Marketing can be a complicated business.
What elements will give us the best results. Should we be posting to social media more regularly? How much should we spend on Google Ads? Is our website good enough?
As a growth marketing agency, we’ve tested them all and surprise, surprise, there is no one magic bullet. Even businesses within the same industry are faced with completely different products, opportunities and challenges.
That being said, over time we’ve narrowed our digital marketing approach down to a proven growth marketing formula, that we represent in our proprietary canvas. And from this model, we use comprehensive planning templates to analyse and deliver personalised tactics for our clients’ businesses.
There are many parts to our Growth Marketing Canvas and it’s defined over 3 discipline segments:
- We’re continuously strengthening the Growth Pillars; improving the product offering, continuously tweaking a compelling Value Proposition.
- It’s a step-by-step application of prioritised marketing tactics and campaigns across a Customer Conversion System (a sales funnel).
- And it deploys a Technology Stack to build efficiencies, reduce costs and report on progress.
With all this potential marketing complexity though, I’m often asked where an organisation should start! What growth marketing parts should get the most attention? It’s like applying the Pareto Rule – what 20% of action will give me 80% of the overall results.
What if the key to future business growth and success lies in focusing on just the core marketing components and doing them well.
So, we’ve distilled our comprehensive Growth Marketing Formula down to just the 5 core ingredients needed to grow your business – execute these well and you’ll set your marketing up for success…
1. Understand your Customer
Ensuring you are targeting a willing, hungry and profitable audience is, without a doubt, the most important step of any marketing campaign.
Analyse your customer base and find out everything you need to know; What social media platform are they on? What their values are in life, what they watch, what they read, what issues do they face related to your industry and product.
Find out what your customers want and what moves them, before you go spend a lot of money marketing. Draw up personas for your top 2-3 customer groups – rank their importance and the share of marketing they should receive from you.
2. Define your Value Proposition
A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. It’s outcome-focused and stresses the value of your offering to the customer.
For [target customer] who [statement of the need or opportunity], our [product/service name] is [product category] that [statement of benefit].
What are our customers’ pain points and desired gains?
What key customer problem do we provide a unique solution for?
Hit people over the head with what makes you different.
3. Set a North Star Metric
Your North Star Metric is the metric that your company uses as a focus for growth.
This measure should be an indicator of the performance of our growth marketing tactics, not necessarily a KPI of the overall business. e.g. Spotify: Time spent listening. Uber: Rides per week.
To qualify as a North Star, a metric must do three things: lead to revenue, reflect customer value, and measure progress.
4. Attraction Marketing
It starts here – if you’re not drawing in a market then the rest of your sales funnel is starved.
Attraction is a critical part of a systematic, scalable sales system. You need tactics in place that are attracting quality leads to your content, website or location.
Fundamentals here include SEO and Google Ads but may also involve display ads and retargeting, emails to targeted lists, cold call outreach, social media, content marketing and PR.
5. Testing and Optimising
Rapidly iterate through experiments to optimise marketing throughout the funnel.
Use A/B testing to improve landing page conversions.
Apply incremental changes to Google Ad campaigns for continual improvement to Cost-per-acquisition over time.
Experiment with cold call outreach and compare performance to other channels.
Test at a low cost and scale the tactics that show promise against your North Star Metric and other KPIs.
While there is always room for fundamental leaps, much of the gains from growth marketing are marginal and incremental.
Run experiments, prepare to fail, pivot quickly, amplify successes.
Takeaways
Our 5-ingredient extract is a distillation of our wider Growth Marketing Formula. Its where 20% of effort will get you 80% of all possible gains. So, if time and money are limited then make sure your focus is on these 5 essential components of your marketing plan:
- Understand Your Customer – target willing, hungry and profitable audiences.
- Define your Value Proposition – define what’s in it for your customer, why should they buy from you?
- Set a North Star Metric – the one measure that will define success – if it increases, your business grows.
- Attraction Marketing – just one part but responsible for fuelling your whole sales funnel – no traffic, no conversions.
- Test and Optimise – run experiments, prepare to fail, pivot quickly, amplify successes.
