Breaking Out of the Loop of Traditional Marketing

Here’s how with Growth Marketing you could give a spike of up to 400% in revenue-boosting opportunities. It’s tried, tested, and proven.

“So, how has the last quarter been like?” asked the business leader. He looked slightly distressed with a slumped sales performance in his region.

“We did a physical, in-person event three weeks ago and saw a footfall of 150+ people at our booth,” said the marketer with a smirk.

 

“Okay, how’s the ROI? Out of 150 visitors, how many had real customer requirements?” asked the gentleman with hope.

“Well, this activity was more from the branding & awareness perspective, I wouldn’t worry about the ROI, we at least got the participants’ data, we’ll start with the tele calling.…” countered the marketer.

If the situation above gives you a déjà vu, think from the perspective of the business leader in the situation above. As a business owner, when your real worry is bringing more business to drive growth, spending your marketing budget on ‘difficult-to-map-ROI’ activities can be a bit gruesome to the business. I remember going through an old (2012) Marketing week study, where the report said that many CEOs have marketing departments “purely out of tradition” and have “made the conscious decision not to expect more from marketing than branding, look and feel good ads and promotions”. We’re in 2022, a decade ahead from there, marketing journeys have transformed, and marketers are now applying a growth-focused mindset to an outcome-driven approach.

Growth marketing is now adopted worldwide by marketers to empower them to be more ROI focused and be able to account for every dollar spent and measure the impact on P&L.

Customer-centric growth marketing

What do current times mean for marketing? It means more digital than ever. Whether it’s about team collaboration or reaching out to customers, digital solutions are our primary way to do business. Yet, I feel with Hybrid work models being adopted, the existing setting is opening doors for opportunities and faster sales cycles. Earlier a lot of marketers kept physical events as an important piece in their marketing strategy, but with the pandemic that moved to digital and knowledge sharing increased multi-fold, our capacity to reach customers increased multi-fold. The way we had been running conversations has changed.

I would like to quote the instance, when during the first wave the lockdown scenario was so chaotic, businesses were closed, for the first time ever we were all working remotely; and my leadership at Embee asked a very important question – “How do we adapt to new challenges and continue reaching customers most effectively?” The question was concerning but very important to act upon. But as the wise ones say, ‘It’s not the strongest of the species that survives but the most adaptable’. The marketing team at Embee used those first two months to build a digital platform called VirtuaPlace, which would first of all, and most importantly solve remote workplace needs for businesses – which was the need of the hour. The platform picked up pretty well, and we ended up consulting more than 300 businesses within the first 2 months and created business opportunities worth $1 mn within 2 quarters of launching it. We, customers, and even our partner brands have now adapted well to this new normal and so have the expectations changed in terms of doing the business.

Impact of defining the point of view

The point of view has now shifted from “how can we attract our customers?” to “how can we enhance the customer experience with our brand to become their preferred choice?” This has triggered us as marketers to reach our target audience through an elaborative journey that is data-powered. This has also resulted in long-term and sustainable growth for us.

Our growth marketing journey started in 2019. We focused our efforts in transforming our strategies across search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, content marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), email marketing and social media which eventually became the pillars in which we could routinely gather customer intent data which we segregated in customer journey milestones to making continuous improvements.

How to build trustable brands along the way?

Building a trustable business takes years of hard work, but one way to build it fast could be through stories. Projecting customer success stories for different scenarios makes a business more:

  • visible (when people search for possible solutions to their problem),
  • relatable (when they relate with the other business we solved a similar problem for),
  • trustable (they did it for them, they can do it for us).

Secondly, one of the other pillars of growth marketing that helps building trustable business is consistent & seamless customer experience across all the channels that includes online & offline interactions.

Thirdly and most importantly in order to build trustable brands, we need a foundation of a strong customer support system. These are some of the ways you can turn your customers into your advocates.

What’s next from here?

As we excel in driving faster digital adoption, it is resulting in excessive digital noise. As we are being exposed to 5000+ marketing messages in a day, how do you differentiate your brand? – Now is the time when we step away from just monitoring common metrics – such as open rates, bounce rates, and unique visitors- Of course they are important, but there’s more to the story that can be understood by going beyond these base metrics that define customer engagement & experience with our brand; such as time spent on the page, click heatmaps, chats initiated (resolved vs unresolved), apply emerging technologies like AI-based Sentiment analysis, voice search etc. Earlier it was digital-first approach, now moving on from here it would be an AI-first approach, that can be used for better customer relationships, and real-time granular personalization.

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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