The devil (or god) is in the details—this is the best way to define growth marketing. Known for its scientific method, growth marketing is a new technology-learning approach to achieving specific goals through data-driven action. In light of its scientific spirit, these planned actions lead to a quantifiable and trackable reaction. Results are far-reaching and overhaul your organization’s long game.
Like the story of an olive and American Airlines.
In 1987, the aviation company removed one olive from each salad served on their flights and saved $40,000 a year. The company understood that a salad served twice a day on flights that run 365 days a year is an augmented product that in no way defined their basic service.
While this may not be a direct marketing tactic, it shows how attention to detail can help save revenue and boost profits. And when combined with growth marketing, it can help companies:
- Forecast analytics based on customer analysis data
- Find sustainable, scalable, and measurable ways of upselling and cross-selling to customers
- Add value for customers through your product offerings
- Increase and extend customers’ lifetime value by leading them further down the funnel
- Drive traffic to the website while promoting it too in your advertising
- Use landing pages to initiate a dialogue and increase conversions
Growth marketing’s trifecta of testable, scalable, and trackable methods will play an essential role in your marketing strategy in the years ahead.
So, what will be the important growth marketing trends for the upcoming years?
Let’s find out.
Upcoming Growth Marketing Trends To Watch Out For
1. Work With Existing Clients
It is a known fact a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
That is because you avoid spending a lot of time explaining your business, your product/services, and their value to your existing customers.
Growth marketing mobilizes this truth that even numbers validate. A study found that the cost of acquiring a new median customer is almost double that of upselling to an existing customer. This data-driven fact will be capitalized in the coming years, and new strategies will be developed to get existing customers to invest more in your organization.
Businesses will consider other additional services to offer, packaging, and pricing services for better engagement while initiating conversations about new service offerings to your best customers.
2. Internal Teams’ Alignment
Marketing, sales, and customer services are all front-end functions driving revenue. They work towards the same goal – more customers. The reality, sometimes, can be different. Due to their distinct roles, there is often a rift and silos between these departments. And this needs to change.
Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams must be synchronized regardless of your business size. This is because it can optimize lead generation and customer retention.
Growth marketing streamlines sharing resources, processes, and communication pathways and finds ways of syncing up to increase efficiency and ROI. When companies align their customer-facing teams, it can lead to two times the revenue.
So, how would growth marketing tackle alignment in the coming years?
Integrating Sales and Marketing Automation Tools
Sales and marketing automation tools are like peanut butter and jelly–different but made for each other. Combining these two can give more visibility into lead analytics and how to close more business.
While marketing automation solutions are used to improve marketing campaigns and nurture leads, the sales automation tools send customer-related data into systems for sales reps to communicate better with customers.
Integrating these two solutions can provide actionable results and business intelligence that directly impacts business goals. While sales reps can use key data points in the CRM, marketing can refer to this data to see what’s selling and optimize their messaging to create effective campaigns.
Embracing Hyper-Personalization
Growth marketing has always used a combination of strategies to generate leads and drive results. But in an age of hyper-personalization, one-off campaigns are not enough. Customers want brands to make them feel special by being present on platforms of their choice, 24/7.
Companies need to focus on delivering hyper-personalized experiences to their customers using technologies like AI and predictive analytics. Netflix has led the torch of this marketing strategy by running around 250 A/B tests yearly, and it is to acquire new customers and drive customer loyalty.
They use AI to make recommendations based on data collected from different sources, including viewer ratings and watch history, search history, and the type of device. They use an integrated data source to predict recommendations that hook the viewers and help discover their preferences accurately.
3. Personalizing in the Age of Privacy
Talking about personalization will add an added dimension to your growth marketing strategy. Gone will be the days of persistent bombardment of ads across different channels. Or mere mention of customer names in a marketing email. Why? Because customers today have become savvier about personal data privacy. They are demanding more from businesses and online platforms to protect against indiscriminate sharing of their details.
These demands are also getting heard. Besides government regulations like Europe’s GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act, tech companies also take privacy seriously. Apple became the first company to provide its customers with better control and access to data sharing. Google, too, plans to change its support for third-party cookies by the end of this decade. This means businesses will not have access to visitors’ online browsing data.
Amidst these tightening privacy and security rules, what will personalization look like? And how would growth marketing be part of this evolution?
When brands offer a personalized experience, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase. Growth marketing will shape it by executing superior data-driven customer experiences. Along with double opt-in marketing, personalization will be shaped by:
- Collecting zero- and first-party data
- Segmenting audience and constantly evolving Ideal Customer Profiles
- Enriching data to discern the needs of each potential customer
- Micro-targeting to each customer
For instance, when you target a small business owner, collect as much zero-party data as possible to understand their needs, industry, and preferences and advertise based on their specific use cases.
4. Consistent Quality Content
500+ million daily tweets, 72000 hours of YouTube videos, 319 billion emails, and 95 million Instagram posts. That is what the internet witnesses every day and more. In these contentious (pun intended, meaning un-implied) times, you jostle to draw your customers’ attention to your products. But how? The simple answer is consistent quality content.
Producing consistent and high-quality content is the hallmark strategy of growth marketing. It drives customer engagement and builds a loyal customer base. By consistently presenting high-value content, you not only reach your target audience but also convert them into paying customers.
With 5G connectivity becoming pervasive and adding to the short attention spans, video-based content is the choice for such a moment. Video is not only for businesses but also for affiliates and influencers who use it to disperse content and, in the process, build customer trust and brand credibility.
Already, 66% of people prefer video to know more about a product or a service, compared to 18% who would read an article, website, or post. Businesses are also aware of this shift in content presentation. In 2021, 85% of companies used video as their marketing tool. Video also provides an opportunity to visually illustrate and showcase your products while personalizing them with a human touch.
The other trendy content dispersal method is going to be podcasts. With a 3X increase in listeners over the last decade in the US alone, podcasts continue to grow in popularity. It will play a seminal role in building brand credibility and raising brand awareness and will be mobilized in any growth marketing strategy in the following years.
5. Long-Term Growth Plans
Growth marketing is about using existing channels to maximize its impact and efficacy. It is an evolved approach to growth hacking, the short-term solution to an ongoing problem. When growth hacking is planned for the long term, it becomes growth marketing.
Ensure long-term, lasting results by including KPIs and metrics that reflect your business needs and objectives and align with your strategic plan.
Start this process of establishing long-term goals by conducting brainstorming sessions to generate ideas. The focus of these ideas must be improving client experience and enhancing client loyalty (circling back to point one). The objective is to build community and spur clients to share their experiences. The idea is to attract new customers and engage them right at the top of the funnel. This way, you can maximize the value of every client, which will lead to more revenue. In other words, more growth for your company.
Conclusion
Contemporary marketing today is a mixed bag of strategies, a hybrid discipline. With marketing moving to the digital realm and automation and metrics becoming its constitutive features, growth marketing is no longer another fad. Instead, it is the critical measurable and quantifiable factor shaping marketing.
Businesses are keenly watching the evolving growth marketing trends in the online landscape. What worked five years ago is unlikely to have the same impact today, with your outdated marketing strategy unable to cope with changing customer preferences.
Growth Natives can help implement these evolving growth marketing trends unique to your business. Email us at info@growthnatives.com to ask questions or learn more.