Traditional marketing has evolved into growth marketing, an industry that encompasses more data-driven, digital-based, and online marketing activities. To keep up, marketers have to actively engage in a mix of tactics and strategies, online and offline. There are plenty of ways to promote a product, but a marketer’s most effective growth marketing strategy depends on their target audience, potential customer base, competitive landscape, market position, and much more. 

No matter what tactics you choose to incorporate into your growth marketing strategies, these best practices will help you build a growth marketing strategy that’ll successfully scale a business. 

Expand the Number of Channels You Use 

A growth marketing strategy won’t be successful with just one platform. When you focus solely on one channel, it’ll limit your exposure and keep you from reaching a wider audience. It can also limit visibility into your customer’s full journey. 

Nowadays, consumers spend time on a variety of different platforms and websites. When you incorporate diverse advertising and marketing channels in your mix, you can create foundations in new markets, attract different audiences, and collect more data about your customers.

Whether it’s social media networks and native ad networks, or display networks and mobile ad networks, it’s critical to explore and experiment with all channels to see which ones work best for you.

Focus On the Whole Funnel 

There’s a vast difference between traditional marketing and growth marketing: Growth marketing cares about all aspects of the entire customer journey. Growth marketing makes the most out of every point of contact. This could mean a social media post or a marketing email — every marketing tactic along the entire funnel is tied to the end goal of conversion.

When you focus on all the touchpoints along your full funnel marketing, you can optimize each according to the target audience.

Repurpose Your Content

A strong growth marketing strategy will involve diverse channels and complex marketing funnels — meaning you’ll need a ton of content to support your activities. Repurposed content is helpful because it saves your team time and labor. By recycling existing content into new formats or for new audiences, you can maximize its value. 

For instance, you can transcribe a video into a blog post, or create an infographic out of a video. The possibilities are endless.

Keep Your Customers Actively Involved

An essential component of growth marketing is having a deep understanding of your audience. Create opportunities so that your customers can interact with your brand. Here are a few ways to start: 

• Build forums or a community your customers can join.
• Provide an easy way for customers to give feedback.
• Engage customers on social media with polls and surveys.
• Speedily respond to customer comments and reviews. 

Track and Measure, Always

Without data, growth marketing wouldn’t exist. To understand the ROI of your digital marketing, every online marketing asset, activity, campaign, and interaction with customers should be tracked and measured. 

To accurately measure your online marketing efforts, you first need to set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. Once you’ve set concrete, measurable KPIs, you can track your campaign activity to see if and when you meet them.

Data tracking also provides you with real-time, scientific information about the areas you may need to improve or optimize. There’s a wide range of online tracking tools you can use to keep a close eye on your success, such as website analytics, social media measurement, mention trackers, SEO tracking, and more.

A/B Test For the Win

Testing is a requirement of successful growth marketing. There are many advanced online tools out there that’ll allow you to test your marketing campaigns in real-time so that you can adjust and optimize on the go. 

One of the most common testing methods is A/B testing, or split testing. A/B testing involves running two versions of a campaign, with only one element different in each. 

For example, you could promote a social media post with two different images or headlines. Then, you’d track the campaign and see which version performed better. The high-performing ad could then be A/B tested against another version, and it goes on and on. Each round of testing brings you closer to the ideal optimized version that will deliver the best results and ROI.

Stick to the Tried-and-True Best Practices

Growth marketing may seem overwhelming at first — there are new tools, technologies, and tactics popping up all the time. While it’s essential to stay up to date with the latest tips and trends, it’s even more important to stay aligned with the industry’s tried-and-true best practices.

Embrace these growth marketing principles, and the world is your oyster. 

Move aside, marketing funnel - there’s an improved customer journey model around, and it’s the marketing flywheel. Find out how your business can use it. Read all about it here.

Originally published on November 25th, 2019, last updated on June 16th, 2022.