As a concept, growth marketing is only gaining more and more recognition — and rightfully so. With the dramatic results it's capable of offering, growth marketing is certainly worth your consideration.
But how do you go beyond the buzzword and create a growth marketing plan that can drive measurable outcomes (and generate real revenue) for your brand? You're about to find out.
6 Things Your Growth Marketing Plan Needs to Succeed
Ready to stop thinking about the growth you want to see and start forming a growth marketing plan that will produce results? These are the six elements you'll need to incorporate.
1. Detailed Personas
Before all else, every well-rounded growth marketing plan must be clear about who the customer is.
You can accomplish that by creating detailed buyer personas. These will outline specific traits of your ideal buyers, including their:
- Age and gender
- Location
- Income bracket
- Level of education
- Occupation
- Hobbies and recreational activities
- Core values
- Life goals
- Pain points
By consolidating that information in one place (and giving a face to your target customers), you'll be able to focus closely on the things that matter most to your audience and create products, content, and marketing messages that truly resonate with them.
2. A Solid Budget
We don't have to tell you about the importance of a well-laid-out budget — from the software you use to the benefits your employees receive, all of your brand's expenses quickly add up.
So just as your SEO budget must account for things like landing page rewrites, ongoing keyword research, frequent blog posts, and regular data analysis, your growth marketing plan must include items like:
- Near-constant data analysis
- Content creation, optimization, and re-optimization
- Precise testing and experimentation
- Ongoing design tweaks
If you budget for those crucial activities ahead of time, you'll be much less likely to be left wondering where your money went (and why) later on.
And if some aspects of your growth marketing strategy end up driving less impressive results than you'd like, you can look to your budget to see if the problem comes down to underspending.
3. Clear KPIs
Growth marketing is all about eschewing gut instincts in favor of concrete data. So if you don't have crystal-clear KPIs to tell you if you're on the right track or not, you're doing something wrong.
By way of example, those KPIs could include:
- Number of new customers
- Number of recurring customers
- Cost per customer
- Average ad campaign ROI
- Customer churn rate
- Total organic traffic
- Total paid traffic
- Number of ranked keywords
- Total keyword value
- Conversion rate
- Number of IQLs, MQLs, and SQLs
Once you can quantify your brand's performance and compare this month's metrics to next month's, you'll be in a position to determine which of your growth marketing efforts are working and which need further tweaking.
4. Thorough Competitive Analysis
If you want to achieve truly remarkable growth and beat the competition, then you'll need to go beyond defining your unique selling points and calling it a day.
Instead, you'll need to take a more in-depth approach by regularly analyzing your competitors using social listening tools and other resources.
Take note of each competitor's:
- Social follows and engagement rates
- Most successful content
- Most unsuccessful content
- Customer feedback, both positive and negative
- Signs of growth, such as new locations or expanded services
- Press releases and news coverage
- Any other relevant qualities
The longer you keep track of those aspects of your competitors' businesses, the better equipped you'll be to compete with (and exceed) them.
5. A Modern Marketing Funnel
The traditional marketing funnel ends when customers make a purchase, but for the purposes of driving significant growth, that just won't do.
Instead, you'll want to use a modern marketing funnel that goes beyond the moment of sale. We're fans of the AAARRR framework, also called the Pirate Funnel:
By using the Pirate Funnel in lieu of a more basic option, you'll gain the ability to focus not just on attracting new customers but also on retaining your existing ones and earning their referrals.
6. A/B Testing
We couldn't talk about a growth marketing plan if we didn't also talk about A/B testing, an absolutely crucial component of data-driven decision-making.
With A/B testing, you measure an audience's response to the original version of an asset (the control). Then, you measure a similar audience's response to a potential new version (the challenger, or variation).
Comparing people's responses to both the control and the challenger will definitively tell you which one delivers the best results:
.png?width=1032&name=ab-testing%20(1).png)
A/B testing is such a fundamental aspect of growth marketing, not only because it relies on facts rather than hunches to draw conclusions but also because it can save such a colossal amount of time and money.
To understand why, imagine you're looking to execute a top-to-bottom site redesign. From the color scheme to the icons to the CTA buttons, you want everything to be new and improved.
But before pulling the trigger, you decide to carry out some A/B testing on the old and new versions of a single landing page. To your surprise, the original landing page performs better, and you've just saved yourself many thousands of dollars in design fees.
And that's the power of A/B testing: It can not only tell you when you're on the right track but also when it's time to put away your wallet and go back to the drawing board.
A Successful Growth Marketing Plan (and Incredible Growth) Is Within Reach
A winning growth marketing plan isn't about spending the most money or using the fanciest tools. It's about knowing which factors to focus on, as well as how to build a marketing strategy around what your customers want rather than what you want.
With the six elements described here, you won't need a crystal ball to know which tactics will work and which will be a waste of time. You'll have something better: a stellar growth marketing plan to show you the way.
