Businessman analyzing growth chart
Generating awareness to bring in new customers or prompt existing ones to make additional purchases lies at the heart of marketing. Without sustained growth, a product or service line will start to fade away. While a traditional marketing funnel turns awareness into purchase decisions, growth marketing takes it a step further.
As a practice, growth marketing uses data and experimentation to optimize each stage of the funnel. Although the goal is to figure out ways to turn more leads into purchases, growth marketing techniques help determine what works with certain audiences.
Content marketing, for instance, is often used as a top-of-the-funnel strategy. A/B testing might determine that posting a blog twice a week attracts the most traffic. But it’s specific topics that end up bringing the target audience to the business.
While content marketing is a critical part of a growth marketing strategy, there’s much more to it. Growth marketing strategies also leverage data for client retention or bottom-of-the-funnel efforts. Many businesses are relying on growth marketing to build long-term success. Here are some of the upcoming developments in growth marketing that brands will want to consider.
Deeper Dives Into Data and Analytics
As noted, effective growth marketing strategies are built on using data and analytics to test a hypothesis and determine whether more experimentation is necessary. But if that data isn’t used to make improvements or there isn’t a goal post, the results won’t mean much. It doesn’t make sense to keep testing email subject lines if open rates aren’t the problem.
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What’s emerging in analytics practice is the examination of what’s improving and what’s not within defined periods. If switching to a new email template leads to higher engagement rates, marketers dive into what aspects consumers engaged with. For instance, did leads click more on the social media icons or click multiple times on the CTA button? Did the color of the CTA button drive clicks, or was it the copy or another design element?
Diving into smaller details like these helps businesses identify development opportunities and determine whether particular marketing tactics are working. Narrowing down date ranges also lets marketers observe whether targeted consumers respond differently to ongoing and recurrent promotions. Discovering that there’s a specific topic or a way of communicating a message that garners high interest each time enables marketers to double down on successful tactics.
Increased Focus on Retention
Even the practice of seeing the customer’s journey through the lens of the traditional marketing funnel is changing. While the conventional journey moves in a single direction, growth marketing strategies are moving toward the flywheel concept. The flywheel concept doesn’t perceive converted leads—customers, that is—as an afterthought.
Instead, customers are at the center of a company’s growth efforts. Although it seems obvious, businesses need to keep current clients happy. Furthermore, meeting or exceeding customers’ expectations isn’t just to garner repeat purchases. The ultimate goal is to turn existing clients into brand ambassadors.
By doing this, companies create a powerful way of attracting new prospects with less effort and expense. Marketers don’t have to pour money into conventional and digital lead generation campaigns. Content teams also don’t have to spend hours researching keywords and topics, hoping to create something that will attract the right audience.
When current customers speak about their experiences with a brand, others are more likely to listen. Testimonials, content sharing, social media advocacy and referrals are all ways word of mouth can benefit a brand. Businesses don’t have to worry about their lead acquisition strategies drying up if their strongest supporters are doing the work for them.
Monitoring the Customer Experience
Without feedback, businesses can’t delight clients and effectively manage customer experiences. The customer experience encompasses all interactions with a brand, including omnichannel reach. Every touchpoint matters, from researching a product on your website to purchasing it in a store. Self-service options and post-purchase care can also determine whether a client sticks around.
Collecting first-party data through surveys, online polls and interactions with sales and service reps provides insights into how customers feel. Do they easily find the information they need, or does it take four calls to customer service to reach a resolution? Are there repeat problems with shipping delays or out-of-stock items at stores? This type of information aids growth marketers in several ways.
They can identify problems and improvement opportunities, sharing the data with other department and C-suite leaders. Marketing strategies could incorporate temporary adjustments and solutions that explain and work around the issues until permanent solutions fix them. Customer feedback also exposes the need for additional content or other methods of access.
Perhaps your clients would benefit more from an interactive FAQ site than a static list that doesn’t match the top reasons for customer service calls. Or your mobile app’s chatbot frequently provides insufficient answers yet doesn’t direct customers to live agents. Frequent testing and monitoring of outreach strategies will help perfect experiences for your specific customer base.
Predicting Future Business
Unpredictability is a given in business, which is why so many owners have contingency plans. However, analyzing consumers’ behavioral data can lead to rough predictions about how they’ll respond to similar scenarios. As the saying goes, past behavior is one of the most reliable indicators of future behavior.
That’s why growth marketing strategies will increasingly harness information about customers’ behaviors. It’ll be easier for businesses to prepare for what could happen based on firsthand knowledge and observations of their consumers.
This information may supplement or go against industry trends, but at the very least, it will provide a clearer direction. Marketers won’t have to throw as many tactics against a wall to know what will stick.
Your team can hone its strategies by knowing what’s around the bend for growth marketing in 2022. Doing so will ensure your outreach efforts aren’t unmeasurable or wasted.
