Growth Marketing Lessons

I’ve been doing growth marketing for over five years in various contexts, including a B2C mobile app with millions of end users to enterprise B2B software with less than a few hundred clients. The businesses are as different as apples and oranges, but the lessons I’ve learned (and implemented) have led to growth at every company I’ve worked at. In this post, you’ll learn what I’ve learned:

Listening to your target market works in every market
You have to put the right tools and processes in place
Training your team takes time, but leads to long-term results
Stay visible in every channel your audience lives in online
Eliminate options to help users take the right next step

Let’s take a closer look at each.

1. Listening to your target market works in every market

I know what you’re thinking – “Understanding your target market is Marketing 101.” That’s true, but you’d be surprised how many marketers haven’t done the research yet to learn what makes their customers tick. Understanding your customers is especially important when you start at a new company. I remember when I started as the director of marketing at an enterprise B2B firm. We only had 200 clients we did business with, and I knew nothing about the target market. This sounds scary, but if your listening skills are solid, you can figure out what connects with any audience. Start with this list to learn as much as possible about your target market:

Where do they hang out?
Where do they get their information?
What are their challenges and frustrations?
What are their goals and priorities right now?
What brands do they like?
What’s their preferred method of communication?
What phrases and language do they use?
What’s a day in their life look like?

I recommend hopping on the phone with customers to answer these questions. You’ll get a rich amount of information and emotion that could easily be missed through analytics. With that said, it’s still valuable to dig into analytics data. Where are your website visitors coming from? Which keywords are driving people to your site? What are people saying about your brand on social media? After you spend time researching, compile your findings into target personas to guide your marketing efforts.

2. You have to put the right tools and processes in place

If you don’t put the right tools and processes in place, your growth marketing efforts aren’t going to succeed. Why? Because without infrastructure, a few years from now your company will end up with thousands of contacts in your database but have no idea where they came from or what interactions they’ve had with you. To keep this from happening, start with what I like to call the Minimum Viable Infrastructure: Analytics. At a minimum, make sure Google Analytics is setup to track your website traffic, referral sources, and conversions. I also recommend Chartio for visualizing your data. Marketing automation****. This is your messaging system to send personalized email, text, and direct mail. Essential. Landing page builder. Best practice is to link every marketing campaign to a targeted landing page. If you don’t have in-house design and dev resources, a lightweight landing page builder is the way to go. Retargeting. Retargeting is important for subconsciously staying on customer’s minds and plugging leaks in your marketing funnel. AdWords, AdRoll, or Perfect Audience are tools worth checking out. CRM**. **Tracking contact interactions is non-negotiable. How you track them may vary, though. Some companies get by with spreadsheets or use their marketing automation tool as a lightweight CRM. For B2B companies, I recommend a CRM that integrates with your marketing automation to create targeted and personalized campaigns. At the end of the day, tools are great, but unused tools are worthless. For example, you could spend $50,000 on Salesforce CRM, but that doesn’t magically change everyone’s behavior from using spreadsheets. Determine your goals, and define a process for each tool before investing in it.

3. Training your team takes time, but it’s worth it

At one B2B company I worked with, the marketing and sales team was still doing outbound batch and blast marketing. Growth marketers know that the world is different now. According to Executive Board, online buyers go through about 57% of the buying cycle on their own without talking to sales. But do you know how hard it is teaching head-hunting sales development reps to sell to inbound leads? As you’re implementing your new infrastructure, the best way to train your team and get buy-in is to _show, don’t tell_. To make the case for putting contact interactions in Salesforce instead of spreadsheets, I showed the sales reps how many people we connected with last month using reports, and talked through how much easier their conversations are when they know it’s the first, fifth, or fifteenth conversation. Training needs will look different depending on your context, just be prepared for a time of championing your tool and process changes.

4. Stay visible in every channel your audience lives in online

It’s common sense to do marketing on the channels where your audience hangs out. But that’s only part of the story. The mistake I’ve made in the past is to view every channel individually, instead of part of a whole. To avoid this mistake, I refer to the whole of a company’s marketing channels as a “sandbox.” It’s an invisible circle around where clients live, read, chill, succeed, and play. Decide which channels form your sandbox by referencing your insights from interviewing customers. You’ll likely have a mix of email, social media channels, online communities, and relevant industry blogs. Create a plan to be consistently visible in these channels. For example, here’s what a basic sandbox can look like:

Social:__ Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter**
**Retargeting: **Display networks, Facebook, Gmail
Search: AdWords
PR: Trade and industry publications
Community: LinkedIn, blog
Email: Trade/Targeted Lists
In-person: Trade shows (mainly partnerships) and events

Retargeting ads are a big part of creating an effective sandbox, even if the cost-per-lead tends to be higher than other channels. Think of retargeting as the surround sound of your home stereo system. You have a flat screen TV (your website), all the furniture points towards the TV (your marketing channels), and the surround sound (retargeting) fills every part of the room, creating a cohesive experience. I’ve also learned not to worry about the cost-per-lead of retargeting because of what I like to call “The Subconscious Effect.” At RangeMe, where I oversee marketing, we ran an experiment where we turned off retargeting for two weeks to see what would happen. We lost direct traffic. We lost organic traffic. Every channel tanked. Why? The Subconscious Effect – leads may not click on your ads directly, but they subconsciously see them and come back to your site through other channels. The takeaway here is to approach your sandbox as a cohesive experience with consistent messaging, a distinct style, and personalized touches. Over time, your leads will take the next step and sign up for a trial or request a demo or download your mobile app or take the next step in your marketing funnel. You just have to stay in front of them, and make it drop dead simple for them to take action. That’s next.

5. Eliminate options to help users take the right next step

Choosing the right call to actions is essential to good marketing. The more potential next steps you ask visitors to take, the more difficult it becomes for them to choose. Psychologist Barry Schwartz sums this up well: “Bottom line – the options we consider usually suffer from comparisons with other options.” For example, at one company I worked with, the website homepage had four calls to actions above the fold. This tanked our conversions. To streamline things, we put one call to action – the most important next step for a website visitor to take – and saw signups increase by 40x. Another example, at a gaming company we were trying to increase user retention for one of our games. I found a moment in the user experience where the user had to choose from dozens of maps to play. For our experiment, we eliminated every map option except for one to help users start playing immediately. Our retention went up 60x by reducing the sea of options. The takeaway? If you want a visitor or user to do just one thing, figure out what that is and build everything around that call to action.

Bringing it all together

The growth lessons I’ve learned over the past five years compound on top of each other. If you do better research, you can create a more effective sandbox. If you build the whole sandbox your audience plays in, you know what calls to action are most important to help people take the next step. Each lesson plays nicely with the others. Your role in all of this is to lead the charge in…

Listening to your target market
Setting up the right tools and processes
Training your team on changes you’ve implemented
Staying visible in every channel your audience lives
Eliminating options to help users take the right next step

These are the growth marketing lessons I’ve seen work again and again. Have you seen these lessons be successful in your growth marketing? What lessons have you learned that weren’t mentioned in this post? Let us know in the comments.