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The Growth Marketing options available to Marketers are endless, so in this post I’m distilling a long playbook list down to 23 practical tactics that any of our small to medium New Zealand clients can deploy today.

I’ve loosely arranged these example actions into one of three sections. The lines are a little blurred between each section, but you’ll get the picture…

Website SEO – preparing your most important digital asset.
Lead Generation – growing traffic and capturing leads.
Content Marketing – nurturing prospects and closing sales.

A key strength of a Growth Marketing strategy is not hinged on any one campaign, channel, or tactic in particular. The success pivots on each of the channels and actions combining to have an effect that is far greater than the sum of their performance alone.

A strong Growth Marketing plan will take care of short-term wins and develop medium- and long-term successes.

It’s likely to include a mix of our shortlisted tactics: Facebook advertising, Google Ads, display advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, landing page design, conversion rate optimisation, email marketing, content marketing… pretty much anything that will help you achieve your goal.

What’s important with any growth marketing methods, is that you take a fluid approach to budget allocation – adjusting the allocation of your budget each month to the channels where you’re generating the best results. Experiment, test and improve constantly.

Website SEO

I can’t think of many situations where a strong website isn’t the catalyst for better results. So make your website great again.

Firstly, set it up so that it will rank well with Google and get found your prospects.

Then ensure it works hard to convert – changes opinions, captures lead, initiates calls or store visits, or it directly sells something.

Search Engine Optimisation – run a website audit and apply the technical changes for Google’s sake. Apply keyword-researched on-page SEO.

Offsite Link Building – ultimately Google ranks popular sites higher and one of their criteria is the amount of quality backlinks your site has. Here we start by auditing competitor sites to work out what strategies they are using to obtain their ranking for specific keywords and then we’ll look to build a better version of their backlinks.

Website Upgrade – perhaps it’s time for a total upgrade to a state-of-the-art mobile-friendly site that better reflects your brand and its position against your competitors.

Landing Pages – Don’t just send traffic to a general home page; direct it to specific landing pages optimised for certain keyword groups and designed to capture leads or for a specific conversion. Destination URLs from pay-per-click ads should be designed specifically in relation to the keyword or topic which was being advertised. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to find the information that is relevant for them. Consider a product like Instapage that also reports on page performance

Conversion Optimisation – construct your landing pages so they encourage a signup or sale. Even subtle changes to button copy can have significant effects. Having the highest conversion rate possible allows you to spend more on marketing than your competitors. Actionable optimisation data could come from Google Analytics, heatmaps, visitor recordings and online surveys.

A/B Split Testing – a fundamental of Growth Marketing is experimentation and testing. Who’s not to say the old clunky page is worse than the new highly-crafted concept page – the only way to find out is to test them side by side at the same time using products like Google Optimise or Optimizely.

Website Trustmarks – An important factor in converting a visitor will always be how much trust they have in your brand or product. If you want a prospect to trust you more, include your clients’ logos, affiliations or employee photos on your website.

Lead Generation

Now that you have new traffic to your website, how can you turn that visitor in to a lead, capture an email address or contact details and then continue to engage and nurture them?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.

Search Engine Marketing – If you want to attract visitors today then start with paid search advertising (pay-per-click). Our tactics often start with Google Ads for immediate traffic and lead generation.

Facebook Advertising – Conversion focused ads using Remarketing, lookalike Audiences, client website fans and tailored interest groups.

Remarketing – You’ve put effort and money into getting people to your site; now retarget those specific groups of those visitors through Google and Facebook.

Gmail Sponsored Promotions – Here you can even target users receiving emails from your competitors!

YouTube Advertising – Test activity on the next largest search portal after Google search. Consider starting with Veeroll to produce high quality inexpensive video ads.

Pop-ups and Exit Intent – Tastefully styled and intelligently positioned popups can highlight an offer and drive conversion (usually email subscription focused). When all else fails, an Exit Intent popup can catch a visitor before they leave with a special offer or coupon.

Online Chat – Online chat works like text messaging and we all know how popular that is. It’s also inexpensive, so just add it to your site and test out the results.

Email Acquisition – Email can form a valuable core channel for any growth marketing plan but first you need to get those email contacts. Part of the email pool will come from general website lead capture – blog subscribers, quote requests, incomplete signups, purchases or applications and enquiries Valued Content Offers – visitors are only going to give up their email if you offer something valuable to them in return. One way to build your email list is to offer special eBook downloads promoted via Facebook or pay-per-click mediums. Another way could be through competitions; offering a prize to entrants.

Content Marketing & Promotion

Content is the fuel that attracts prospects to your website. Great content engages prospects, warms them to your brand and ultimately helps you build a relationship with customers.

Unfortunately, it’s often an afterthought for businesses. If Google Ads works, why would we need to write a couple of blog articles a month? Why should we let our competitors in on our secret best practice guide? Because great content drives interest in our brand and positions us as a leader in our industry. It shows expertise and builds trust. And it weaponises our personalised emails, monthly newsletters and automated responses, and creates interest in social media, while our banner ads are being ignored.

Blog Articles – Much of our work here will be stimulated through valuable content sort out and searched for by your prospects. We’ll use social media and emails and SEO tactics to attract visitors to your blogs. Even for larger clients, blogging is often a hard tactic to commit to but by using affordable content writers anyone can have a strong blogging presence – which will become a strong foundation for much of our Growth Marketing. Mix your topics up a little; think case studies, reviews, in-depth articles, lists, aggregating other sites’ content.

Blog Optimisation – Your blog pages need to be optimised for lead capture – think popups and inline forms and download offers. Don’t forget to AB Test these as well.

Reviews & Ratings – Use a system to gather reviews and ratings from customers; display them on your site and ensure they are added to Google My Business or aggregated by a 3^rd party so that they appear in search and Google Ads results – that way prospects are more likely to click on you.

Email Marketing – Email remains one of the most effective means of delivering personalised messages to prospects and customers. We use it at all stages of the sales funnel, segmenting lists and delivering emails to welcome new subscribers, send requested content, to make special offers, send out periodic product news or bring back a lapsed customer.

Marketing Automation – not so much a strategy as a tool, but one that helps us do more, automating many processes through the funnel; from lead generation, segmenting and tagging users, personalising website pages, controlling email marketing and assisting with CRM.

Loyalty Programme – it seems that Retention Marketing often gets left off the list. Marketing to current or previous customers can take a lot less effort and deliver better returns than finding new ones. A loyalty rewards programme could be just the edge your customers need to come back to you for more. Reviews and ratings – People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in people’s purchasing decisions. So set up a system where you ask for them, display them schematically correctly on your website and have them pushed to Google My Business and beyond.

A marketing plan shouldn’t be written and put on the shelf – that’s why we treat a client’s plan like a guidebook that continually focuses our actions and reminds us of the strategies we’re deploying to achieve your KPIs.

Our marketing process covers 11 crucial steps:

Brand Mission
Value Proposition
Buyer Personas
SWOT Analysis
Competitor Analysis
Marketing Budget
Optimised Website
Marketing Tools
Strategy Grid
Activity Calendar
Goals & KPIs

We’ll guide a client through these steps and summarise the information utilising our planning templates. It’s a 2-way process where the client imparts valuable information to us and in turn we provide workshops and tools to facilitate the planning and ongoing activity:

#1. Describe Your Brand Mission

The first step in creating a strong marketing plan is to highlight the mission statement of your company. All of your marketing efforts will revolve around fulfilling that statement for your customers.

What purpose does your company serve?
What problems are you solving?
Why are you in business?
Summarise that mission in one or two sentences.

#2. Define the Value Proposition

There are many ways to go about developing a Value Proposition, but we think the following formula cuts to the chase. It’s also great for presenting the ideas to your team or visualising how the website page might convey this:

Headline. What is the benefit you’re offering to customers, in 1 short sentence? Might mention the product and/or the customer. Does it grab attention – why should I care? What’s unique or desirable about it.
Sub-headline or a 2-3 sentence paragraph. A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom and why is it useful. Why should I choose you rather than a competitor’s product.
Bullet points. List 3-4 key benefits or features. Make sure the support the headline and your overall claim.
Visual. Images communicate much faster than words. Show a hero shot or an image that reinforces your main message.

Evaluate your current value proposition by checking whether it answers these questions:

What product or service is your company selling?
What is the end-benefit of using it?
Who is your target customer for this product or service?
What makes your offering unique and different?
Why would I purchase your product/service over the competitions?

Go beyond what you sell and focus on why it matters
to your customer

#3. Build Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are semi-fictional profiles of your ideal customers derived from research and sales data from your existing customers. They define groups of our most important customers and consider demographics, behaviours, interests, and especially, goals and pain points; so that can align content and strategies with them throughout the buyer’s journey.

Match specific Persona’s to selected traffic sources and promotional hooks/lead-magnets and to certain stages within the Buyer’s Journey to personalise your messaging.

Write up your key Personas by downloading our Buyer Persona MS Word template.

#4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

This bullet point table will focus us on the issues that need to be addressed for the coming year.

Use this information to address your marketing strategies.

To find your strengths answer questions like:

What does our organisation do well?
What are the things that other people say you do well?
Why did we win our last pitch or why does Distributor X deal with us?
What processes do we have in place that have made us effective?
What do we currently do that is a unique strength to our business?

To find your weaknesses answer questions like:

What could we improve in our organisation?
What is causing a constant barrier to our success?
What are we currently doing in our marketing process that could be improved?
What are the things you need to avoid?
What does our competitor do well that we don’t?

To analyse opportunities outside your business, answer the following:

What external trends could bring opportunities?
What are the current ongoing trends?
What is the market missing? What disruptive thinking could you benefit from?
What is changing in our industry that we could take advantage of right now?

Analyse the threats that may impede your success:

What obstacles are you facing on your current mission?
What are the negative aspects in the current market?
What are our competitors doing better than us?
Are there changes in our industry that could threaten our efforts?
What political, economic, or social aspects could hinder our marketing efforts?

#5. Competitor Analysis

You don’t have to be the best business in the world – you just have to outperform your competitors.

List key direct competitors in your market.
Include global operators that you’d nominate as hero’s or as a source of inspiration.
What are your competitor’s strengths and how can we negate or take advantage of them?
Determine competitor vulnerabilities, and capitalise upon those weaknesses.
What are they doing right and how could we improve on that?

Track your progress against your competitors based on industry reported sales, research, website rank tracking etc.

#6. Set a Marketing Budget

There are four ways you can set a marketing budget for the year:

Percent of Revenue. This is where the revenue that your business brings in determines what your budget will be.
Top-Down. This is where the GM or Marketing Manager decides what your marketing team will spend.
Competition Matching. This type of budget is based on trying to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing.
Goal Driven. This type of budget is based on the goals that you have set for the year. The amount you spend on each project will depend on the kind of goal you need to reach.

#7. Optimise Your Website

The website and the content within becomes the hub for all our marketing activity. And it’s crucial that your website gets the brand positioning, design and coding attention it deserves…

It’s the place to deliver a clear and unique value proposition so your prospects and customers get what’s in it for them and why they should purchase from you. That proposition is usually delivered distinctly and quickly within key landing pages through copy and images but is also disseminated in overall website design, appealing to your Buyer Personas.
An optimised website usually makes the development of landing pages, blog posts and lead capture forms a breeze. No doubt it will be built around a user-friendly Content Management System (CMS).
An optimised website will be search engine optimised (SEO) to ensure keyword ranking on google and easily found by your targets. Intelligent use of keyword research will help optimise meta titles, meta descriptions, page headlines, copy and content and overall strategic direction of your site.

Your website is the centre for content distribution, lead capture, conversion and deal closure. And it’s a key starting point for attracting traffic and nurturing leads through our conversion processes. Don’t skimp on the investment required!

#8. Setup Marketing Tools

Whether you’re using a spreadsheet or something fancier, there is a plethora of tools and apps to help us plan, optimise, execute and track our research, activity and results.

A solid marketing strategy, backed by the right technology stack for your business, will help you stay on track to achieving your goals and may include:

The tools are there to help us do a job your competition probably haven’t even begun to think about. We’re going far beyond a monthly email newsletter – we’re strategically moving your traffic, leads and customers through an intelligent sales funnel – all within a level that matches your budget and resources, of course.

#9. Build out a Strategy Grid

Build out a Strategy Grid for your business defining your business/product strategies and tactics by buying stage; Attraction, Engagement, Conversion and Retention.

This is perhaps the most important element of your marketing plan because it assesses and details exactly what you’ll do with the resources that you have.

#10. Detail an Activity Planner

While the overall tools and strategies might be in place or documented, we still need to lay out what will happen next week or next month.

Dependent on your appropriate promotional cycle (weekly, monthly etc), you need to set up a planner to detail what email campaign will be delivered on the 15^th or what promotion will run in June.

It could include a Content Publishing calendar or detail about what automation flow you’ll introduce in two month’s time.

While you should lay out a full 12 months of activity, it’s important to concentrate on the detail for the immediate rolling 3-4 months.

The activity planner can also include a list of strategic things-to-do with ideal delivery dates.

#11. Set Goals & KPIs

The last element in our marketing process is to set goals and key performance indicators. Our marketing goals should be S.M.A.R.T. This means they should be:

Specific. You should know exactly what you’d like to accomplish.
Measurable. If you can’t measure it, it’s not useful.
Attainable. Stretch yourself, but avoid setting yourself up for failure.
Relevant. Your marketing goals should be connected to clear business outcomes.
Time-based. Give yourself a deadline by which you’ll achieve your goal.

Set up a spreadsheet for these goals and combine those results with reporting from sources like Google Analytics. Track them by your most appropriate promotional cycle (weekly, monthly etc). Common KPIs include:

Revenue
Gross profit %
No. of online transactions
Active Customers
Website visitors
Leads generated
Conversion rates
New Customers

Takeaways

While a strong marketing plan must cover at least these 11 elements, we’ve found that the more concise you can write this up, the better. It’s not that detailed reports and analysis are unimportant but when we’re summarising your plans and activity the shorter you keep it, the more understanding and buy-in you’ll have from key stakeholders.

If your first Marketing Plan draft covered these elements over 2-3 pages, you have already made a significant start to a strong plan and more than likely achieved significantly more well-contemplated planning than your competitors.

Category: Marketing