The year 2022 was a year of growth for many of our clients, and we are proud to have implemented lots of successful marketing tactics and strategies that led to that growth. That's why we’re sharing five of our favorite tactics here to help you learn how you can implement them for your own business or clients in 2023.
Our Top Growth Marketing Tactics
Over the course of 2022, we helped our clients build growth in a variety of ways — but there were five growth marketing tactics that resulted in especially strong results. These tactics included asset optimization, proper lead follow-up and nurturing, new channel testing, technical website audits, and strategic recommendations for new website builds. Let's dive into each tactic.
1. Asset Optimization
Asset optimization utilizes campaigns and pages you already have to draw people to your different lead magnets. The lead magnets can be tools, downloadable content, or programs already in place so you aren't reinventing the wheel; you're simply optimizing your current assets. In 2022, we optimized our client's Business Name Search Tool, an existing lead magnet they created to make it quick and easy to search LLC and corporation names to see if a proposed business name is available in a chosen state.
To optimize this tool we automated the process of using it and improved the delivery and timeliness of the result the user receives. Additionally, we tested the web page and optimized it for visit/lead conversion, connected it to a nurture campaign, and customized components of the campaign to be specific to the Business Name Search. From our optimization, we saw 184K submissions and a 238% increase in usage from 2021-2022.
2. Proper Lead Follow-Up and Nurture
Following up with your leads and nurturing them can make all the difference in your sales. Having a strategy in place and implementing it can be challenging, but we were up to the task for our client. Some tactics we used to craft our lead follow-up and nurture strategy were:
- Categorizing Leads: Organizing leads based on budget, timeframe, and readiness is critical to ensure you are properly following up. If they aren’t ready to buy and your messaging is to push them to buy, you’re going to either push them away completely or lose the opportunity to nurture them into conversion.
- Responding: When a lead comes in, it’s best to respond within 24 hours. This is your best chance to make a great first impression. When a lead shows interest, they are looking for an immediate response. After 24 hours, they often abandon the task and either purchase from a competitor or have already changed their mind.
- Nurturing: This part of the strategy is often overlooked, but it's important. Leads that are taken care of properly can turn into the best customers. The best way to nurture leads that aren’t sure about buying yet is to provide them with value. Do this by sharing valuable information with them, such as your applicable videos, podcasts, how-to guides, blogs, etc.
There are just a few of the many ways to optimize lead follow-up. Showing prospects you can be of value to them and that you are a thought leader in that space will maximize your conversion rates and move leads down your sales funnel more effectively.
3. New Channel Testing
Using a variety of channels for your marketing helps ensure you reach your customers and potential customers wherever they are most receptive to your communication. Most rely on email marketing, but last year for our client, we opted to try a channel that was new for them but one that's been successful for others for many years: direct mail.
Each year, they send a business annual report reminder by email. But there was a segment of the customer list that lacked valid email addresses and a segment of those who simply did not open any of the email campaigns. Using direct mail, we captured customers who weren’t as engaged through email and helped to generate incremental revenue for the client at a 244% ROI.
4. Technical Site Audit
Ensuring your website is in strong technical health is crucial for growth — if your site isn't Google-friendly, you'll never earn the search engine traffic or rankings you want, and if your website isn't user-friendly, you won't be able to earn leads or conversions from the traffic you do receive.
Ideally, all websites need to be on an audit schedule. Having a scheduled audit of your website can help identify and rectify issues before they occur and give detailed insight into your website’s health.
One of our clients came to us wanting to understand what they could do to improve search traffic and rankings for their current site. Because they were simultaneously working on a brand-new site to be launched before the end of the year, we didn't want to devote too many resources to fixing the old one — but we wanted to capitalize on any short-term traffic potential and make any improvements that could carry over to the new site.
We completed a technical site audit and isolated fixes that could result in quick growth, including the following action list:
- Fixing their robots.txt
- Adding all URLs in canonical format to the sitemap
- Submitting their sitemap in GSC
- Adding H1s and H2s to all pages
- Adding self-referential canonicals
- Fixing their site canonicalization setup to eliminate redirect chains
These six items help to improve traffic and keyword rankings and ensure your website meets search engine requirements for crawlability and indexability.
5. Strategic Recommendations for New Website Builds
On a related note, we also took the time to evaluate what technical fixes our client should keep in mind for their new website build. These were fixes that might take longer to implement (or to see results) but were worth doing for long-term growth.
Building a new website takes time, focus, and patience. Creating a list of what needs to be done in order of importance can help streamline the website build and keep your energy focused on what will really produce growth. For our client, we determined 12 actionable steps to take during the website build that we knew would produce results after launch. This included:
- Building a site architecture to target priority keywords
- Ensuring all content/links are crawlable
- Building from a mobile-first perspective
- Optimizing for page speed and experience
- Including appropriate Schema markup
- Including keyword-optimized H1s, H2s, URLs, and title tags on each page
- Adding optimized image alt text on all images
- Ensuring all links point toward the final version of URLs
- Writing unique meta descriptions designed to earn clicks for each page
- Reviewing the sitemap and robots.txt for appropriate formatting
So what changes has our client seen as a result of their technical audit and new site build? In three short months, they saw a 46% growth in first page keywords and an 86% growth in overall keywords. When the audit was performed, they had 99 keywords on the first page of Google and 927 keywords overall. As of February 2023, they have 145 keywords on the first page of Google and 1,728 keywords overall. Not bad for quick fixes!
Why You Need a Growth Marketing Strategy
Whether it’s for your own brand or your clients, having a growth marketing strategy is crucial to success. These five tactics were successful for our clients in 2022, and that’s why we continue to use them in 2023. If you want to partner with us to get your growth marketing strategy in shape, reach out.
