Why growth marketing is transforming the business world

The exciting thing about working within the marketing space is that the world is continuously changing with new tools, technology and methods.

Keeping a finger firmly on the pulse of new developments is essential to remain competitive and be as innovative as possible – standing out from the crowd when it comes to differentiating one business from another.

Buzzwords have always beset the marketing community, and the digital space can be quite a minefield to negotiate, with different terminology and technology constantly inserting itself into the marketing lexicon.

New technology has enabled many developments using data, online systems and software designed to help marketers reach their consumers more quickly and easily – with the objective of achieving sales and marketing results with better and better returns on investment.

What is growth marketing and how can a small business use it?

By harnessing the various tools that are now at the disposal of digital marketers, growth marketing techniques can be deployed to create a lean and efficient marketing operations function, which can achieve impressive results and cost efficiencies.

Growth marketing is really about scaling your marketing operations functions as a result of using all this new technology, to get from A to B much more quickly and efficiently than would ever have been possible a few years ago.

We now have super sophisticated systems at our disposal enabling us to be more efficient and effective marketers and promote a better understanding of companies and their products.

Growing an audience before you sell a product is the first process in this new environment.  So inbound marketing and social media are two of the main tools used to be able to achieve this.

By testing and learning you can find out more about your perceived audiences and buyer personas, and also what approaches to your marketing messages work the best.

So you can build out your messaging, measure the responses, and learn what people engage with and what type of content they like very quickly.

Inbound and content marketing

In the past, most marketing has consisted of outbound, or ‘interruption’ marketing – i.e. when we are reaching out directly to people to try to build an audience or sell a product.

Now we have a new paradigm which reverses this process – inbound marketing is designed to attract and engage website visitors by offering high quality and relevant content to your audience, to create sales and leads.

Content marketing is the practice of generating this digital content for your website and external locations on the web, which speaks to your buyer personas in a way which informs them of information they are seeking, i.e. when searching on Google.

This content can be in the form of articles, blogs, downloadable assets such as; white papers, studies, e-books, videos and many more, which is designed to engage prospects and build a dialogue.  By using contact forms, CTAs and landing pages, prospect data can then be collected into your CRM system, at which point they enter the sales funnel.

By using marketing automation systems such as Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, or Eloqua, these leads are then nurtured through this funnel and experience a buyer’s journey process which is very different from anything that has preceded it.

By using workflows and intelligent CRM systems which are programmed to deliver targeted and timely messages (all GDPR compliant) you then create a growing database of highly qualified prospects – or MQLs / SQLs as they are known (marketing/sales qualified leads).

You can also manage your social media posting within these systems, so again everything is integrated and easy to control.

Nurturing and delighting your prospects is the key concept here, and you have to ensure that the sales end of your company matches the experience of the prospecting period. Otherwise, you have wasted your money and time.

In-house marketing departments can utilise these systems, and all offer training and onboarding so that you can become familiar with the process.  Alternatively, you can use the services of a specialist partner or experienced company who can manage it all for you.

Either way, it is the smart way to do marketing in the 21st century, and the more companies get on board with these concepts the more they will thrive.

Growth marketing is the way forward!