Breaking Out of the Loop of Traditional Marketing and Hacking Success with Growth Marketing

Exploring Growth Marketing with the possibility of spiking up revenue-boosting opportunities by up to 400%.

A typical sales banter:

“How was the last quarter for you?” enquired the sales leader. He appeared slightly worried due to his region’s average sales performance.

“Three weeks ago, we held an in-person event and had a footfall of 150+ individuals at our booth,” smirked the marketer.

“How’s the return on investment? How many of the 150 visitors had genuine customer requirements?” inquired the sales leader, hopeful.

“Well, this exercise was more for branding and awareness,” the marketer retorted, “I wouldn’t worry about the ROI, we at least acquired the participants’ data, we’ll start with the telecalling…”

If the scenario above rings close to home, consider the viewpoint of the sales leader. Spending marketing dollars on ‘difficult-to-map/justify-ROI’ initiatives may be detrimental to the business with the focus on bringing in new business to fuel growth. I recall reading a piece from Marketing Week back in 2012 that stated that many CEOs have marketing divisions “purely out of tradition” and have “made the conscious decision not to demand more from marketing than branding, look and feel-good advertisements and promotions.” We’re now in 2022, a decade later, and marketing journeys have evolved, with marketers adopting a growth-focused perspective for an outcome-driven strategy.

Marketers all around the world are using growth marketing to help them be more ROI oriented and to be able to account for every dollar spent and assess the impact on their bottom line.

Customer-centric growth marketing

What does the present digital landscape imply for marketing? Digital solutions are our key means of doing business, whether it’s for team communication or reaching out to customers. However, I believe in the current environment we see the adoption of hybrid work models which have led to shorter sales cycles. Many marketers used to have physical events as a vital part of their marketing plan, but as the world went digital, the knowledge sharing multiplied, and our ability to reach customers multiplied as well. The manner we had been operating dialogues has altered as well.

I’d like to use the example of the initial chaos caused by the lockdown during the first wave when businesses were closed, we were all working remotely for the first time ever, and Embee’s leadership put forth a critical question: “How do we adapt to new challenges and continue reaching customers most effectively?” The question was poignant, and it was essential to respond. ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but it’s the ones that adapt,’ as the wise ones say. Embee’s marketing team used those first two months to develop VirtuaPlace, a digital platform that would, first and foremost, meet businesses’ remote workplace needs, which was a pressing need. We ended up counselling over 300 organisations in the first initial months and created $1 million in new opportunities within two quarters of launching the platform. We, our customers, and even our partner brands have all adjusted to this new normal, and our business expectations have evolved as well.

The value of defining one’s viewpoint

The focus has switched from “how can we attract our customers” to “how can we improve our brand’s customer experience so that we become their preferred choice?” This has prompted us as marketers to take a data-driven, elaborative route to reach our target audience. We have experienced long-term and sustainable growth as a result of this.

In the year 2019, we began our growth marketing journey. We concentrated our efforts on transforming our strategies in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid advertising, content marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), email marketing, and social media engagement tracking, which eventually became the pillars on which we could gather customer intent data on a regular basis and segment it into customer journey milestones for continuous improvement.

How can you create trustworthy brands along the way?

Building a trustworthy company takes years of effort, but one method to do so quickly is through the customer’s journey. Projecting client success stories for various scenarios allows a company to be:

  • Visible (when people look for possible answers to their problems),
  • Relatable (when they think of other businesses for whom we’ve solved similar problems), and
  • Trustworthy (they did it for them, they can do it for us).

 

Second, a consistent and smooth customer experience across all channels, including online and physical encounters, is another pillar of growth marketing that aids in the development of trustworthy businesses.

Finally, and most critically, we require a solid customer care structure in order to develop trustworthy businesses. These are some of the tactics you can use to convert your customers into brand ambassadors.

Where do we go from here?

As we get better at promoting faster digital adoption, we’re creating a lot more digital noise. How do you stand out in a world when we are bombarded with more than 5000 marketing messages every day? – Now is the time to move beyond just monitoring common metrics like open rates, bounce rates, and unique visitors. While these are important, there’s more to the story that can be understood by going beyond these base metrics that define customer engagement and experience with our brand, such as time spent on the page, click heatmaps, chats initiated (resolved vs unresolved), and applying emerging technologies like AI-based sentiment analysis, voice search, and so on. Previously, it was a digital-first strategy; today, it will be an AI-first strategy, which can be leveraged to improve customer connections and provide real-time granular personalisation.

Written by

Shivani Sharma, AVP-Marketing, Embee Software

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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