So you have looked at growth marketing and listened to people who say that’s what they do, and it’s all acronyms and buzzwords. No way to figure out what it is and how to do it, if there’s value for you in it at all.
What is growth marketing?
“Growth marketing” is also known as “growth hacking”. It is a part of marketing and focused on the growth of a company (Wikipedia) . It is a process of coming up with ideas and conducting experiments. That will help to choose the best ideas that improve customer experience. It teaches you to make changes or abandon ineffective processes before investing resources. A growth marketing process is important to early-stage startups who must achieve noticeable growth in a short amount of time.
Even though experiments are aimed to improve processes for growth and scalability, failure is inevitable. This is why growth marketers always need to plan ahead and be ready for any failures.
If an idea doesn’t produce the outcome you wanted or expected –backup a plan ready to execute.
If a project goes wrong, growth marketers should assess the problem thoroughly and figure out what the next step should be.
Lifehacks
A growth hacking team involves the work of marketers, developers, engineers, and product managers who all have the same goals. That includes building and engaging the customer base around a specific product or business. By using tools and techniques such as…
- search engine optimization
- website analytics
- content marketing
- A/B testing
- email marketing
- viral strategies
growth marketing can help businesses achieve their goal of increasing conversion rates and growth of the customer base.
What are the main goals of growth marketing?
Customer retention
The most important goal of growth marketing is to retain existing customers. It is easier to sell a product to an existing customer than a new one. Therefore, the customer satisfaction of existing users should be highly prioritized to ensure loyalty to your company’s product or service. Brand loyalty grows if the customer continues to be satisfied with the quality of the service or product has to offer.
This could also lead to new customers who are referred through the means of word of mouth marketing. What businesses always have to keep in mind is that it is detrimental and counter-productive if one business continues to bring on new customers while old customers are not going to remain around. To improve retention, growth marketers might look for a way in which they can offer individualized support for users or improve the value users can gain from a specific product or service the business is offering.
Gaining new customers
Once you have succeeded in retaining existing customers, it becomes easier for you to carry out the pursuit for new customers and successfully convince them to make purchases. Social media and free trial periods are also very helpful in this. You need to ask yourself questions and identify where the customers are searching for the product and how visible you are there. “What your customers’ problems are”, “why and where are they searching for a solution to their problem”; does your solution meet them during this search?
You need to position yourself as a problem solver in order to attract new and retain existing customers. Being able to understand your customer’s needs and how you can help them meet their needs is crucial to the process of both customer retention and customer acquisition.
One of the working steps to gain your first Early Adopters is to submit your project on Projectium. Once you do that and post a few #buildinpublic updates about your product you will start gaining lots of attention from various people in a tech/growth community.
These two growth marketing goals contribute to the next goal: profit. When the above two goals are successfully reached, it will eventually lead to more profits. Our goal should be to achieve new sources of revenue without putting an extra unnecessary burden on marketing expenses.
What makes it a good growth hacking
1. Focus on the customer.
No matter what your business specializes in or what type of business you are in, every organization is focused on its customers. If you provide customers with what they need and make sure they are satisfied, this will encourage more and more visitors to come back and increase conversion rates.
2. Do not focus on sales.
This may sound counter-intuitive, but a lot of companies have run into this problem when they are trying to build a content marketing strategy. When focusing on your company’s digital marketing growth, you should look at what your audience needs first. If you provide your customers with the best and most useful content pieces and aim towards the perfect target audience, your visitors will definitely make a sale. Focusing on providing actual value can encourage old customers to come back and if this happens, this is the first step to getting trust and brand loyalty.
3. No Fear of Failure.
No marketers can predict what is going to happen. You must be open to attempting every single possibility to see what works and what does not. You will eventually know what things can lead to success, then you optimize those and continue the process. Every growth marketing campaign cannot be a guaranteed success and there is always a possibility of failure. When an experiment fails, it is not the time to give up but to look into what went wrong and think of a solution to the problem. Successful growth marketers see a failed experiment as a useful source of information and the quickest way to achieve that precious information.
4. Knowledge in Data.
Data is a useful source of information obtained after carrying out growth marketing experiments. A good marketer does not only create experiments but is also someone who is able to analyze data. Data is very important as it determines the next steps of what a growth marketing strategy should be. With data, growth marketing teams can come up with problems, solutions, and decisions based on data.
Step by step on a growth strategy
Step 1. Identify Your Target Audience
As a marketer, getting to know your target audience is crucial as this will make sure your content campaigns will be delivered to people who are going to be interested in what your company has to offer.
Your target audiences center around a specific group of people. These can be men, women, teenagers, or children, or a group of individuals who generally share an interest such as music, cooking, or sports.
There are many ways in which you can identify your target audience, some of them can be conducting market research, identifying industry trends, using tools such as Google Analytics, or carrying out client interviews.
Step 2. Get to Know Potential Customers
Once you have a target audience, it’s time to get to know more about them. You can start interviewing or conducting surveys to your existing customers to answer questions you may have about your target audience.
If you have an online presence, it would be really simple for you to interact with customers through websites or social media platforms.
Step 3. Select Your Platforms
In order to establish your online presence, you are going to need a website and some social media platforms to join. There are a large number of social media networks online such as Projectium, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, or Pinterest. You need to make sure the social platforms you use are the same ones used by your target audience. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a successful social media platform so chooses your sites wisely before making an investment.
Step 4. Create the Right Content
Start experimenting with content to know which ones work best for you. Contents can go in the form of blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, or videos.
It is beneficial to have a look over your statistics to see what types of content and which topics are attracting traffic online. Once you’ve identified what works best for you, keep making new, useful pieces of information, and always remember to check whether you are producing the right pieces of content.
So… (Where to put focus)
Technological advancements have provided us with the tools and technologies to make every marketer a growth marketer. You should always focus on testing to know what works best for you and your business and start optimizing for engagement, providing a better customer experience and satisfaction.
By being more understanding towards your audience, you can start establishing strategies to attract customers based on their personal preference, what they like to see, what they want to watch, and convince them into making a purchase. As you experiment with new strategies, you’re constantly collecting data as you go, and that data you have is crucial to the success of your business.
If you’re looking to start with building your own early-adopters community – keep in mind that there’s a place for it. On Projectium you will find a lot of passionate like-minded individuals ready to help you in your startup journey!