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Growth Marketing Strategies for Challenger Brands

Julie Zhou

VP of Digital Marketing and Growth

While growth marketing’s definition seems pretty straightforward, proper execution is a different story. You have to stay up to date with the latest trends, stay true to the industry’s best practices, and actively grow the business through a mix of tactics and strategies — both online and offline. On top of all of this, you have to be creative to combat advertising fatigue to drive revenue. Luckily, we’ve put together a list of growth marketing strategies for your convenience.

Keep Up With the Trends

Growth marketing is like an ever-mutating dragon with many heads — you tackle one aspect, and a new technology or statistic pops up in its place. Or, at least, that’s how it feels like. This is why it’s especially important to keep on top of trends regularly. Not just once a year or even quarterly, but monthly because new trends that affect the way we market to our audiences pop up all the time. Scout for trends while on social media platforms, media sites, and keep tabs on what industry thought leaders have to say. 

Scale Yourself Through Automation

Growth marketers look beyond the marketing budget — they find ways to focus on marketing’s impact on growth. However, that’s not to say growth marketing doesn’t require money. Many digital tactics require some form of time investment, whether that be for planning or executing. Think ahead to come up with ways to reduce the amount of manual work that you need to do. For example, automate as many tasks as you can. If you have weekly social media posts going out, select a platform that will allow you to schedule posts. 

Since creating content is usually labor-intensive, recycle evergreen content into new formats. For instance, if you have an ebook with helpful information, you can turkey-slice the sections into a variety of new blog posts. Blog posts can, in turn, become infographics or templates, and you can always take a previously published article and reinforce it with new statistics or a different angle.

The more that you can remove yourself as a bottleneck, the more experiments you can run more quickly.

Have a Healthy Multi-Channel Mix 

A robust growth marketing strategy means having a healthy mix of channels in your marketing arsenal. Why? Because consumers aren’t just hanging around one channel or platform, they’re constantly flitting back and forth between different social media networks, display networks, mobile ad networks, and more. When you have a healthy multi-channel marketing mix, you can establish your presence in new markets, attract different audiences, and gather more varied customer data. The key is to explore and experiment with a variety of channels to see which ones work best for you. 

Put a Magnifying Glass to the Whole Funnel 

Growth marketing is different from traditional marketing because it pays attention to all aspects of the customer journey. According to a recent study, it can take up to eight touchpoints with the consumer to create a sales lead. Growth marketing optimizes every touchpoint — everything from a social media post to a push notification and a marketing email — so that you can meet your conversion goals faster. 

Measure, Track, and Test

At its core, growth marketing is data-driven — there’s no such thing as growth marketing without data. The only way to understand your digital marketing return on investment (ROI) and improve your processes is by accurately tracking every marketing asset, activity, and campaign. To do this, you need to develop SMART goals: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. Search for online tracking tools such as website analytics, SEO tracking, and social media measurement that’ll help keep track of your success. 

Testing comes next — it’s the foundation of your growth marketing strategies. Look for advanced testing tools that can measure your marketing campaigns in real-time so that you can optimize and adjust on the go. A standard method of testing is A/B testing. In A/B testing, you have one ad or piece of content. You duplicate it, only changing one aspect. Then you run both ads or articles of content to see how your audience responds. You can A/B test everything from email subject lines and calls to action (CTAs) to images and landing pages. 

Experimentation is Key 

For growth marketing success, you should mix up your growth marketing tactics quarterly — repeating the same things rarely give way to change. Figure out what’s working, and switch old methods out with new types of digital tools such as chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile video, and more. 

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

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

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