Why We're Calling It Growth Marketing Now

A few simple steps for getting your feet wet in the brave new world of growth marketing

Ah, growth marketing – the secret sauce behind every successful business that seemingly came out of nowhere.

You know, those companies that were as obscure as that dusty old cookbook in your grandma's kitchen until one day they're everywhere, and you can't escape their catchy ads and irresistible offers.

How do they do it?

Well, it's time to demystify the art of growth marketing with a sprinkle of humor to make your journey a tad more entertaining.

Sales Is Your Most Important Growth Marketing KPI

The first step in building a growth marketing strategy is defining what success looks like for your business.

Are you looking to increase website traffic, generate leads, boost sales, or expand your customer base?

Setting clear, measurable goals will guide your strategy and help you track your progress.

In reality, if doing growth marketing - almost 100% of the time the goal should be sales (customer acquisition).

After all, that’s why we call it “Growth” marketing.

What’s great about growth marketing and not traditional marketing is that good growth marketers were yesterday’s growth hackers and so we know exactly what it takes from a metrics standpoint in order to reach that sales objective.

For example, traditional marketers or agencies will do your organic social media and then tell you that the goal is 100,000 impressions and then getting 1,000 new followers each month.

But so what?

What are you going to do with those followers? How much did you invest in your team, agency, or even media to get those followers? Did they turn into a sale? Will they convert into a sale? And did you just get a return on your investment or did you just throw money down the drain?

If you can’t answer these questions, it’s okay, but there are people out there like me and others who can - and we’re here to help.

A growth marketer, performance marketer, or even someone who’s trying to help you and not fool their way around another contract, will ask you - what is the business sales goal?

Across the board, a good marketer will look at the sales objective and then using a mix of marketing mix modeling (mmm) along with a simple sales simulation be able to create across your marketing KPI benchmarks for Paid Social, Google Ads, and even Instagram followers - so that when these benchmarks (CTR, CPA, Etc) are reached there is a predictive formula for what sales will be achieved and also what we need to optimize across our channels going forward to reach it.

*And therefore, for this reason- don’t settle for impressions anymore, ask for the reasons as to why the impression #'s matte to the bottom line. Or, why 500 follower increase vs 10,000 follower increase matters to the original sales target.

Because if you don’t take this next step, your competitors will- and they’ll take your customers while they’re at it.

But numbers are only the beginning of the story.

A Good Growth Marketing Strategy Needs A Great Hook

Imagine your growth marketing strategy as the opening line of a stand-up comedy routine.

You need something that grabs attention and leaves people wanting more.

Your hook should be as irresistible as a pizza delivered in 15 minutes or less. It's all about that initial punchline – or in this case, your unique selling proposition (USP) or Value Proposition.

Be so appealing that customers can't help but take a second look.

For example, there are three elements that I always use before launching any marketing strategy… and they are essentially to do more strategy :)

Such as:

A Brand Strategy: This is about positioning, doing homework on the problem, solution, audience, and the benefits. After enough work here, you can come to a good conclusion as to who your core audience is but also why they need your product based on what dilemma you’re solving which will make for great content, which comes next.

A Content Strategy: Creating a content strategy, even if it’s just one page- is key for identifying how you’re going to tell the type of story you want to tell, the voice you want to have, the offers you’re trying to convey, discounts/sales seasons, and other relevant information that will come in handy as a guide later.

A Campaign Strategy: Or also known as a funnel strategy - Think of a campaign strategy not like a media plan (yet) but something that comes before that. Your campaign strategy is more like a recipe for success filled with items across TOF, MOF, and BOF that you’re going to tackle in order to tell the story in a while that will fulfill the brand positioning goal and also meet the KPI needs addressed in the goals setting so that you can achieve your sales objectives.

The reason why I focus on the elements in the media planning process is that it helps me provide a series of offers and hook's based on both what the business is doing, wants to do, or has planned in the coming season.

For example, let's take a Dress Shoe for Men.

You could create ad in your ad copy write:

General copy:

Shop Dress Shoes For Men Online

But that's just poor advertising and lack of effort.

Instead, try:

Shop Discounted Large Size Dress Shoes For Men Today

or

Buy Now to Get 25% Off Discounted Dress Shoes for Men

You see what I did there, I used both offers that were taking place, along with what we knew about the pricing strategy and audience to make the offer more personalized and custom for a higher conversion rate possibility.

If you're ever feeling caught in what to create for your content, always go back to your audience, which leads us to the next tip.

Never Forget, You Need an Audience to Grow in the First Place

Understanding your audience is like knowing your neighbor's dog's favorite treat – it's creepy, but it gets results.

Dive deep into data, stalk your customers on social media (not literally, please), and find out what makes them tick. What problems are they itching to solve? What keeps them up at night? The more you know, the better your marketing message will resonate.

For example, I recently worked with a client who was paying thousands of dollars a month for a research and social listening tool and yet couldn’t answer the most basic question around who their audience was.

Clearly, we fixed this, but it was amazing to me how important the audience is, how that defines your personalization approach, and yet here we are and it’s still getting missed.

If you're feeling lost, don't ever feel ashamed if you have to go back to marketing 101 basics- build profiles for all your audiences, give each segment an identity and figure out how you’re going to create content and build a plan from there as to what you’re going to do to bring it to life.

From there you should have a good foundation for your content strategy. However, this blog is about "growth" marketing which is different than your traditional posting plan- I'll explain in the next tip.

Growth Marketing Means Reverse Engineering Why You're Using Emoji's

Your content should be so shareable that even the most stoic people can't resist clicking that 'Share' button.

Think about it; a cat video is universal – everyone loves it. Your content should be just as universally appealing (not necessarily featuring cats, though).

Create blogs, videos, infographics, and memes that people want to pass on to their friends, family, and colleagues.

But here’s the difference between what a growth marketer does and a traditional marketing agency- there is a reason a cat videos goes viral.

A good marketer will look at the strategy, audience, campaigns, and then also the channels you’re using, how their AI works, what type of machine learning strategy needs to be in place and then reverse engineer every post or ad based on this in order to meet the need not only of the audience - but also the need of Google’s AI so that your content makes it past each series of firewalls.

For example, have you ever heard of "Like-for-Like" groups?

No? Now you have.

How do they work?

People in a group will post or run ads and they'll agree to like each others posts at certain times of the day so that the algorithm of that social platform will identify that post as a good or engaging post and then serve it up more - influencers do this all the time.

Reason is, even after all of that rocket science - it's still predictive and not action. Meaning, we don't know what will really work until the consumer engages with this, which is why data analysis is the key to every growth marketing approach.

Growth Marketing Means You'll Have to Become a Good Detective

Data analysis is the Sherlock Holmes of growth marketing.

You need to be a detective, examining every piece of data for clues to success.

Which ads are performing best?

What's the ROI on your campaigns?

Are there hidden trends that can be capitalized on?

Dive into the data like it's a juicy mystery novel, and you're the detective trying to crack the case.

For example, as you do this you’ll realize how much more A/B testing has to be done.

Why?

Because A/B testing is the secret ingredient to optimizing your marketing campaigns today.

It's like dating two people at the same time and figuring out which one you click with better.

Try different headlines, ad copy, images, and CTA buttons to see what resonates best with your audience. Remember, in the world of growth marketing, there's no such thing as 'one size fits all.

Which is why it’s wild to meet different marketing teams and hear how they optimize their ads once every two weeks and most of the time run the same ad for a 3-6 month period regardless of performance.

This might sound completely insane, but it’s a real example of what’s happening out there.

It also might feel comforting if you’re feeling behind, because the truth is that so are others.

To get it right, know that today’s world is an always-on A/B test, we’ll get more into this in the course I’m creating on machine learning later this year.

In growth marketing, failure is your trusty sidekick.

You're going to have campaigns that bomb worse than a stand-up comedian at an accounting convention.

But that's okay. Learn from your failures, adjust your strategy, and keep moving forward.

Failure is just a stepping stone to success, and it's usually a hilarious story in hindsight.

That’s because the marketing world changes faster than fashion trends.

What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

Which is why I recommend always keeping up with industry trends, new tools, and emerging platforms.

Also, attend webinars, read marketing blogs, and never stop learning. The more you know, the more you can adapt and thrive.

Building a growth marketing strategy might seem daunting, but with the right mix of creativity, data analysis, and a dash of humor, you can crack the code and achieve remarkable results.

Remember, growth marketing is all about making your audience laugh (or at least smile) while also getting them to click that 'Buy Now' button. Then, always staying in pursuit of the the data to see why they did it- and can you replicate it over-and-over to achieve the original business goal you set out to reach in the first place.