Written by Market My Market’s content team, with contributions from Lauren Dominguez, Jordan Kimmel, Tyler McNulty, Brandi Nicklaus, Isabel Skormin, and McKenzie Fox
The term “growth-focused marketing” might sound like just another industry buzzword. After all, isn’t growth the ultimate marketing goal? Growth marketing is a specific marketing technique that addresses a business’s target audience during each step of the buying process. It aims to acquire new customers while nurturing relationships with existing customers through both traditional and modern marketing strategies.
Growth marketing may incorporate digital marketing techniques––like email, social media, and SEO––in addition to traditional techniques––like television and radio––to increase revenue and client retention. While other forms of marketing focus on gaining new clients, growth marketing emphasizes the importance of keeping existing clients engaged.
Contributed by Lauren Dominguez, Content Lead
Growth-Focused Content Strategy: Explained
If you want your business to make it big on search engines like Google and Bing, few tactics can help you see your company creep up in the results rankings quite as quickly as a growth-focused content strategy.
Content marketing strategies aligned for growth are created specifically for search engine optimization (SEO) and are typically centered on a single subject. The most effective growth-focused content strategies are aimed at tackling SEO-friendly topics directly related to your industry. This approach allows content writers to focus on creating content that will satisfy search demands and provide your target audience with the content they desire, keeping readers engaged and returning for more.
Contributed by Brandi Nicklaus, Content Specialist
What Sets Growth-Focused Content Apart from Other Forms of Content Marketing?
As the marketing world continues to evolve, more and more industry leaders are asking the question, “What is growth marketing?” Here’s what you need to know about how growth marketing stands out from the crowd:
Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
For many marketers, growth marketing presents a new challenge that differs from the conventional marketing techniques they learned in college. As such, if you’re like most businesses, your company probably utilizes some form of traditional marketing. This includes leveraging television, radio, and print to convert and influence a group of people within your target audience. While they never truly go out of style, these old-fashioned techniques often disappoint as more clients are focusing on digital networks when finding their next purchase.
It’s important to note, however, that utilizing a growth marketing approach doesn’t mean you’re neglecting the conventional techniques of traditional marketing. Instead, growth marketing focuses on a wide-ranging tactic that uses a mixture of traditional and digital channels to involve both current and prospective clients. Ultimately, growth marketing seeks to reach and convert your target audience and maximize your client retention rates.
Growth Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
With the idea that growth marketing emphasizes digital techniques, you may be wondering how this concept differs from the overall marketing model, “digital marketing.” While they may sound similar—as both use data to make strategic decisions for your digital marketing campaign—growth marketing and digital marketing have slightly different areas of focus.
While digital marketing tries to convert users, growth marketing emphasizes retaining them. Additionally, while both growth and digital marketing emphasize digital methods, growth marketing often goes beyond digital channels by utilizing all kinds of approaches, including traditional marketing, to achieve a goal.
Contributed by Jordan Kimmel, Content Specialist
What Are the Benefits of a Growth-Centered Content Marketing Strategy?
If you’re wondering why you should turn your attention to a growth-centered content marketing strategy, you’re not alone. After all, altering your approach from the traditional or digital methods you’re accustomed to can be intimidating. Likewise, swapping to a growth marketing strategy may mean fully reevaluating how you reach, convert, and keep potential and current clients, which can be a laborious and puzzling task. However, this approach may be worth it for your business. Here are a few reasons why:
- Consumers take non-linear buying journeys: Traditionally, the buying path for a consumer consists of moving from awareness to purchase. Yet, as the internet has developed, customers have begun to approach the buying process in a non-linear way. A growth marketing strategy will help you adapt to how the modern person shops.
- High turnover rates decimate revenue: In today’s world, it’s been said that it costs ten times more to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one. As such, growth marketing is important to help focus your efforts on keeping existing clients happy through loyalty and trust.
- Merchandising and marketing now intersect: Many companies are switching their approach to focus on combining merchandising and marketing efforts. However, this presents a new challenge, as businesses then have to think about where users are in the buying funnel to provide the best follow-up action. Growth marketing combats this issue because you can more easily look at consumers at every stage.
- Data offers insight into consumers: From monitoring the actions of current clients to tracking the buying journeys of new customers, growth marketing helps leverage data from your website, email marketing strategy, and ad campaigns to create widespread data, which can help provide you with valuable information about consumers.
All things considered, this kind of marketing strategy uses digital and traditional marketing techniques to provide quantifiable growth and retain existing customers.
Contributed by Jordan Kimmel, Content Specialist
What Types of Businesses Need Growth-Focused Content?
While growth-focused content can benefit any business, certain businesses may prefer it to achieve greater levels of success:
Small Businesses
Small businesses tend to rely mainly on client referrals and word-of-mouth to help them grow. Using growth-focused content in their marketing plan will help reevaluate a business’s true target market, which will help grow all aspects of how the business operates.
E-Commerce
Without proper marketing tactics, e-commerce businesses can get lost in the seas of other web-based businesses crowding the internet. Utilizing growth-focused marketing will help businesses consider every stage of the buying funnel, which will help them stand out in the crowded web.
Contributed by Isabel Skormin, Content Specialist
How to Build a Growth-Focused Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you have a better understanding of what a growth-focused content marketing strategy looks like, it’s time to create your strategy. Having a strategy in place is vital to your business’s success. Without one, success or failure is just a matter of luck. More importantly, you waste your time, effort, and resources if you do not have a thorough strategy in place. When creating your growth-focused content marketing strategy, keep the following in mind:
Establish Your Mission and Goals Early
Your first starting point for a growth strategy is to establish your mission statement. This is a brief statement that will make it easier to focus on what’s important when creating your content. Having a mission statement in place early on will ensure that your content marketing strategy stays on track. In your mission statement, you should think about your target audience, the content you’re creating, and the benefit your audience will get from your content.
While your mission statement covers your audience and what they will get from your content marketing strategy, you must also determine what your business will get from the content you create. That is where you need to establish goals for your content, which will help grow your company in the long run. Some goals might include:
- Improving revenue
- Making more sales
- Increasing website traffic
- Gaining influence and authority in your field
- Succeeding in SEO
Once you establish your goals and mission statement, you can move to the next step: Knowing your audience.
Learn About Your Audience
You will need to learn who your audience is to have a successful growth-focused content marketing strategy. There are three steps you can take to learn who your audience is.
- The first step is to collect demographic information on your visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers. Analyzing your subscribers can help you identify your audience’s age and gender.
- To learn more about your target audience, collect customer feedback. The feedback will give you insights into how they feel about your current content, their needs, and how you can address those needs in future content.
- Once you know who your audience is, you can then create buyer personas. These personas detail your ideal customers so that you can target content better. When you create a buyer persona, you’ll better understand what content your audience responds best to and how it will help them.
Create a Content Calendar
After you better understand what content your audience looks for, you can then use that information to build out your content calendar. But first, you will need to determine what kinds of content you will be producing. Most successful content marketing strategies rely on having content published to a specific site, like your company’s website. You can then repurpose that content for guest writing on other sites. However, in an age of social media, graphics and video marketing published to your social media accounts can also deliver huge results.
However, creating all your content will be useless if you do not know when to publish it. Lack of planning is a critical mistake, so you must create a content calendar. You can use a shared Google Calendar with everyone on your team to manage content production. If you’re publishing a lot of content to several channels each month, you may want to invest in a productivity management system like Asana. Keeping everything organized is the best way to ensure that your content reaches the appropriate audience and at the right time.
Contributed by Tyler McNulty, Content Specialist
How Do You Know If Your Growth-Focused Content Strategy Is Working?
Content is a crucial component of growth-focused marketing and serves several purposes. Tailored content can help you accomplish any of the following goals:
- Raise brand awareness
- Drive engagement
- Generate leads
- Increase sales
- Retain clients
- Upsell services
There are metrics you can track to see if your content is supporting progress toward any of the above. Below are a few KPIs for each.
- Brand Awareness: How can you tell if your content is helping you raise awareness of your company? You can rely on tools like Google Analytics to check on the number of pageviews your content has received. A spike in the overall traffic to your website can also indicate your content’s success.
- Engagement: Are people engaged? If your content is driving engagement, you may see an increase in social media activity. More likes, comments, and shares means the content is serving this purpose.
- Generating Leads: Have you noticed more form submissions? How about more email and blog subscriptions? How about more requests for free consultations? Growth-focused content can push these numbers higher.
- Increasing Sales: If your newly acquired leads are turning into clients, your growth-focused strategy is succeeding in helping you gain new business.
- Retaining Clients: Growth-focused marketing aims to keep existing clients just as happy as new ones. Is your client retention rate trending upward?
- Upselling Services: Finally, your content may be making a positive contribution to your overall marketing efforts if you’ve noticed an uptick in the number of additional services your clients are signing up for or inquiring about.
Contributed by Lauren Dominguez, Content Lead
3 Tips for Creating Growth-Centered Content
Follow our top three tips to attract new leads to your business with a growth-focused content strategy that will be sure to provide you with impressive results:
Create Valuable Content
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and the old method of churning out content just to turn out content will no longer get you anywhere. These days, when it comes to growth-focused content marketing, you will get out what you put in. If you are creating content that has no worth, your results will be equally as hollow.
Know Your Audience
If you do not know who you are writing for, how can you possibly write content that they consider to be of value? Know your target audience like the back of your hand, and you will be better able to provide your audience with the type of content that will ensure that they keep coming back for more.
Stay Consistent
Whether you are hoping to cultivate some flowers, accumulate wealth, or develop your business, all growth-related efforts require consistency for long-term success. Create a content schedule that you can stick to and regularly check-in to ensure that your efforts are in alignment with your goals for growth.
Contributed by Brandi Nicklaus, Content Specialist
What’s the Difference Between Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking?
Both growth marketing and growth hacking focus on increasing revenue growth in customer activation, retention, and monetization. However, the two marketing strategies are on separate sides of the marketing funnel and desire different types of business growth. In order for businesses to have successful marketing plans that center around their desired growth outcome, it’s important to understand the difference between the two.
A Summary of Growth Marketing
By using creative, data-driven strategies that target customers through various channels, growth marketing focuses on the organization’s brand and tactical performance. When marketers use growth marketing, they’re directing their attention to improving the company’s growth, revenue, and client satisfaction.
What is Growth Hacking in Marketing?
While growth marketing focuses on the brand image and client opinions, growth hacking uses a fast-paced, rapid experimentation approach for their business’s growth. The main goal is to find the most profitable tactics to increase revenue and sales growth as fast as possible.
Implementing both strategies in your marketing plan and understanding what makes them separate from each other is beneficial to your company. While they may have very different approaches to business growth, they still work to increase revenue and customer activity.
Contributed by McKenzie Fox, Content Specialist
Growth-Focused Digital Marketing Provides the Best of Both
At Market My Market, we take a growth-centered approach to digital marketing. We focus on helping your business gain more organic traffic and qualified leads by utilizing a variety of proven SEO tools and research methods to build your online presence. Let’s brainstorm ways we can help you make the most of your marketing. Schedule a free consultation by completing our contact form.
Contributed by Lauren Dominguez, Content Lead
