Once you’ve assessed the weak points in your pipeline, it’s time to apply growth marketing techniques that drive conversions.
While marketers may need to adapt details for their specific product, service, or industry, there are certain core techniques all businesses must keep in mind.
Buyer Personas
One of the most crucial aspects of growth marketing is understanding your customer needs. More specifically, marketers must grasp what messaging will resonate with them.
The most effective way to understand customers is to build personas — profiles that represent your most valuable accounts and their stakeholders. Here are some steps to help you get started:
- Segment customers from your sales and marketing data by demographics like industry, geographic location, and job title.
- Determine the specific needs your product or service will address by audience. For example, how can it help someone in marketing ops solve their role-related challenges, or help a CMO achieve their goals? Create profiles for individuals who reflect each of the steps mentioned above.
With personas, brands can develop focused and personalized messaging that addresses a customer’s immediate needs. Meanwhile, a well-optimized pipeline makes it easier to assist each customer in their buyer’s journey.
Together, these tools can help you generate a highly effective growth marketing strategy.
Onboarding Optimization
Reducing churn is one of the most useful ways to drive growth; after all, if you can’t retain your customers, no amount of acquisition will bring long-term value.
Retention strategies vary by product and service, but one of the best churn solutions is to optimize your onboarding process. If customers can learn how to use your service quickly or understand it intuitively, they will embrace its value more fully.
As a bonus, onboarding can both retain them and encourage them to recommend your brand to others.
Every product’s onboarding process will be a little different. However, here are some best practices to keep in mind, inspired by the best practices used by file hosting service Dropbox:
- Set a goal of helping customers engage with your product at least twice in the first week. Highlight your value immediately to impress customers and give them a reason to continue using it.
- Keep lines of communication open with your customers. Some options may include email updates, in-app notifications, or accessible support options. The more personalized these communications can be, the better.
- Introduce one feature at a time. Give customers time to experiment before moving on. This approach helps them understand how elements fit together without becoming overwhelmed by the product as a whole.
A/B Testing
Growth marketing demands a constant re-evaluation of brand content to ensure a given strategy reflects its target market. One of the best ways to accomplish this is with A/B testing — running two variants of the same messaging to see which performs better.
Once you have statistically significant results favoring one of the variants, marketers can apply it to a campaign on the whole.
A/B testing is a common technique for ad creative, but its scope applies across the entire growth marketing pipeline. Brands can test any marketing asset, including:
- Web pages
- Emails
- CTAs
- Article headlines
- Product packaging
- Social media posts
- Promotional images
To run an A/B test, create two versions of the same content and distribute them to a selection of customers through the appropriate channels. Be sure to monitor key performance indicators, from ad engagement to conversions.
From these results, marketers may learn that one variant performs strongly or that both perform well for different audiences. These lessons will be vital when optimizing campaigns for your entire market.
Growth Automation
The marketing world is paying close attention to automated processes, and with good reason. New research consistently shows that when brands automate repetitive tasks, it frees employees to focus on higher-level activities.
And modern CMOs know of many repetitive tasks that can drag down operational effectiveness.
If you’re a growth marketer, then growth automation is one solution. This technique requires marketers to automate most tasks that drive conversions and enhance the lifetime value of a given customer.
Some examples might include delivering personalized advertisements, segmenting buyer groups, delivering follow-up emails, and more. When marketing leaders effectively coordinate growth automation efforts, it can increase revenue and allow marketing teams to focus on growth initiatives requiring hands-on development.
Perhaps the best candidate for growth automation in marketing is pipeline management. A simple step such as integrating sales and marketing pipelines can increase efficiency as customers move along the funnel — closing more deals in the process.
To see these techniques in practice, take a look at our recent blog, 4 Growth Marketing Examples for Modern CMOs.
