You may have heard the buzz word ‘Growth Marketing’ thrown around a bit lately. But what does it mean?
When you strip traditional marketing of all its bells and whistles it has one purpose, to attract customers. Growth marketing goes one step further – it attracts engaged customers.
So what’s the difference? Customers will get engaged overtime, right? Yeah sure, but how much time and resources are you wasting to get maybe 10% of them through the churn? Growth marketing is about being smart, knowing where qualified customers are and how to engage them to create longlasting relationships.
[Tweet “It’s about sustainable marketing that speaks to real people and offers a real substantial value.”]
4 Growth Marketing Hacks to Scale Your Retail Business
1. Get LEAN
No, I’m not telling you to hit the gym more often, I’m sure you’re seeing enough of that ‘summer body’ spam already. I’m saying you need to cut the garbage from your marketing strategy to become a lean, mean, growth marketing machine.
Forget about cutting calories and focus on cutting out all the little unnecessary things you do each work day. Scaling your business takes time, unfortunately, there’s no way around that! If you are wasting half your time doing tasks that aren’t growth-focussed, scaling your business is going to take twice as long (if you don’t go broke first).
If something can be automated, automate it. If there’s a task that you personally don’t need to be doing, delegate it. If you have something/someone who is weighing your business down, remove it/them.
When you are trying to scale your business it’s important that you’re making the most of every resource available to you. Whether that means streamlining your processes using a service like Neto or simply freeing up the 2 accumulative hours you spend each week posting to social media by using a post recycler on Statusbrew.
A great growth marketer won’t entertain unpurposed or time-wasting tasks. Does this task have a purpose? Do you need to be doing it? If yes, can it be done better? If no, either delegate or cease the task completely. Time to get LEAN and stop doing things ‘just because’.
2. Always Consider Sustainability Above Short-Term Success
Sustainability should be a no-brainer right? Well, unfortunately not, and our current government is a great example of this!
The facts are written in stone, sustainable resources will benefit us greatly in the long-run…but apparently its just ‘too hard’ to go green. Same goes for sustainable marketing. You may need to spend extra time brainstorming and perhaps the idea will be harder to execute, but it will be worth it in the long run.
A great growth marketer is willing to take on the challenge of always accommodating for the future, manifesting strategies for the long-term in your short-term campaigns. Whenever you’re expending resources you need to think about whether this effort is going to continue to create growth. Will the campaign you’re working on cause one burst of engagement and then die out? Or will it continue to have value over a long period of time? Can you turn the campaign into an evergreen resource your customers can continue to access?
3. Hire or Train ‘Swiss Army-Knife’ Employees
When we first launched our Sophmore Program we spoke about the importance of building your ‘Dream Team’, but what really is a dream team? Having a Dream Team is more than having a skilled team, it’s about having a multi-skilled team. If you hire based on single skills you will find your employees boxed into their specialities unable to effectively communicate and execute strategies across platforms.
For example, if your email marketing guru isn’t well-versed in social media they may not understand the capabilities of feeding your email subscribers into Facebook to create custom audiences. Or maybe you have an awesome content creator that doesn’t understand how SEO affects post visibility.
To become a growth marketer you need to have a hybrid mix of technical, tactical and strategic skills in product, data, and marketing. You’ll become a swiss-army-knife, ready to use data-driven, unconventional and experimental marketing approaches to fuel the growth and scalability of your retail business.
4. Focus On the Entire Funnel
Traditional marketing was all about the beginning of the funnel. Your job as a marketer was to feed them into the funnel and hope and pray engagement would become engaged as they moved through the customer journey.
Growth marketing is about removing those boundaries and seeing the marketing funnel as a non-linear sequence. A good growth marketer shouldn’t merely focus on attracting people hoping that 5% convert to customers, they know to look for engaged customers from the get-go. A good growth marketer adds value to every aspect of the customer’s journey and won’t drop the ball after the customer has converted.
Growth marketing is about acquiring a qualified audience and optimizing your strategy so that you can shorten the time between when a person first sees your brand to the point of sale. It’s about drawing customers into your funnel by dropping the bread crumbs, not forcing them in.
Growth is the product of innovation and here at Milk It, we are specialists in marketing innovation methodology!
Our training programs are designed to train your entire team because you can’t scale unless you’re all working towards a common goal and are able to communicate ideas regarding strategy effectively. Sorry for the unashamed plug, but seriously check it out! (After reading the remainder of this blog of course!)