What is growth marketing? How to Grow your Business efficiently.
When we talk about our lives or our careers all we want is progress. And one way of measuring this process is through the parameters of growth. You must know from what point you started from and where you have reached in order to have a look at your growth at all levels. This is what happens in the markets as well. The companies make efforts to progress and for that, they use the technique of growth marketing. One must remember that in order to grow you must always be ready to adapt! Adapt the new changes, methods, and tricks. This article is all about growth marketing. For this one must first know what is growth marketing?
WHAT IS GROWTH MARKETING
Growth marketing also called growth hacking is a marketing strategy where you use the minimum amount of resources for the production of growth. Here, the minimum amount of resources refers to the least amount of resources possible. It is basically a data-driven approach where you use tests to optimize results. It is a new version of marketing consisting of elements such as A/B testing, value-additive blog post, SEO optimization, and technical analysis of every aspect of a user’s experience with your product or service. The conclusion then gained from all these tests, searches, and analyses is then used to achieve sustainable growth.
HOW DOES GROWTH MARKETING WORKS?
Growth marketing uses highly scalable methods that once discovered, can result in speedy growth. It works by collecting data and answering questions to generate a growth-friendly business.
Data collection is done as the basic purpose of growth marketing is speed. Through testing, rapid implications, and usage of the collected data, you try to enable quick and right decisions that accelerate the growth of your business.
Answering questions is another important step in growth marketing. One must always analyze the questions like
- What makes your customers happy?
- How to attract more customers?
- How to make the customers purchase your product again and make them your permanent customers?
- How to increase profits?
One must analyze such questions and their results in order to turn the negative impacts into positive ones. It also helps you to make your future strategy and analyze your potential failures away before they happen.
STRATEGIES OF GROWTH MARKETING
Apart From asking correct questions, there are other strategies that must be used for growth marketing. They are;
- Search engine marketing – the ads that you encounter while using browsers like yahoo, Google etc. That is what search engine marketing is. As the name suggests it is basically the process of acquiring the market online by purchasing ads on search engines. It is basically used to create traffic on your website by increasing the visibility in the search engine result page.
- Search engine optimization– this is also used to increase the visibility of your website and thus help in growth marketing. It is the process of improving ranking in the search engine when people search keywords on any browser like Google, Bing etc. This helps in attracting more customers for your company and is the most popular strategy for growth marketing.
- Conversion optimization– conversation optimization mainly called as conversion rate optimization, helps you to evaluate the sales funnel of your website and identify ways and areas where improvement in order to get higher traffic and more customers for your product or service. It includes using a hypothesis test and then creating a new version of a web page other than the current one and seeing the performance of both and getting to know which one is more effective and beneficial for your business.
- Web analytics– web analytics refers to the students of online or offline patterns and trends of the market. In order for the growth of your business you need to analyze the latest trends of the market. It is a method to collect, measure, report and analyze your website data. It is also used to analyze customer activities and traffic on your website and then generate a report regarding the same.
- Email marketing– email marketing is a type of marketing that enables the customers to know about the latest offers, discounts and new products via emails. It helps to keep your audience engaged in the purchase with your brand and promote your business product or service at the same time.
- Social media marketing– social media marketing is the process of creating effective content on social media that can accelerate your sales and promote your business. It is the most used strategy for growth marketing in the modern day world. It helps you to connect to your audience and help them understand your brand. Social media marketing includes INSTAGRAM MARKETING, FACEBOOK MARKETING, LINKEDIN MARKETING etc.
- Using innovative technologies– in order to pursue an effective growth marketing model you must be open to using modern and innovative technologies and equipment.
THE PROCESS OF GROWTH MARKETING
The process of growth marketing can be categorized into four stages. These are discussed below;
- PLANNING– the process starts with laying out a plan about the goals that are to be achieved and the method that is going to be used in achieving that goal.
- TESTING– after the planning stage, comes the testing stage. In the testing stage one implicates the planned methods in order to achieve the planned goal.
- DATA AND ANALYTICS– after using the techniques and methods, the next phase consists of recording the data and then analyzing the results obtained after testing.
- DECIDING– in the Last stage, decisions about what turns out to be beneficial for the business are made after analyses of data. The best results are only chosen in the next round of testing and planning.
BENEFITS OF GROWTH MARKETING
One major fact about growth marketing is that you just cannot rely on one technique to accelerate your growth. Instead, you have to find multiple ways that will increase your growth.
Growth marketing is a constant process of ad tweaking in order to make more sales. The result of how much increase in growth can be achieved with this process depends upon company to company. For example; if Google ad words will cost 40% more than Facebook ads, then there can be a shift of money too, thus resulting in massive customers.
Given below are some of the ways ad buying and the entire process of growth marketing can benefit your business.
- Search engine optimization benefits– you may take advantage of the data collected and use the keywords on your website or content that are most searched by people. This will highly benefit the campaigns that your companies run on social media platforms.
- Branding recognition – you can always make your brand relatable to the people by triggering any of their emotions or pain, or by providing something that they extremely require. In order to know this you can again use social media platforms to understand the wants and requirements of people or simply provide them with something that is trending.
- Promoting campaigns– take advantage of the existing campaigns to the fullest. You can use the existing company campaigns to identify what the customers want and use them to promote your future campaigns. Keep on exploring new and creative ways and use social media to its complete potential to achieve your growth.
- Retaining and gaining customers– growth marketing will enable you to use the data and analyze it, so that one can know what attracted the customer in the previous sales and then use the results for future in order to retain those customers.
QUALITIES OF GREAT GROWTH MARKETERS
In order to be a successful growth marketer, you must have certain qualities. These qualities are listed below;
- DATA DRIVEN – a good growth marketer must be data driven. This means you no longer rely on assumptions or gut feelings about what your customers expect from you, rather you dive deep into the data to figure out the strategies that will help you grow. For that you must be ready to use all the tools possible be it using the right technology, man power such as a data analyst or other possible resources.
- CREATIVE THINKING– if you do not get confided to what is common and use your mind to think out of the box then that’s just the skill you need. You must use some creative and innovative ways to attract people which will in turn help in growth. For example ; you can provide a free purchase on a product for the customers who visit you for the very first time. These offers attract the customers and accelerate your growth.
- SKILL SETS– since growth marketing involves a large range of work from testing to video optimization, thus you must have all the skill sets that are required in order to be a great growth marketer. You must also be aware of coding , creating video and other necessary tasks. Thus one must possess the right set of skills.
EXAMPLES OF GROWTH MARKETING.
Now, since we know almost everything about growth marketing now, let’s see some practical examples of how it has been used by brands and companies to have a greater reach on the audience.
APPLE
Have you ever noticed that Apple releases a new iPhone every year? And every new model is much more exciting and powerful than the existing ones and despite the high rates that it offers every second person you see has an iPhone in his or her hands. This is because Apple uses the growth strategy of product development to expand its business. This strategy enables them to keep their Apple customers coming back to them to buy phones. Not only this, but they also release different products for the same target audience. For example; Apple released the Apple Homepod, which is a voice-enabled speaker. Any of the above strategies used can really help your business to grow rapidly in a short duration of time.
IKEA
This furniture retailing firm entered the furniture Market by selling furniture at an extremely low price. It thus penetrated the market suddenly with something unique and used price differentiation as a tool for growth marketing. This made them one of the leading retailers in the furniture Market.
TINDER
Of course, who hasn’t heard of it? A dating app that enables you to find people near you to date. They knew that their Major target audiences were college and university students and thus they actually went to people and told them about their website, that too physically. Thus they used a tactic of actually stepping out of their buildings and doing a live interaction with the audience in order to promote their website.
These were some of the examples of known brands that actually achieved success through growth marketing models.
CONCLUSION
Growth marketing is very different from the traditional marketing methods but is the most effective way of growing a business nowadays due to the internet and social media platforms. Above examples are proof of how they have actually used strategic planning in order to attract customers and grow their business. Thus, one must pursue growth marketing as a means of growing their business.
FAQs
SEM is a slang term for search engine marketing.
Despite many companies building teams of growth marketers, they will majorly be hired in well-established technology companies or emerging technology startup companies.
Vanity metrics are false indicators that project sustainable growth.
The areas while pursuing increased profits are;
● Annual billing
● Customer surveys
Outsourcing is a business practice of hiring a party outside the company to perform services or create goods that were earlier performed by companies own employees. In growth marketing it is important to maintain strategic management of the outsourced team by listing key issues that are matters of concern and need to be solved.