I am sure that everyone is familiar with the term digital marketing as it has been around for years. In recent years a new type of marketing has emerged call Growth Marketing.
In 2019 there were 5.9 million businesses registered in the UK, of which 99% of them were small and medium-sized businesses. As more and more businesses open every year, the marketplace becomes more competitive and harder for business to stand out.
More than ever, businesses are looking for Growth Marketing rather than digital marketing to grow their business.
WHAT IS GROWTH MARKETING
Growth Marketing is also referred to a Growth Hacking, but not the same. Growth Marketing looks at the entire customer buyer journey and finds ways to optimise the process. It does not focus on one channel but multiple channels to get the best result in the shortest period of time.
One difference between digital marketing and growth marketer is that the latter focuses on data to influence their decisions. It also builds layers into a marketing strategy and includes tools like heat mapping, search engine optimisation, funnel building and email automation.
A growth marketer has one objective and that is to improve the performance and help businesses grow in the shortest amount of time possible. They achieve this by running multiple test campaigns backed by data to refine the process until they reach the optimal result.
WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING
Digital marketing or what is starting to become known as top-level marketing focuses on brand awareness and client acquisitions. This is also known and Top of Funnel (TOF) marketing. They typically use online tools to market products and services of a business.
This traditional marketing model focuses very much on running advertising to try and reach customers but does not follow through the entire customer journey. A digital marketer will usually specialise in a particular area, for example, paid search, content marketing, or SEO.
Digital marketing focuses on creating leads and sending those prospects to the sales team to close. Most of the time these leads are not qualified and can be classified as poor-quality leads.
THE ADVANTAGES OF GROWTH MARKETING
Data-Driven Marketing:
One of the biggest advantages of growth marketing is the fact that all the decisions are based around data. Everything is tracked, measured and accounted for so you know where your marketing budget is being spent and how it is performing.
Test & Learn Campaigns:
What makes growth marketers unique is that they run multiple tests and learn campaigns to see what performs and what doesn’t. Small test, done regularly with very small test budgets. Once they know what works, it is about optimising the campaign. They use tools like heat maps and run A/B tests to test everything and optimise the process.
Understanding The Buyer Journey:
A growth marketer will work their way all the way down from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel and customer retention. They are constantly making minor tweaks and changes to increase your Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). Not everyone who gets exposure to your product or service will buy immediately and you need to nurture them.
Performance Led Marketing:
In a competitive environment, a 5% increase in sales can make the difference between being successful and not. By constantly testing, growth marketers are able to run the best performing campaigns to acquire customers at the cheapest cost.
Story Led Marketing:
Instead of just focusing on pushing a product and service; growth marketing creates story brands that are more engaging. They talk about the purpose of the brand, how it solves the customer’s problems and makes for a more pleasant experience. This puts people into an emotional state rather than a thinking state.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF GROWTH MARKETING
One of the main disadvantages of growth marketing is that it can be perceived to be expensive. I say perceived because companies who are used to working with traditional digital marketers and have spent a lot of money and not seen any results. The only objective of growth marketers is to get results and increase a company’s performance.
The systems that a growth marketer builds into your business take time to set up, but at the end of the day, they are yours forever. They are building assets into your business to help you automate and scale your business. Companies should look at this as an investment as it will help them understand their customers going forward and help them make better marketing decisions.
“Price is what you pay, Value is what you get” Warren Buffet. There is a reason why companies around the world are looking for growth marketers because of the value that they can bring to their business.
WHAT IS GROWTH HACKING
Hopefully, you are beginning to see the difference between growth marketing and digital marketing. But to confuse matters even more, there is also a term called Growth Hacking or Growth Hackers.
Now, what is a Growth Hacker I hear you ask?
Well, a Growth hacker is a specialist (consultant) who is brought into a company for a short period of time to help solve a specific problem and to solve it quickly. If your campaign is optimised and is operating at 60% a growth hacker will come into your business and try and optimise the campaign to 80% – 90%. This small difference can make a huge impact on your company.
However, your business needs to be ready for a growth hacker or else it will be very expensive. They are very good at using what is already working and finding a creative solution to problems. A growth Hacker also works at speed and have a very short outlook on solving problems.
The difference between growth hacking and growth marketing is that a growth marketer builds the growth systems into your business, the growth hacker optimises those systems to get the best out of them.
WHAT IS A GROWTH MARKETING STRATEGY?
A Growth marketing strategy is a step by step process to take you from where you are now to where you want to be in a designated amount of time. A growth strategy focuses ultimately on growth and helping a company acquire and retain customers as well as building a plan to nurture those leads who have not yet become customers.
To build an effective growth marketing strategy, you need these four core principles.
Target Audience (Personas):
To grow a business, you need to identify your target audience. Unfortunately, most businesses are too vague or broad when it comes to defining their target audience. We need to get specific and ask questions like, how old are they, male/female, what problems do they have, where do they search for information, what are their lifestyle choices. By truly defining your target audience, you can get a better understanding of what they need and how best you can serve them.
The Message:
Now that we have identified our target audience for our growth marketing strategy, we need to identify how we are going to communicate with them. When understanding the problems and challenges that they face, it is easy to build a messaging strategy around their problems to convince them that you are the solution to their problem.
If your target audience is vague or too broad, then your message won’t land. If you know that you are targeting property developers in the UK and you know that their challenge is trying to find high net worth investors, then you can draft message accordingly.
Buyers Journey:
Not every person that sees your product or service is going to become a customer… I wish that were the case. Only a small percentage of people eventually become customers. What a lot of companies do is go in for the sale as soon as a person is exposed to their product or service. This is wrong.
As an example, would you ask someone who you have just met for the very first time to marry you? No, you would go on a few dates, get to know them a little better find out more about them. The same is true with your customer buyers’ journey. We need to look at nurturing people first and turning them into leads, then from leads, we need to nurture a little more and turn them into customers.
What we need to do is build a marketing funnel with multiple nurture points and call to actions. By nurturing people down a funnel, we help influence their buying decision which puts your company in a better position to convert more leads into sales.
Build a community:
Building a community around your business is a very powerful thing to do. These are your true fans and they will become your biggest supporters. By building a community it allows you to test ideas, messages and products with your community first to see if it resonates, before going out to the market.
By building a community you can also conduct market research and find out what people actually want and what they don’t want. Lastly, this community will support you whenever you launch products, run marketing campaigns and give you feedback when you think you can improve. It does take a bit of work to get started, but once you have built an engaged community, it starts to look after itself.
GROWTH MARKETING EXAMPLES
Here are a few growth marketing examples that you can use to help boost your engagement and nurture visitors into leads and leads into customers.
- Video Marketing: Using video is a great way to bring your brand to life. Videos help your target audience build an emotional connection with you.
- Lead Magnets: Create a lead magnet or something of value that your target audience needs in order to solve a problem. Use this lead magnet to build a database that you can communicate with regularly.
- Email Marketing: Not every person that sees your product or service will become a customer. We need to build an email sequence that helps keep your brand top of mind with your customers.
- Influencer Marketing: Using influencers to help promote your product or service is a very powerful way to get noticed. These influencers have respect and authority amongst their peers and followers. Leveraging their influence in a particular market is a very powerful strategy.
These growth marketing examples are just a few suggestions about what you can experiment with initially, there are a lot more examples out there for you to use.
WHY SHOULD YOU HIRE A GROWTH MARKETER?
Obviously, we are slightly bias to hiring a growth marketer rather than a digital marketer because that is what Got Legs Digital specialise in. The reason why we believe it is best to hire a growth marketing agency is that they are agile, data-focused and find the best marketing solution for your business in the shortest possible time frame.
If you hire a growth marketing agency, you can be sure that they will know their numbers and be able to show you where your advertising is being spent and how it is working for you. A good growth marketing agency will build automation into your business and ultimately work themselves out of a job, which makes this extremely attractive to companies looking to either bring marketing in house or to be able to systemise the marketing process.
CONCLUSION:
Got Legs Digital is the first ethical Growth Automation Marketing Agency. We are always open to speaking to new businesses and helping them to automate their marketing process to help them scale their business and free up their time. Please get in touch and book a free consultation with one of our growth experts.
