What makes growth marketing so amazing? To start with, it's data-driven and fully scalable, so if your primary concern is scaling your brand, you should go with growth marketing. It focuses on the entire funnel instead of just the top of the funnel and helps attract, engage, and retain customers for life. And it relies heavily on experimentation and data to optimize marketing campaigns across all channels.
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, start implementing the strategies and techniques used by top growth marketers. When you are developing a marketing plan, these growth marketing strategies should be considered non-negotiable. Without them, your marketing plan is incomplete. Worse, it might also be ineffective.
What are these non-negotiable strategies?
Let’s figure it out.
1. A/B Testing
Growth marketing is all about experimentation. A/B testing is a core component of a growth strategy as it helps you optimize marketing campaigns.
A/B testing is an experimentation technique where two or more variations of a single asset are shown to users randomly to find the best variation. It is used to test hypotheses statistically:
Imagine this scenario: you want to test if your newsletter signup form works best in the middle of blog posts or at the end. You can use an A/B test to see what works best for your readers in terms of newsletter conversion rate. You can create two different versions and test both variations by sending traffic randomly.
An A/B test or CRO tool like Google Optimize will do everything for you, including creating variations, splitting traffic, running the test, and detailed analytics.
The reason why the A/B test is a non-negotiable aspect of your marketing plan is that it optimizes marketing campaigns. It improves marketing performance by telling you what works and what doesn’t. You can improve CTR, conversion rate, and UX, and find the marketing channels that outperform.
In the absence of A/B tests, your marketing plan will be a traditional one. If you aren't testing and trying to improve marketing based on data and experimentation, you aren't doing growth marketing.
2. Customer Lifecycle
Does your marketing plan cover the complete customer lifecycle journey? It should.
A key aspect of growth marketing is that it covers the entire funnel. It doesn’t just target top of the funnel and customer acquisition; rather, it focuses on customer engagement and retention too:
The three customer lifecycle stages that growth marketers focus on are:
- Activation
- Nurture
- Reactivation
If your marketing plan is targeting all these stages, you are moving in the right direction and all set for exponential growth.
Targeting customers at all the funnel stages and engaging with them throughout their lifecycle is what makes growth marketing so effective. If you focus on customer acquisition only (like many brands), you'll spend a lot of money on marketing since acquiring new customers is 6-7x more expensive than retaining existing customers. And it is up to 70 percent easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer:
This is what makes growth marketing way more cost-effective than traditional digital marketing. You optimize marketing costs by doing things that cost less and have a higher impact.
Customer lifecycle shouldn’t be ignored and must be a non-negotiable growth marketing technique in your marketing plan. Ignoring it means you aren't doing growth marketing.
3. Cross-Channel Marketing
Sustainable growth isn’t possible if you stick with a few marketing channels. Most brands rely heavily on a few proven marketing channels and don’t bother testing others. Growth marketing doesn’t rely on a single marketing channel. It focuses on cross-channel marketing.
Cross-channel marketing is a combination of several marketing channels leading to an increase in your reach and improving customer journey:
Couple cross-channel marketing with A/B testing and continuous improvement and you'll be at the top of your marketing game. You'll be able to find the most effective marketing channels and can further improve their effectiveness by experimentation.
The reason cross-channel marketing should be a non-negotiable aspect of your growth marketing strategy is that it helps you create an effective customer journey. You'll connect and engage with your ideal customers across all the channels they use. It is ideal for personalized marketing because you can show your audience a consistent marketing message on all channels.
4. Content Repurposing
It doesn’t matter what marketing plan your brand is using, it will always involve content — or some form of content. And where there is content, there is content repurposing.
A key growth marketing strategy that must be a part of your marketing plan is content repurposing. Don’t go without it. Here is why: Research shows that 90.63 percent of pages get no organic search traffic from Google:
This means the majority of the content you create goes unread and unnoticed. This is why content repurposing must be a part of your marketing plan. You can reach a new audience at new channels from the same content by repurposing it. Even if your existing content is performing exceptionally well, you can still recycle and reuse it.
For example, you can convert a blog post into a video, PPT, and short snippets for social media posts. A single piece of content can be used across multiple channels effectively.
It is the most cost-effective way to generate content and a reason why content repurposing is loved by growth marketers.
5. Retargeting
Retargeting is one of the best growth marketing strategies that should be a part of your marketing plan. The average conversion rate of a website is 2.35 percent. This means out of 100, 97 people will leave your website without conversion:
How do you bring these visitors back?
Retargeting.
You can track visitors who leave your website without conversion through a tiny code. You can then reach and target these visitors and bring them back with targeted ads like this:
Traditional digital marketing focuses on traffic and conversions that happen. It is least geared towards retargeting and bringing those visitors back who leave your website. Growth marketing uses data-driven marketing to boost conversions by targeting visitors who are skeptical and need follow-ups.
Retargeting is cheap since you are reaching to the people who already know your brand and have at least one interaction with you. This is less cost-effective than bringing new visitors onboard and converting them.
Growth Marketing Isn’t Constant
Your growth marketing strategies should be flexible, and so should you. You can't put all your eggs in one basket, and you can't put all your money on a single marketing strategy. Keep tweaking it. Keep testing marketing campaigns and channels.
Testing, experimentation, and incremental improvement are the basic pillars of growth marketing. It isn’t your regular set-and-forget marketing strategy. It has to be adaptable and agile to bring long-term, sustainable growth.
The growth marketing strategies covered above are your non-negotiables. Get in touch with us if you aren't sure where to begin or need help with executing and implementing any of these growth strategies.
