5 things you need to know to ace a growth marketing strategy

Growth is the goal for pretty much every business owner. Not everyone’s definition of growth is the same, though. Some want to grow their finances, some want to enhance their reputation, others want to make better business connections. However, you’ll be pleased to know that growth marketing can help people to achieve all of those goals and more in innovative ways.

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels. Want to them better identify and attract the people who matter most to your growth ambitions? Check out our blog 'Lessons from an inbound marketing agency'

To achieve real progress, companies may need to go back to basics with their growth marketing strategy, and that can be one of the hardest things for business owners and senior managers to do. They’re already busy running the company, isn’t there an easy cheat solution or a quick fix? Surely there's some new fangled tactic to try? Can't we just bolt it on top?

5 ways to create a growth marketing strategy from scratch

If there was a growth marketing shortcut, everybody would be doing it. However, just as every business owner has unique growth ambitions, they also need a unique approach to the way they operate, how they approach new leads and deal with customers.

Every business is different, and the more bespoke your growth marketing strategy, the more likely it is you’ll be able to build stronger foundations for future success.

Although there isn’t a quick-fix when it comes to growth marketing, there are some things that each and every strategy should have in common when starting out. So, how do you approach growth marketing whilst also concentrating on running your day-to-day business operations?

1: Keep a marketing budget in mind

Marketing spend accounts for approximately 7.5% of the average company budget. Putting some money into the channels most relevant to your target audience is one of the best ways to reach out and communicate with the people who will help your company grow in the future.

Growth marketing can benefit from strategies such as social media outreach and targeted biddable media campaigns. In order to set a budget for these strategies, however, you need to know how much you can afford to invest, and what results you expect to see from it.

2: Discover as much as you can about yourself

Again, start from scratch and think about what constitutes growth for you and what you’re currently doing to achieve it. Work out your niche and what you do better than other brands in your sector.

Then, think about how you communicate this online, and the creative stories you can tell as part of your growth marketing strategy. Drill everything down to the most basic level – who are you talking to, where can you find them, and what do you want to say?

3: Discover as much as you can about your market

Once you have a better idea of who you are and what you can do, the same questions have to be asked of your customers. You’re looking to expand with growth marketing. You need to identify the people who will help you get to your destination and support your growth.

For instance, some companies use Twitter to market themselves. Though this can be great, they may be wasting time focusing on a channel their audience doesn’t frequent. Do your target customers use LinkedIn far more often? Or is everybody on Instagram?

Market research can be difficult, but thanks to the internet, there are numerous ways to survey potential customers – locally, nationally and in your niche – to build personas. Once this is done, you can create targeted marketing strategies around who these personas are, what their problems are and where you can find them to offer a solution.

4: Outline feasible targets in your strategy

Growth marketing isn’t an A-to-B process. Even companies as big as Coca-Cola are struggling to get their growth marketing strategy right, as has been widely noted. For this reason, it pays to set realistic targets for yours marketing campaign which can be evaluated at regular intervals.

Target setting is especially important when advertising across multiple channels, in order to keep track of marketing spend, improve the quality of leads and ultimately drive costs down. Targeting leads through paid search and social is an incredible way to boost your growth efforts, but people’s online browsing habits often change. Keeping on top of these and making small, regular campaign adjustments will help to improve results.

5: Measure results in creative ways

Similarly, if your growth marketing campaign uses omnichannel strategies to drive data collection, there can be an awful lot of complex data for business owners to handle.

Measuring results and KPIs is crucial to campaign management and growth. However, we also think that visualising these statistics in creative ways can help companies to better understand which parts of their campaign is performing well, and which areas need some serious tweaking.

For instance, HubSpot’s marketing software automatically collects a wide range of data, and compiles it into useful graphs that immediately give a clear picture of the direction a campaign is headed in.

Do you have the time to do growth marketing yourself?

All of these factors are essential to the growth marketing process, but they can require a lot of thought, management and creative focus. Get the formula right, though, and you can take your business to the next level, attracting higher volumes of better-quality leads on a regular basis.

Do you have time to do all this though, on top of running your business and making sure that core departments are running efficiently? Time is one of the main reasons why business owners often partner with a growth marketing agency. Experience and expertise are other very good reasons – benefit from an agency’s hard-won industry knowledge, and make your campaign as strong as it can possibly be.

An experienced growth marketing agency will care as much about your business wins as you do, and will work with you to develop a bespoke strategy from scratch. Better yet, they can implement marketing automation software to streamline and optimise all sales and marketing processes.

Build stronger relationships with the people that matter to your business, and gain time to focus on running your business. These are the real advantages of working with a growth marketing agency. Contact Six & Flow to find out more how we can help you reach the next stage of your growth.

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels. Want to them better identify and attract the people who matter most to your growth ambitions? Check out our blog 'Lessons from an inbound marketing agency'