Growth marketing isn’t a single action or activity. You can’t identify your target market, create some growth goals, and call it a day. Nor can you focus on a single area, like digital marketing or customer acquisition.
Growth marketing is a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to promoting a brand. It creates a growth plan that integrates the entire customer journey and aligns a business’s offerings with that experience. This has the potential to unleash long-term strategic growth — if you do it right.
Let’s consider what it takes to create a quality growth marketing strategy and how you should structure that marketing strategy if you want it to remain an effective part of your business development and organic growth over time.
Gartner defines a growth strategy as “an organization's plan for overcoming current and future challenges to realize its goals for expansion.” It’s a good baseline, but at Relevance, we dig further into the growth strategy concept.
The phrase “current and future challenges” is particularly important. It’s key to truly understanding what growth strategy — and growth marketing as a whole — focuses on.
Growth marketing is a comprehensive, long-term approach to marketing. It seeks to generate revenue, as is the case with all marketing. But it does so through holistic, data-driven strategic planning that emphasizes the customer throughout.
A growth strategy gives you a vision for what you’re trying to accomplish. This takes into account a wide range of factors (many of which are detailed further down).
A good growth strategy should be bookended by a solid growth marketing framework and effective tools and techniques. This hierarchy or growth marketing process starts with a growth strategy plan and detailed framework. This is the umbrella under which your growth marketing activity takes place.
Each growth strategy draws on the guidelines and resources of your growth framework. It applies the overarching guidance to create a specific strategy for your business’s current promotional trajectory.
From there, the impact of this strategy trickles further down the growth marketing hierarchy as you create individual campaigns. These are time-bound marketing plans that you execute using specific tools and techniques.
So, in a sense, your growth strategy is a middleman in your growth marketing activity. It interprets the long-term vision of your growth marketing framework into an applicable plan for the present. This helps you create more specific campaigns that you can initiate at the right times.
Understanding a growth strategy is one thing. Creating one is another. There are three areas that you want to focus on when structuring a growth strategy:
Let’s consider each of these in further detail.
As is the case with all growth marketing, everything revolves around data. Growth marketers do not use “gut instinct.” They collect and analyze data. This allows them to make informed decisions.
When you are engaged in strategic planning, you want to have the right data handy. This should include market research on potential customers. Past marketing performance is also important.
This kind of information can help you brainstorm ideas effectively. Remember, research and data are the foundation of a healthy business growth strategy.
The customer is always right. They should also be center stage. When you’re building a growth strategy, your customer should be in the middle of every discussion.
Traditional marketing starts with product features and benefits and then considers how they apply to consumers. Growth marketing reverses the order.
It considers the needs of a company’s target market and then looks for ways its products or services meet those needs. This may feel like semantics, but putting the customer’s questions, thoughts, and concerns first leads to more organic messaging.
Once you’ve gathered relevant data and prioritized the customer, it’s time to talk specifics. As you flesh out your growth strategy structure, keep three key areas in mind:
By emphasizing these three key pillars together, you can craft a holistic strategy that enables you to own your industry and accomplish each growth marketing goal.
Once you’ve structured your growth strategy, you’re almost done. The last step is to implement it. As you use your strategy to inform your marketing campaigns, make sure to analyze the results.
If something is working, great! Keep up the good work. If a marketing activity or technique isn’t performing the way you want it to, make adjustments. Then rinse and repeat.
If you continue to come up short of your growth marketing goal, don’t give up. That may simply be the sign that it’s time to find a good growth marketing partner (cough cough, like us!). They can bring the third-party perspective, experience, and expertise required to set your strategy on the straight and narrow.
Creating a good growth strategy is important. It serves as a guide and source of inspiration for your growth marketing activities to achieve you business goals and reach business success.
If you’re crafting a growth strategy, do it the right way. Start with the data. Focus on the customer. Keep the three pillars of growth strategy (authority, credibility, and visibility) in mind. Test your results and tweak where necessary.
Doing so gives your growth marketing efforts the best chance of success when you go to put your strategy into action.
Use these scorecards to assess your current growth tactics and determine what your next steps should be.
