There are many new businesses coming into the markets every year, and overall the amount of money that they spend on marketing is staggering.
The markets are crowded and the competition is extremely high which makes businesses fight for the attention and trust of the customers.
Now more than ever, it is extremely important to create a marketing strategy that will interact with the customers in creative and exciting ways.
The marketing strategy needs a goal to not only reach new customers but to also keep their attention and create good word-of-mouth which will result in natural organic growth.
This is where growth marketing comes in.
Growth marketing is not only caring about the top of the funnel and getting new customers but also making those you already acquired stick around.
In this post, I will explain what growth marketing is, what are the benefits, and which growth marketing techniques are the best.
What is growth marketing?
Some of you might already know and use growth marketing, and some of you might not be exactly clear on what it actually is.
In either case, growth marketing is attracting a lot of attention for a reason.
Growth marketing is a data-driven approach that uses testing to discover how to optimize the results.
This is still pretty vague, and a lot of people might not be able to get it completely.
That’s why I will give a proper example that involves Instagram.
In the beginning, Instagram started out as a location-based social network, but not a lot of people were interested in that.
Instagram noticed that people that did use the social network most often used the photo section and filters.
With that knowledge in mind, they pivoted their app focusing on what the users wanted out of it.
The app then gained a lot of traction and was sold to Facebook for $1 Billion.
So basically, growth marketing is about testing and experimenting with your products, and truly learning from the feedback that your customers provide.
It takes marketing to the next level enriching the traditional model with layers like A/B testing, data-driven email marketing, SEO optimization, technical analysis, blog posts with added value, and much more.
After getting the insights from all of these strategies, what’s crucial is to implement them to gain real growth.
Growth marketing vs. growth hacking
If you google “growth marketing”, you will also get an answer for “growth hacking”.
And although many people use these words as synonyms, there are some small differences between them that are worth knowing.
Growth marketing is a broader concept than growth hacking. It covers the concept that through testing, you need to achieve growth.
Growth hacking, on the other hand, is a literal specific tactic that you specifically implement on some channel that results in growth. Usually, growth hacking aims to be as cheap as possible.
Benefits of growth marketing and growth hacking
There are many benefits that come from implementing growth marketing strategies into your business, and some of them are:
1. You will attract new customers
Once you gain some new customers through your growth marketing strategies, the data that you gather from that will be invaluable to you.
You can analyze it, and find out specifically what parts of the sales funnel attracted the new customers.
With the data from this analysis, you can alter your existing strategies to make sure that the audiences respond better to it.
This way, you will, in the end, attract new customers once again.
2. Better SEO
If you run PPC campaigns on your social media profiles, you can use the gathered data to recognize which keywords are your highest-performing.
Use those keywords throughout your content both on your website and social media platforms to improve your SEO and reach your target audience.
3. Measurable ROI
Since you will be using actual data to make all the decisions, you can easily track the performance of your growth strategy or hacking.
You can see what performs good, and what needs to be fixed or changed. Keep the growth hacks that are showing promise in getting you new customers.
4. Cheap
Growth hacking was designed to be cost-friendly.
This means that whatever your status is, you can try growth marketing tactics and strategies regardless of the resources.
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This can be reached through extensive A/B testing as one option to gather relevant data.
However, this whole experimenting and testing process might be quite long and exhausting before there are visible benefits.
5. Not a lot of resources needed
Usually, growth hacking can be created by one person, and that same person can do the implementation process as well as retouching the hacking from the data.
This means that you won’t need whole expensive marketing teams to figure out the strategies, or additional employees in charge of implementation or taking care of the whole process.
Growth hacking marketing techniques
There are many ways in which you can design good growth marketing techniques and strategies tailored to your business.
After all, the best growth hackers have to have some unique characteristics to be able to tailor-make a fitted strategy.
Some of those characteristics are:
- Be data-driven
- Be creative
- Be focused on the product
- Posses a hacker mentality
- Don’t be afraid of failure
- Be a good storyteller
- Be a multitasker
These types of people can easily get on with the best growth marketing techniques like the following:
1. Make your blog a priority
If you want to create loyal customers, you have to first make sure that they know about your brand.
And knowing the fact that most of the customers in today’s world go directly to the internet for any information related to the products is your golden ticket.
If you don’t have a blog already, please reconsider that decision since having a blog nowadays is extremely important for brand awareness.
What’s best about blogging is that it’s not expensive, and a very simple way to offer added value to your customers and give information to potential customers.
Moreover, you have a chance for lots of collaborations, sponsorships, and similar things that will further get you more time in the spotlight.
Be consistent, be concise, be helpful.
2. Stock up on the emails
Email marketing is not going away and it is the path to leads and conversions.
That is why it is wise to spend some time stocking up on relevant emails that will make sure you reach the right audience for your brand.
You have to communicate with these emails regularly, but not be too pushy and annoying to make them unsubscribe to your list.
Email marketing really helps out when you have a need for hyping things up like for example a new product being released.
Try to build up hype and try to come up with creative email campaigns.
Remind the email recipients of the release every few weeks or less.
For properly setting up the emails and the email lists, use services for this purpose like for example MailChimp.
3. Referrals can do wonders
It’s a win-win situation- to have a well-thought referral system.
A very successful example in this sense is Dropbox. In their beginnings, they offered the users who referred a friend additional space as a reward- free of charge.
Plus, the person that would sign up to the referral link would also get free space.
This is one of the reasons why their growth was so rapid.
Another company that used this and is still using it is Payoneer.
In the beginning, if you got a referral and they put 100$ on their account, you both got a $25 reward.
As they became more popular, the $100 dollars became $1000 dollars.
Still, it works.
4. Surprise your customers with gifts
I mentioned it already, businesses are fighting for the attention of the customers.
However, that can desensitize them and honestly, sometimes it is annoying getting 20 emails from different businesses trying to sell you things.
That is where an act of kindness can get your business the positive publicity and just brighten the day up for some of your customers.
A good strategy is to give your customers some of your products for free, just like that.
Send them an email, let them know they got a free gift.
You can make sure that they will open all the emails that come from you in the future, and of course, spread the invaluable word-of-mouth.
5. Partnerships and collaborations
This is always one of the absolute best growth hacking techniques out there.
Partnerships and collaborations are a way of co-marketing that really is an effective strategy when it comes to raising brand awareness and reaching new customers.
If used right, they can create great social media buzz and send very relevant people to your site.
The best thing to do when looking for partners is to try and see how you can add more value to your existing products and services.
These types of partnerships are working out the best since they are completing each other.
Think of McDonald’s and Coca Cola as the most obvious examples.
This strategy is possible for small and medium businesses too, as long as they do add some value to their initial offers.
These are some of the most used and most successful techniques, however, there are a lot more like:
- Hosting/Attending Community Events
- Program for rewarding loyal customers
- Create a community
- Follow your competition
- Do guest posting
- Use influencer marketing
- Feature user content on your website/social media
- Use affiliate marketing
Whatever strategies you use, keep in mind to do what’s best and most relevant to your business in particular.
Wrapping up!
The most important thing to conclude is to not be afraid to experiment with what works the best and implement the feedback.
Create strategies that you think are the best for your customers, but always make sure to read the data and not only read it, but tailor the initial strategy to fit the needs of your customers.
As long as you are data-driven, experimental, and extremely creative with your strategies- you will do just fine when it comes to growth marketing.
Use all the tools at your disposal starting from your website and social media platforms, to emails, traditional marketing channels- and success will be guaranteed.
If you found this post helpful, you should check my other posts on different types of marketing:
- Relationship marketing – how to do it?
- All you need to know about CPA marketing
- Upselling – what’s the right way to do it?
What kind of marketing do you put the accent the most in your business? Let me know in the comments, and give suggestions for my next posts.
