Strategic Growth Marketing Can Help Your Business Reach Three Goals
Often referred to as “growth hacking,” growth marketing is one of the latest marketing tactics that businesses are using to grow their customer base.
The term sounds like a no-brainer -- growth marketing means you just market your business to grow, right? Well, sure, but, as you can imagine, it’s more complicated than that.
Here’s everything you need to know about what growth marketing is, along with goals to set for your growth marketing campaigns so you can start measuring your success.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a type of marketing strategy that’s focused on retaining your customers rather than just attracting new customers. Instead of only focusing on the top and bottom of the sales funnel, as traditional marketing does, growth marketing follows the customer through the entire buying process.
Understanding the life cycle of the buyer helps you figure out where to reach your future customers. It also tells you how to retain your current customers and, most importantly, how to keep them coming back and referring you to their network.
Growth marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of marketing. You’ll need to stay vigilant by running A/B tests, tracking analytics and monitoring trends. You’ll have to be flexible and ready to concede failure quickly when you discover that your marketing tactics aren’t working.
When it comes to growth marketing, businesses tend to have three main goals:
1. Customer Retention
A key difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing is that growth marketing focuses on existing customers first. People who have already bought your products or used your services are more likely to come back to you if they have had a great experience and if you continue to deliver products, services and information they find valuable.
Starting with a customer retention focus is also smart financially. As research has shown, acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than it is to retain an existing one.
2. Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition comes second because you want to know how to keep customers before you go out and find new ones. When it comes to customer acquisition, the main goal here is to figure out where potential customers are located and how they’re going to find you. It could be through online marketing, offline marketing or referrals.
Drill down into these components even further, and focus your efforts where you have the highest potential. If your potential customers are on Instagram but not Twitter, focus on Instagram, and forget about Twitter.
3. Increased Profit And Revenue
Of course, at the end of the day, your business needs to make money. A poorly executed growth marketing strategy that relies too heavily on customer acquisition costs might help you increase profits but not revenue. A successful growth marketing strategy, on the other hand, will give you new revenue streams and lead to an increase in both revenue and profits for the long term.
No matter what stage your business is in, developing a growth marketing strategy will help you retain customers and find new ways to attract new customers so you can grow your business.
This article was first published on Forbes.com and is reprinted here.