Tips & Guides — 07 Jun 2022
Departments That Growth Marketing Supports
With new ecommerce startups and small businesses launching every day, keeping your business relevant and engaging to customers can be challenging. Online platforms have transformed customer acquisition and attraction, demanding new marketing efforts and SEO to constantly create brand awareness. Many new businesses use growth hacking methods, gaining customers through promotions, although often losing them after the initial offers fail to further engage.
However, growth marketing strategies create sustained customer growth, benefitting your conversion rates and long-term ecommerce plans. Despite taking longer to implement and see the results, successful growth marketers use these strategies to build a secure and loyal clientele. Before you start your growth marketing strategy it’s important to know how the different departments of your business will benefit.
To stand out from competitor startups in your industry, you need to stop using traditional marketing methods and hoping for different results. Growth marketing experiments with marketing strategies and initiatives, finding the elements of your marketing that engage your ecommerce customers. This enables you to use them effectively and improve your existing marketing according to your target audience preferences.
Growth marketing works throughout the marketing funnel, not only seeking lead generation to acquire new customers but also continuing the customer lifecycle through customer retention and brand loyalty. This uses marketing strategies and technologies that develop customer relationships, encouraging multiple ecommerce purchases and increasing average order sizes. Done well, marketing efforts build brand trust leading customers to recommend it to others.
Overall, growth marketing relies on collecting and analyzing data, used to make informed business decisions. Experimenting with marketing tactics creates results about how your customer base responds to ecommerce tools and techniques. Likewise, customer retention strategies utilize this customer information to identify relevant suggestions and effectively market products to them.
All growth marketing strategies share some key components. These prevent your growth marketing from focusing solely on top of the funnel activity, as well as gathering new customer metrics data to share with marketing partners. Using the components to reflect on your existing marketing practices can optimize your marketing efforts and your customer experience, creating long-term solutions with your business marketing strategy.
An essential growth marketing practice is using A/B testing on different aspects and elements of marketing campaigns and strategies. This clarifies which ecommerce partnerships, features, and initiatives best engage your potential customers. These are then included in future marketing, being aware that different customer segments have varied reactions to the same offers. What appeals to one customer type doesn’t always reach or engage another.
A/B testing trials variations in marketing techniques, formats, or tools by presenting two options to customers and measuring the engagement to each. For example, A/B testing can be used in WordPress web design and in email newsletters, with the copywriting including a call-to-action button at the top of the page or email in one version and at the bottom in another. This measures the clicks for each button placement and informs design decisions in future newsletters.
Growth marketing aims to generate leads and find potential customers without using constant promotions. This can be done by working with other startups and businesses in your field with products that compliment your own. These business partnerships introduce your products to new marketing channels and reach their ecommerce customers. Using existing resources and marketing agencies, this marketing constantly attracts new customers and lead generation.
Equally, targeted marketing to specific customer segments advertises your products to potential customers looking for products like yours. Search engine marketing (SEM) can track the search engine terms being used by customers and ensure your marketing efforts appear with relevant searches. Customer personas can also highlight your target audience, the products they want, and where they engage with marketing, increasing brand awareness.
Customer retention is seen in growth marketing activation strategies to extend customer lifecycles and build loyalty. Many small businesses use ecommerce referral programs, offering existing customers a discount or reward for engaging with the initiative. This encourages customers to activate their brand loyalty, becoming familiar with the products and customer journey, making them likely to continue buying from your business.
Other customer retention methods prevent churn or onboard customers post-purchase. Reminders and email marketing updates return recipients to their abandoned carts or update them with new products. This raises brand awareness and activation by increasing customer knowledge of your products. In remarketing, growth marketing reengages customers in your ecommerce landing pages – minimizing churn, marketing efforts, and user acquisition costs.
Digital marketing has opened up the marketing channels available to reach new customers. From onsite chatbots, social media, PPC marketing programs, to ecommerce landing pages, these are used to engage potential customers in products and make sales. Even 35% of marketers use augmented or virtual reality in their strategies. The marketing channels your business chooses affect the customers you reach and the marketing strategy to use.
Omnichannel approaches with growth marketing tools manage many platforms through one interface. This ensures a consistent brand image is projected on all marketing channels, improving user experiences and brand recognition. Omnichannel marketing also tracks customer activity and interactions on your business marketing channels. This alerts your business to respond, giving your customer base a positive impression.
Growth marketing obviously benefits your marketing department, but it also works together with and supports other less obvious departments in your business. Whether by providing information, through customer lead generation, or understanding customer behaviors, growth marketing has an impact on departments across your business.
Unsurprisingly, growth marketing strategies aid marketing managers and departments. Primarily, this is by taking a data-based approach, using testing to discover what does or what doesn’t appeal to potential customers across content marketing, email marketing, social media, or other digital marketing channels. This is in contrast to traditional marketing – instead optimizing your marketing efforts by tracking KPIs and measuring successful growth marketing with customer metrics.
Similarly, a growth marketing perspective on your ecommerce forecasts plans over longer periods rather than using growth hacking, known for its instant customer engagement. When marketing campaigns finish, growth marketing teams analyze the digital marketing strategies and tools to note aspects to replicate or replace in the future. Successful projects aren’t determined by new customers alone, instead assessing valuing potential customer engagement, churn, and average order values.
Growth marketing assists lead generation and purchases in sales, using strategies for consistent ecommerce customer acquisition and customer retention over long periods. For your sales department, this makes finding new customers and information about them simple. This enables sales to recommend relevant products and work with growth marketers on how to increase sales on eBay or other vendor websites.
To extend customer lifecycles, growth marketing uses customer activation and advocacy at the bottom stages of the marketing funnel, reducing churn and encouraging sales with existing customers. Advocacy is created through referral programs offering incentives to customers who bring traffic to your landing pages or by using user-generated content. Likewise, ambassador programs use recommendations from existing customers to reach potential customers.
Usually, customer support departments manage the questions or issues that customers have with products or their customer journey. Using growth marketing, some questions can be anticipated through research into your target audience and answered through content marketing. Likewise, onboarding messaging to new customers within your digital marketing provides a channel to share ecommerce customer support information post-purchase.
Alternatively, growth marketing can make the customer journey smoother, identifying parts of the customer experience that are difficult, causing issues, or should use automation. By testing and optimizing the process from initial contact to purchase, growth marketing reduces customer journey issues. This limits customer complaints and those resolving issues by messaging your customer support department.
Growth marketing strategies are based on researched customer metrics and statistics analysis, supporting higher management by presenting KPIs and data to use across the business. Stakeholders gain a clear vision of the business direction, current marketing efforts, and your ecommerce metrics including conversion rates. Growth marketing strategies also use evidence from research and previous projects to justify the focus of your digital marketing and initiatives.
By providing higher management with specific goals and methods, growth strategies also help nurture the business while measuring the same KPIs – not to mention researching, and developing different approaches. The regular evaluation of the effectiveness of marketing tools and features suits agile working, using growth marketing to adapt to the current customer market preferences.
Tracking spending and budgets for strategies is easy due to the thorough documentation and research of growth marketing. Particularly when justifying budgets or predicting future ecommerce revenue, the customer metrics already collected for growth marketing tactics can accurately plan how budgets will be spent and their return on investment. This helps finance teams balance spending and pricing, keeping the business in profit.
Your growth marketing data also demonstrates the effect of past spending, including areas of your business using up marketing budgets without good results, for example. This prompts finance and growth marketing teams to reevaluate spending and product pricing, accounting for onboarding and acquisition costs, for good returns on investments. Alternatively, growth marketing teams may use automation for optimization in some areas to reduce costs and increase revenue.
Your target audience is essential to business, informing your products, marketing, and sales techniques. Research departments learn about your target audience and products they want through methods including watching interactions on social media like LinkedIn and analyzing the terms search engines use to find your business. However, growth marketing also researches this alongside KPIs and other metrics. Working together creates more research to draw from.
Similarly, the research made through growth marketing can be applied to product development. Knowing the most appealing features enable developers to build and replicate them in other products where appropriate. Alternatively, growth marketing customer research can highlight unpopular ecommerce products or problems, such as complex interfaces or pricing issues, that developers can improve on.
Again, for production teams, growth marketing can gather target audience feedback for both the business and products. With less popular products or ranges, feedback can be given so production teams don’t waste resources on products that aren’t selling. Alternatively, growth marketing can inform the production of popular products and where restocks are needed to maximize sales and avoid selling out.
Growth marketing customer research and feedback suggest features to make specific products more desirable. This includes different colors of products, using different materials, or in more sizes. For SaaS businesses, this might look at integration options or improving customer transitions from other software with BYOC solutions. This information can expand the range of products available without designing and developing completely new products.
It isn’t always obvious how growth marketing relates to other departments in your business. However, there are plenty of examples of growth marketing working well with other departments whilst still raising brand awareness and your conversion rates. We’ll look at how your marketing efforts affect more than just marketing teams and how your businesses departments can be included in your growth marketing strategies.
Working with other businesses expands your digital marketing reach and creates constant customer acquisition. This can be by listing your products on partner business platforms with PPC agreements, using partner marketing agencies, or creating affiliate programs with other startups and businesses. Partnership marketing allows you to share expertise and tips, even content marketing by copywriting using SEO to better engage with existing customers.
Partnership marketing supports your marketing and sales departments, and even customer support depending on your partner marketing arrangement. Partnership marketing divides the marketing effort and relies on other businesses and marketing agencies with customer acquisition and top-of-the-funnel strategies. This reaches new customers and pitches your products to them to increase conversion rates.
A/B testing can be used in your growth marketing to receive better engagement through social profile optimization. By identifying the most interacted with content, SEO terms, and hashtags to attract more views, and how frequently to update your statuses, testing used here can influence other departments of your business. Also, finding social media platforms your target audiences use, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, or other platforms is discovered through growth marketing testing.
Social media marketing and the testing surrounding it gain data about your customers and their preferences. If certain products do well or gain attention on social media, this indicates that there will be a higher demand for them, helping to prepare production departments. Likewise, social media messaging and comments can flag issues that need altering or addressing by customer support teams.
Investing in influencers is currently a popular growth marketing strategy. Influencers advertise your products, provide recommendations and reviews, participate in question and answer sessions using video conference rooms, or show potential customers how to use products in live streams. This can be on their platforms or using your marketing channels. For customers, influencers act as a reliable and relatable source of information.
In supporting other departments, influencer marketing primarily creates sales. Influencer referral programs provide discounts for customers using the initiatives, directing new customers to your landing pages and convincing them to purchase. Influencers also can provide customer support through their content, collecting questions and concerns from potential customers. Even if they can’t answer everything, these can be passed on to customer support staff.
Growth strategies don’t always have an outwards approach, sometimes reflecting in on what your business is selling. Product development, as a strategy, improves existing products and better aligns them with customers’ expectations. Likewise, it’s used to expand your range with complementary products that sell in combination with your existing stock. This increases the products customers buy, adding to the average order value.
Product development growth strategy supports both your production and development departments. The growth strategy finds features that customers want and issues that customers face, providing developers with a clear idea of what products attract your current customers. This includes finding more cost-effective ways to make products to reduce the pricing. Growth marketing metrics also inform how production makes designs more appealing.
Despite its name, growth marketing affects more than just marketing managers and their departments. By nature of its research-driven, data-informed choices, growth marketing can relay valuable information to other departments. Similarly, growth marketing looks closely into the feedback and preferences of your target audience, again shaping the products your business makes so they’re best suited to your customer base.
Using growth marketing can direct your whole business into using more data and testing to inform decisions, collecting entire customer metrics to shape the strategies used. It also unites the goals of the company, meaning each department works towards the same end through its varying methods. Successful growth marketers provide longevity to business strategies, making provisions for the future to continue attracting customers and making sales.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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