Social media and other online marketing leveled the playing field for all businesses. Even so, large companies have big budgets and the human capital to experiment with ads online and off. They also have the means to dominate bids and buy up online ad space. Consequently, small businesses must look beyond traditional marketing techniques to distinguish themselves from the competition and achieve growth marketing.
Traditional marketing has one primary job: creating a sale.
This takes a top-of-the-funnel approach to lead generation and conversion. In contrast, growth marketing takes an approach more akin to public relations. It focuses on customer perception, customer experience and building long-term relationships for repeat sales.
To achieve this, growth marketers rely on a wide range of tools and elements:
Before any company can truly tackle growth marketing, it first needs to understand its position in the market.
Then, it can use the features that distinguish it to carve out a new path to its niche of customers. Not sure what your differentiating characteristics are?
Start here.
Are your products more affordable than other options on the market?
If your products are more expensive, does the brand also convey that it provides better quality to justify that dollar value?
Pricing can also go beyond the final cost. How do you organize payments?
For example, Smugglers’ Roost, an RV park in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico, built a local reputation by providing 99-year leases on its lots. This is much different from month-to-month renting or even annual leases.
Are there any specific features of your product that make it completely different from other available options on the market?
For example, does your restaurant sell a popular item with a secret ingredient passed down in your family?
If you provide psychotherapy services, Do you allow anonymous sessions for people who need anonymity to truly open up?
What sets your business apart?
If there’s one thing the modern marketplace will almost always pay for, it’s convenience.
Do you have faster shipping than your alternatives?
If you offer financing options, can you approve loans more quickly than your competitors? Is it easier to order it online or pick it up at local retailers?
What makes your product the most convenient choice?
Even if you are a small company, you can sometimes gain recognition by leveraging partnerships.
Whether these are high-value clients you worked with or Fortune 500 partners investing in your company, they can set you apart.
If these options aren’t available to you, you could consider reaching out to local influencers.
Some companies are as well-known for their philanthropy as their products and services.
For example, Ben & Jerry’s created a loyal following among its buyers by loudly espousing the same causes they do.
While the general public and even its international partners do not always agree with its decisions, the ice cream company knows its buyers well and caters to them.
What causes does your business support that your customer base does too?
Executing your growth marketing strategy will require creativity, risk tolerance and high-level data. Every growth marketer has his or her own way of tackling the process, but these are some of the main steps you can expect.
You might know who you plan to attract with your products and services, but do you know who they actually attract?
If you run a brick-and-mortar business, it’s fairly easy to tell who walks through the door and makes purchases.
However, it can be trickier to tell online. For this, you need serious data analytics.
Your growth marketer also needs to know why you attract a specific demographic and what keeps it buying.
It’s important to determine what prompted the initial sale and what prompted repeated sales or referrals, which could be entirely different from each other.
Narrowing down the main reasons will take some time and some A/B testing.
Before a marketer can attempt to grow your business, he or she will first need to determine where it currently stands.
How many sales do you make in a day, quarter or year?
What is the size of your customer base and how highly do customers rank or recommend your product?
How does your business performance compare to competitors with similar characteristics?
Above all else, growth marketers have an eye for creativity.
They know how to speak to your audience and how to tell stories worth hearing.
No matter how small your differentiating factor might be, they could turn it into something spectacular by boosting either its origins or the resulting effects.
Creativity has risks, so these experts also know how to fail fast and move on to the next best thing, while also continuing to do what works.
After completing your fair share of experiments, you and your growth marketer now know how to proceed. This makes it possible to build a growth marketing strategy that affects all aspects of the business:
The marketplace changes constantly and so do the platforms that empower them.
For example, Apple recently changed its privacy settings.
This will make it exceptionally hard for companies to reach Apple users via Facebook ads. Consequently, you and your growth marketers must learn to prepare for change and predict change.
At Seer Production, we have spent years analyzing growth engines online and off.
We work closely with our clients to build systems that use these engines to dominate niches within the most competitive markets.
Our multi-faceted approach includes boosting organic search ranking, building communities on social media and creating brand awareness. We are also proud to support some of America’s most successful Black-owned businesses.
Get started with our growth marketing team today.
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