Imagine being on a ship to go from A to B. What does the ship need to cover the distance? Propellers below the ship and wind behind the sail.
While your propellers will work to push you ahead, it is the wind that determines how much time you will take to reach. The ship’s propellers are your growth marketers and the wind is the brand.
I love this comparison.
In fact, it might just be one of the best explanations of growth marketing if you are talking to a novice. But what is growth marketing really?
Growth marketing is the one concerned with the entire funnel, and not just the top, where the goal is revenue growth not merely through bringing in new customers but also through the activation, retention, referral, and monetization of the customers you already have.
Unlike the more traditional brand marketing, growth marketing is a data-driven process.
It’s experimental, iterative, and — most importantly — user-focused since growth marketing is far more concerned with customer lifetime value (CLTV) and customer retention than simple customer acquisition.
So how can you implement some of the best growth marketing tactics on your product/service and make it a success in under a month?
Here are 8 of my favorite growth marketing tactics that will show up results in 30 days:
Referrals
Referrals now have become quite an old (not so hip) way of getting in customers. But most B2B and B2C organizations don’t do referrals the way they should be done.
Most organizations award users with a bit of cash (or their own currency). Best users don’t really care about little cash.
The best referral programs reward users with a bit more of their own product/service.
Eg. Dropbox referrals rewarded users with extra storage on pushing in referrals. People signed up for storage when they came to Dropbox, and they gave people more of it. Masterstroke!
Sometimes, rewarding with access to more of a product is not possible. Cash rewards come in only in that case. Even here, the reward should be significant.
Eg. If you sell an e-commerce portal, offer your product for free after 5 successful referrals. If you’re a subscription service, offer 3 months free on successful referrals and not just one month.
Post Purchase Experience
If you are an e-commerce site, make your product and experience and not just a commodity. How?
Often, there is a time gap between customers purchasing the product online and the product arriving at their address. Use this time!
Create a post-purchase e-mail flow to excite your customers. This can include examples of how to use your product (or assemble the product). Another good example is UGC showing off real customers.
Hypothesis Testing
Study your competition’s growth strategy. Understand what kind of A/B tests they are running online so you can test similar hypotheses. How?
Use your browser’s incognito window and visit their landing pages multiple times. Make a note each time you notice a visible change — that is their A/B test.
Compare the variations they use and decipher what they are testing —
- New Value Prop?
- New Social Proof(s)?
- A different pricing showcase?
- New Product imagery?
Once you have an answer, determine if it is worth testing the same for your own product/service.
Retention is Key
Surprise current customers with freebies often (or whenever you can). We live in an era of customer delight and not just customer satisfaction.
Don’t wait for birthdays/anniversaries — customers nowadays receive gifts from a lot of brands on those days. Make yourself stand out.
Relate the gifts to your core offering to increase customer affinity and build a longer relationship (high CLTV!)
Call to Action (CTA)
Research well before closing on the copy of your call to action button. Look within and outside your industry.
A good CTA usually begins with a verb and ends in an adverb.
Eg. Buy Now — to set the purchase in motion.
Watch Now — to get the user to see your video.
Run Ads for Best Copy
Consider running ads on a small budget to test your landing page copy. Your ads will get much more impressions than your landing page — and hence you get statistically significant results!
How? Create multiple variations of ad copies on Google/Facebook ad manager. Instead of conversions, focus on click-through rate (CTR). The copy with the best engagement will be the best landing page headline, subhead, and body.
Retarget
The most underrated growth tactic, ever!
Anyone who has visited your landing page, or interacted with your ad is someone who is interested in your product/service. Make your you remain top of mind for that user.
A little known growth hack (lighter on pocket) is retargeting LinkedIn audiences on Facebook.
If you are a B2B product/service, the quality of traffic LinkedIn will get you will be unmatched. Direct users from LinkedIn onto your landing page. Once there, retarget the on Facebook! (The Voila moment!)
It will give you much lesser CPCs and thus lower CPLs and lower ROAS.
Attribution
A lot of times links with UTM parameters are not the most conclusive evidence of a campaign success or failure. People hear about your through (let’s say)influencers and then may buy later, often untracked.
One smart way of identifying is to add a post purchase (or post sign-up) survey. Ask customers about where they heard of you and all multiple options — Online, newspapers, TV, influencers etc.
A higher post survey ROAS for different media help you better plan your spends.
Conclusion
Growth Marketing converts potential energy of your user revenue into kinetic energy. It hastens the purchases.
If you are looking at incremental sales as an immediate result, with an increase in customer lifetime value and lead or demand generation, your growth marketing strategy needs to be in place — with incremental leads and conversions being your north star metric.
Using some or all of these tactics will certainly push up your leads, revenues, and signups. And that is how we define success for a growth marketing campaign.
But sustaining the incremental leads and revenues is what will hold the key. But that is for another day!