If you’re a professional marketer, you know that significant growth doesn’t usually happen overnight. Sometimes, it can take weeks, months, or even years of building up your marketing strategies to produce targeted goals and results.
Don’t you wish there was a way to know if your strategies worked while further helping your business grow to its full potential? Lucky for you, there is!
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing, growth hacking, performance marketing… You’ve heard these interchangeable phrases used before, but what do they mean?
Growth marketing is an integrated approach of constant testing across marketing channels with the goal of scaling and optimizing your business. The purpose of a growth marketer is to find new ways to build and engage your organization’s audience.
A growth marketer is keen, creative, analytical, and scrappy — all at once. They will test and experiment with new concepts and content until they find an approach that enables significant growth.
For example, have you ever conducted A/B testing? Congratulations, you’re already on your way to being a growth marketer! As the purpose of A/B testing is to test the effectiveness of content based on performance, it’s essentially a growth marketing strategy without the label.
Why is Growth Marketing Important?
Since not all industries or markets are alike, there are unfortunately no clear cut rules to direct and guide everyone’s marketing strategies. While overtime marketing best practices have developed, when it comes to an individual’s brand, there are never any guarantees for what will work and what will not. Traditional strategies usually involve “set it and forget it,” burning through resources like time and money, with no intention of maintaining potential customers’ attention.
This is where testing and experimentation become valuable. When it comes down to it, brands turn to growth marketing to provide them with creative, innovative, and low-cost strategies to achieve business scalability.
Notably, growth marketing is exceptionally substantial for content marketers. It helps them discover new ways to communicate with audiences, whether it’s testing a new marketing channel or a piece of content. Using the evidence of analytics, marketers can then integrate the best performing content into their strategies without worrying about its effectiveness.
Low-Cost Growth Marketing Strategies to Help You Get Started
For marketers accustomed to traditional marketing approaches, this level of experimentation can look overwhelming or even impossible. How is it possible to produce large amounts of growth with limited resources? Fear not! Here are a couple of convenient ways to implement growth marketing with content you already have.
A/B Testing
Like mentioned before, A/B testing is growth marketing in disguise. To run an A/B test, you’ll need to create two versions of the same content piece (or just slightly alter a piece of content you’ve already created). This can work for multiple types of content — landing pages, social ads, emails, etc. The ultimate goal is to use analytics and decide which version resonates best with your audience.
Look into search ranking
Investigate where your business ranks when it comes to specific search terms. You can do this with Google Analytics and other SEO tools, or simply conduct a search using incognito mode. Not only does this provide feedback on where your SEO might work, but can also give insight into competitors, ideas for content creation, and more.
Feedback from current users
You don’t have to let analytics do all the talking. As the best source of product information, your customers can provide feedback to improve any current business function, including marketing. Whether it’s with surveys or client one on ones, get the answers you need to encourage business progression.
Audit your current content
Growth marketing is all about staying up to date with trends in the industry and uncovering new marketing tactics that take advantage of growth opportunities. Techniques that worked a few years ago could now not be the most effective way to generate consumer engagement continuously. What’s not performing as well as you would like it to, and more importantly, what’s the solution to fix it? Make it a point to frequently review what you produce so it can achieve its full potential.
Want more examples of growth marketing implementation? You can find more here, but don’t limit yourself to just those. There are several resources out there including SmarkLab’s Growth Plays — a complete playbook of 50 unique campaign ideas and tactics to help prioritize your marketing efforts.
Assess in your current strategy what elements or content may benefit most from growth marketing and start there. By applying growth marketing, you’ll be able to maximize your marketing strategy backed by data and analytics while contributing to your business’s growth.
Get the most out of your content by letting us help implement your growth strategy. Drop us a line to get started!
