How Science Guarantees Returns For Your Marketing Strategy
Updated on June 17, 2021
“Fresh fish. Fresh fish for sale. Buy three, get one free.”
Traditional marketing can feel like setting up shop in a market with your customer acquisition rate depending on how loud you can yell. You probably imagined using a more focused marketing approach to get ahead of the competition.
A well-oiled marketing funnel with low customer acquisition costs and excellent conversion rates drives the value of a business up and is part of every buyer’s due diligence when looking for a great deal.
When researching different types of successful marketing tactics, you might have come across growth hacking and growth marketing. The former is highly niche while the latter can be applied by anyone on a bootstrap budget and can be used to achieve similar success.
So what’s the difference between these two marketing strategies?
Growth Hacking vs. Growth Marketing
Growth hacking, which is associated with entrepreneur Sean Ellis, mainly focuses on driving growth as quickly as possible. It targets any part of the marketing funnel and any marketing channel to achieve greater customer acquisition using innovative solutions.
Over time, marketing has become much savvier and has evolved beyond growth hacking.
Common growth hacks and strategies are still used, but in a data-driven way. Traditional marketers and growth hackers focus on demand generation to improve brand awareness and expand their user base.
Growth marketing goes beyond trying to grow as quickly as possible. Instead, this approach involves every aspect of the business. Once you truly understand your customer’s journey, you can build a loyal audience with a higher lifetime value.
Head to the Lab to Find Growth
Thomas Edison is remembered for inventing the lightbulb, the movie camera, and the telegraph. But for every successful invention, there were probably scores of complete failures. These failed experiments didn’t bother him, however. In fact, he famously said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
This mindset is at the heart of growth marketing; in order to succeed, you must not be afraid to fail.
All growth marketers aim to implement new strategies or update existing ones with innovative solutions. Growth marketing requires experimenting with these changes, many of which won’t be successful, until you find the right configurations for your business.
Essentially, you’re taking an experiment-based approach to improve conversion rate optimization (CRO). Big wholesale changes to your existing campaign can feel like a Hail Mary, but growth marketing is all about making minor tweaks or additions to improve the user experience.
Let’s cover what growth marketing looks like in action.
Spread the Seeds for Maximum Growth
Common investing advice is to put your eggs in many baskets. This is the same approach you want to take when adopting a growth marketing mindset. Growth marketing looks at the entire customer lifecycle and tailors marketing efforts to match the needs of each customer according to where they’re at in the buyer’s journey.
After making tweaks to your marketing strategy, it’s important to analyze the data to see how customers are responding to the changes.
Developing a growth marketing strategy involves a constant cycle of analysis, change, and reflection. The key is establishing a clear goal for each marketing strategy and channel so you can determine whether the tweaks you’ve implemented are effective for achieving the intended goal.
There are so many ways to effect change; let’s look at some of the marketing channels and strategies you could start working on.
Email Marketing
Through a simple landing page on your site, you can start nurturing high-quality leads for free.
Email marketing is a great way to set up another revenue stream, especially for e-commerce businesses like FBA or dropshipping. It’s also a great way to create a user-friendly onboarding experience for SaaS businesses.
Well-placed product marketing content teaches customers how to get the most out of your tool while making them better customers.
One of the best growth tactics for email marketing is A/B testing. You can experiment with the copywriting, images, and placement of your CTAs to see what generates the most engagement.
Chatbots
Chatbots are a fantastic tool for providing customer service all day, all week, all year.
This simple tool works by using an algorithm to respond to common customer questions with helpful articles written to address FAQs. If this doesn’t suffice, the chatbot will direct customers to an email address.
At the very least, a chatbot minimizes the time a customer has to wait before receiving support for a product or service.
Testimonials
According to Content Marketing Institute, 81% of customers actually look for testimonials before they consider buying a product. Even if they don’t intentionally look for customer success stories, 95% of customers are influenced by reviews according to WYZOwl.
Well-placed testimonials can improve conversion rates because honest reviews are considered to be more trustworthy than brand-produced content. If you have a domain alongside your e-commerce store, include the average rating and how many customer reviews your best-performing products have gathered.
Include a couple of reviews on your landing page as case studies that reflect customer success when using your product. These in-focus testimonials show how your business helped a customer achieve their goals and will act as great pieces of social proof.
Content Marketing
You can’t go wrong with a solid content marketing strategy if you’re planning to adopt a growth marketing mindset.
It’s used interchangeably with inbound marketing because of the SEO aspect for gaining organic traffic. With content marketing, you’re providing value with every piece of content you publish, and when you optimize your content for SEO, your articles can be found on search engines based on the keywords.
Consistently providing more valuable content than your competitors builds trust with potential customers. This allows you to build an audience over time who actively look forward to new content on your website and will be more likely to recommend your brand or content by word-of-mouth.
Monitoring the performance of each piece of content is key.
If your content generates huge spikes of traffic over the course of a few days and then no traffic at all after that, it’s worth revising your content strategy and the types of keywords you’re targeting.
You’re aiming for a steady increase in traffic over months. Focusing on evergreen content will increase the likelihood of your site generating steady and returning traffic.
Social Media
Nearly four billion people are on social media yet not enough businesses utilize this marketing channel effectively.
Social media could be a fantastic way to build a loyal following through organic posts. A steady, consistent flow of content keeps your audience engaged as well as updating them on new services, products, or industry knowledge.
While social media reach favors paid advertising, it’s possible to build a following through organic search.
If your aim is to reach as many people as possible with top of the funnel content, paid ads on social media are the way to go. If you have a clear idea of your target audience, Facebook is especially powerful because of its capability to target specific demographics with paid ads.
Pay attention to time spent on the ad, how much of the video was watched, as well as the click rate to monitor your ads’ effectiveness.
To improve the conversion rate, you’ll need tight copywriting to effectively hone in on the customer’s pain point and communicate how your product or service solves that problem.
Visual content also plays a huge role in user engagement with social media ads, so make sure images or videos are thought-provoking and eye-catching. Think about what would make people stop scrolling and pay attention to your ad.
Loyalty Bonuses/Discounts
Providing loyalty bonuses through referral programs is a great way to increase customer retention by engaging your customer base and providing them an incentive for them to become brand advocates.
If your business sells a product or service that has a high rate of repeat customers, simply offer a discount on the next purchase when a customer shares a referral code with a number of their friends and family. If you are selling a one-time-use product that consumers are unlikely to purchase again, however, this is not a useful strategy
Consider cross-selling other complementary products in your range using similar discounts.
Creating an email funnel and retargeting existing customers who browse your site or store regularly could produce the results you want.
By monitoring the number of new users and customers that engage with your business as a result of these referral codes, you can see whether you need to refine different elements of your landing page, like the copy, images, or CTA placements, to improve CRO.
Use Adventurous Marketing for a Higher Sales Price
Growth marketers find success by monitoring measurable action and data to track the effectiveness of their changes. Deciding which metrics determine the success of your marketing efforts provides context to the way you’re earning new customers as well as the churn rate of existing users.
No two growth marketing strategies will be the same. As you continue to experiment and try new things to earn new users, take note of what works and what doesn’t and adjust accordingly.
A new business will need to experiment with their marketing campaigns for a while before they discover which channels generate the most success for them. It’s not unusual for founders to try a scattergun approach to drive as much growth as possible, but it takes time to find out which channels give decent ROI for the effort and time spent.
Buyers want to skip this startup phase and are on the lookout for businesses that prioritize certain marketing channels based on previous success. Instead of covering up failures, these learning points are particularly interesting to investors and are one of the points we cover in our Real Money Real Podcast seller interviews.
Creating a powerful marketing engine that generates leads and requires little manual input takes time to build. Growth marketing is one way to turn your business into a turnkey solution which tends to receive a higher sales price compared to businesses that require more hours to work on.
Leverage growth marketing to increase the value of your business to prepare for a profitable exit. If you’re interested to see how much your business is worth now, use our free valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate. After some time where you’ve made some tweaks to your marketing strategy, you can use the tool again to see how much it’s worth based on your changes.
If you like the estimate from the first valuation, register on our marketplace for free and schedule a call with our team of business analysts to set yourself up for a profitable exit.
