As a business owner, managing many moving pieces can be challenging. No one key, trick, tool, or hack alone guarantees business success. Growth marketing is just one critical piece to that puzzle. However, many struggle to understand the concepts involved or why they are the key to business success. Below are some tips to help you understand the best growth marketing plan for you.
1. Feel More Confident About the Way Forward
A growth marketing plan is data-driven. It not only relies on initial data to develop the plan in the first place. It also incorporates a data-driven attitude into everything you do. Your plan will establish how you collect data. It outlines where you’ll use it to promote a better customer experience and, in turn, business success.
As a result, you can take a more confident step forward, knowing you’re moving in the right direction. Just look at the many ways you’ll use data within your growth plan.
A Scientific Approach
A/B testing is a cornerstone of any growth marketing plan. It involved running controlled scientific experiments in marketing to determine which elements work best with your target audience. Through A/B testing, you’ll know which CTA, button, landing pages, and headlines resonate the most. This allows you to optimize them. And that saves you time, money, and frustration.
But what’s more, it delivers a better customer experience. A/B testing isn’t just about performance. It’s customer-centric. It doesn’t keep doing the same ineffectual things over and over. Instead, you’re using data to figure out what works. What delights your customers and keeps them coming back for more?
Less Bias
Historically, many marketers and other business leaders have said they have a “gut feeling”. But the scary truth is that most “gut feelings” are filled with bias created by your own personal experiences. That doesn’t make them bad. That simply means they’re based on how you see the world. And everyone, even people who grew up together, have had a different life experience.
These biases can mislead you about what’s really going on. You can end up making short-sighted and erratic decisions. You might do something because it seems fitting to you. But your customers see it entirely differently. Now, this isn’t to say that every customer will agree with your decisions 100% if you base them on data. After all, you can’t please everyone. However, it can help you make moves that appeal to the largest customer base.
The more data-focused approach baked into growth marketing doesn’t rely on personal experiences or hunches. It collects data and learns from it. By doing so, you can propel your business forward.
More Agility to Pivot
Identify trends and problem spots faster because you’re viewing more of the customer experience picture. You’ll be able to pivot and keep moving. Agility means you’re taking responsibility for the whole customer journey and how customers see your brand. You learn from your mistakes, identify the hiccups and streamline a winning customer experience.
2. Retain Customers to Maximize Lifetime Value
Selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times more profitable than selling to a new customer. If your business model doesn’t actively work to retain customers, you’ll never escape those tight sales margins. One valuable tool in maximizing customer retention and understanding the financial impact is calculating CLV, which can help businesses assess the long-term value of each customer, identify high-value segments, and tailor their retention strategies accordingly.
This approach enables businesses to allocate resources effectively, prioritize customer engagement efforts, and boost profitability by nurturing long-lasting customer relationships.
Constantly selling to new people just doesn’t work financially, time-wise, or any other way. Period.
A growth plan recognizes this. It doesn’t see a sales funnel that ends when someone buys something. In reality, that’s the beginning. If you don’t move past that starting point, you don’t grow.
The 3 A’s
First, you have awareness, which is your reach. How many people are seeing you? Then you move on to acquisition. This step measures how many people come to your website along with other metrics that bring to light how they’re interacting. Then activation happens when that visitor takes a meaningful step toward becoming a customer or making the first purchase.
By the time this person activates, they will likely spend as much as you did acquiring them. You just broke even. It’s easy to see why a growth plan doesn’t stop here. You must keep going.
The 3 R’s
Next, you have the big hurdle — Retention. What percentage of customers keep their subscription, buy again, or upgrade? What you call it depends on your business model. These actions show someone sees value in and is investing in your brand. Out of this, you begin to generate revenues. And a greater percentage is profit because you’re selling to an existing customer.
The final R is Referral. Because your plan created a brand community that retains customers, this attracts more people like them to your brand. They also want to become a part of your brand community. They will activate more quickly because the engagement they see from your community is social proof that you’re a brand they want to associate with. Make sure that any social proof is reflected on your website. Now, you get to retain these customers. The growth continues.
3. Achieve Sustainable Long-Term Growth
A growth marketing plan helps you start building something today that will continue to grow with increasingly less effort, not more. In fact, your marketing may just take on a life of its own. You can keep this momentum going as long as you continue to test, optimize, and focus on customer experience. At the same time, you’re seeing revenue rise and customer acquisition costs sink.
Sustainable growth happens, in part, because you’re not the only one invested in your business’s success anymore. You’ve generated a community of customers who care about your brand. They see it as an extension of who they are. They’ve invested a lot in themselves. Naturally, they want to see it continue to thrive.
You’ll realize this sustainable growth in three essential ways.
Scalability
A growth plan focuses on scalability. Scalable systems can increase or decrease as needed to adapt to your changing environment. They grow up with you. So you don’t have the headaches and setbacks of having to change vendors, ditch old technology, speed hire, or change how you do everything to grow your business.
A scalable system works for all business sizes. And back to number one, it’s based on data. So you know what’s working and what isn’t. You can streamline everything. See what works on a small scale, measure, analyze, then scale it up. Trends in technology will affect how fast you can grow and how effective you will be. Make sure you understand these new trends and how they affect how you scale.
Repeatability
You can take what you’ve learned and apply it elsewhere to get similar results. This gives you the incentive to invest the time and effort into testing to determine what works. That’s because you already have a growth plan for broader applications.
For example, you may run certain tests on Facebook or Instagram. Much of what you learn also applies to LinkedIn, Ads, SEO, and maybe TikTok too. So, thanks to repeatability, you can maximize your ROI on testing.
Maximizability
Your plan helps you do more with less. For example, by focusing on retention, you generate more value out of each customer. You turn your customers into promoters. To some extent, they start doing a lot of the marketing work for you.
Is a Growth Plan Your Key to Success?
It certainly can be. It allows you to make confident, data-driven decisions. It recognizes the true power of retaining customers and turns them into ambassadors for your brand. It helps you achieve sustainable, long-term growth.
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