Your product or service is helping people. Your customers are happy, and their referrals are bringing in new business. You’ve reached a point where it is difficult to keep up with demand. You need to grow your business.
Or something has changed about your target market or the context of your work. Some of the growth you’ve seen previously has stagnated. You had initial success and believe you can adapt to the changing marketplace if only you could get the right people to see your work.
Growth Marketing Strategy
Both of the businesses described above need a marketing strategy to propel them toward growth. Eyal Gutentag, who works with companies large and small to develop growth marketing strategies, points out that effective strategy combines both creative vision and understanding of the data that measures performance. Both the creative and the analytical must work together to refine the marketing message and be sure that it connects with the right people.
Creative: Get the Right Message to the Right People
When a business is new or experiencing changes such as scaling and growth, it’s important to clearly define who you are trying to reach with your marketing. What are they already thinking about, and what would they need to see or hear to become curious about your business? While defining your message and the feelings you want it to generate is a creative process, only by measuring the response to this message can you objectively determine whether it made the connection you intended. When your message resonates with the right people, they will respond in greater numbers. By combining creative and analytic processes, you can test messages in low-cost ways before putting money into a campaign that might fall flat.
Tactical: Get the Right People To Make the Right Decision
Performance marketers are skilled at methods to influence people to decide to work with your company. Half of the trick, of course, is honing in on those people who are already thinking about the problem that your business solves. If you haven’t clearly defined your target market and found a message that demonstrably motivates them, marketing tactics that nudge them toward making a decision will not work in your favor. Once you have an audience showing interest, you can lay out the next steps and move them closer to buying. The next steps here are actions the customer takes that make it easier to buy from you. Actions that build trust, overcome objections, or inform them about how you solve their problem can all be measured and can identify which potential customers are ready to go further.
Analytical: Make It Count
Marketing in the digital age has been described as “shouting into the void.” With so much information out there competing for people’s attention, it is easy to waste your creative and financial resources on messaging that won’t achieve your desired result. To avoid this outcome, measure results every step of the way. When your messaging is informed by the way real people respond, you can be confident spending money to get that message seen by more people.
