Deciding on a marketing strategy for long-term success is tough.
But rather than finding a winning sequence of ads or emails and sticking with them forever, you might be better served by using growth marketing to help you adapt your strategies and improve over time.
Let’s explore some growth marketing strategies and whether it’s right for your eCommerce business now.
What is Growth Marketing?
In a nutshell, growth marketing is a type of long-term marketing philosophy in which marketers use certain techniques to experiment with marketing channels and ads. Over time, marketing strategies are expected to improve in their efficacy, giving you more bang for every advertising buck.
For example, growth marketers may use techniques and strategies like:
- A/B testing to determine which versions of landing pages result in more purchases
- Personalization tools and automation tools to determine which types of ads connect with the most people
- Website plug-ins to gather data or generate leads
- SEO keyword analysis to determine which keywords and what kind of content brings the most people to a business’s eCommerce site
No matter the techniques used, growth marketers rely on incremental testing, only ever-changing slight things about their current marketing campaigns at one time.
Yet these slight changes can produce huge results over time, especially when practiced continually.
Benefits of Growth Marketing
Growth marketing carries several major advantages, which is why many brands are relying on it more than ever before.
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Improve SEO
The first major improvement is boosted search engine optimization (SEO).
By its very nature, growth marketing relies on analyzing certain keywords and phrases for adding new content to a website or tailoring advertisements. Along the way, growth marketers can learn more about what keywords are up-and-coming, possibly ahead of their competitors.
For example, say that your business provides financial assistance for customers interested in securing a personal loan. In such a case, you could use enhanced SEO metrics and analysis to:
- Create Google ads that connect emotionally with your target audience
- Create landing page copy that makes your brand seem more welcoming and knowledgeable to visitors
- Create a more compelling copy to get people to sign up for a loan application
In each of these areas, better SEO boosts your brand’s selling efforts directly.
Enhanced SEO also means your website will show up on Google more frequently and rank more highly with Google’s search engine algorithm.
Good SEO is crucial if you are competing in a crowded market against other, more established companies.
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Boost brand recognition
Growth marketing may also lead to improved brand recognition over time.
Brand recognition can best be understood as how well the general audience and your target audience associate your brand with your niche or industry. Nike, for example, is synonymous with athletic shoes because they have very high brand recognition for their industry.
Boosted brand recognition means your company will be more directly searched for on Google, and therefore, more likely to be visited instead of your competitors.
Furthermore, higher brand recognition means you need to spend less money on marketing - at least on general advertising and brand awareness campaigns.
Growth marketing can improve brand recognition by leaving a more positive first experience in the minds of those who do see your brand. If your website uses A/B testing and other growth marketing methods, it will provide the best possible experience for everyone who lands there.
This, in turn, means that those who interact with your brand will likely spread positive word-of-mouth to their friends and family.
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Enhance current marketing campaigns
Growth marketing can help you significantly enhance your current marketing campaigns, which can be very valuable if you don’t have a lot of marketing budget left in the quarter or year.
Growth marketing takes full advantage of any leads you have acquired from your marketing campaigns. You can use growth marketing testing to make sure that your campaigns or ads are as personalized as possible.
Many of the tools used by growth marketing such as marketing agencies (BrightEdge, Digital Silk, and HubSpot agency) can also help you gather extra data on your target audience's buying habits, demographics, and preferences.
In the long term, you'll be able to craft even more compelling and convert marketing materials to close business sales more easily. Ultimately, growth marketing means that your marketing is as effective as possible in terms of both budget and conversion rate.
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Attract new customers
Last but not least, growth marketing can make it easier to get new customers over time.
Because growth marketing relies on tons of data collection, you can then use the collected data and determine which specific factors drew your first customer batch to your site through the sale funnel.
Armed with this information, your marketing team can then alter materials like ads or email marketing messages to resonate more fully with your audience.
It's all about optimization and efficiency boosting. Growth marketing does require ongoing attention for you to see major results in terms of customer draw. But when applied over the long-term, growth marketing will help you bring people to your brand more readily.
Every piece of marketing material you put out will be:
- More persuasive
- More tailored to the unique needs and wants of your target audience
- More distinct and recognizable from the competition
No one wants a brand that claims to do everything. Specialization is the name of the game in the modern economy. Growth marketing can help you carve out your niche even further than you already have.
Is Growth Marketing Right for You?
If you’re wondering whether growth marketing is a good approach, there’s a simple answer: yes. Why?
Because growth marketing doesn’t require an excessive investment of extra marketing funds to return major dividends later down the road.
If you don’t practice growth marketing, you risk doing the exact same marketing tactics and tricks over and over again. Maybe you spam your visitors with ads.
Or maybe you repeat the same email marketing messages again and again. This doesn’t give your marketing team the opportunity to evolve, and it could lead your competitors to overtake you in the marketing sphere.
You can start practicing growth marketing just by analyzing data and running experiments on things like:
- Landing page versions
- SEO keywords used in copy or ads
- Timing of ads
- Email marketing personalization
As you run these experiments, you only need to apply them to a handful of your current or prospective customers.
Gather data over time, then dedicate a team to analyze the data and come to workable conclusions. In a matter of weeks or months, you’ll have enough data to start making tweaks to your marketing campaigns.
As you gather more data, you can see what the tweaks did. Then lean into the changes or reverse course if the results weren’t positive.
Conclusion
Given enough time, growth marketing can significantly improve how you reach customers and boost your bottom line. It’s a good idea to start practicing growth marketing sooner rather than later – the earlier you start, the more time you have to gather data and implement it with your future marketing efforts.
