Today’s marketing leaders face stiff competition and endless barriers to growth. Now more than ever, marketers must go beyond top-of-funnel techniques to convert their most valuable opportunities — and adopting a comprehensive growth marketing is the best way to succeed.
Constant experimentation and assumption validation are key to helping growth-minded CMOs achieve their targets. The fundamentals of growth marketing apply to both B2B or B2C marketers, and there’s plenty of lessons to be learned from those who came before.
This article examines four successful businesses that streamlined their operations for expansion and became successful growth marketing examples for all companies — including B2B organizations — in the process.
LEGO Group
LEGO may be one of the most recognizable toy companies in the world, but even it once struggled to get the most out of modern growth channels.
As social media became essential to marketers, the LEGO Group wasn’t sure how to effectively approach the emerging space or reach its target audience. Its solution was to better understand social audiences by segmenting customers into six distinct personas:
- Lead users: Customers and enthusiasts who actively engage with LEGO in conversations related to product design
- 1:1 community members: Customers with names and addresses on file with LEGO Group
- Connected community: Anyone who both purchased a LEGO set and visited a LEGO shop or park
- Active households: Customers who purchased a LEGO product within the past twelve months
- Covered households: Customers who purchased a single LEGO product
- No households: Anyone who has never purchased a LEGO product
Segmenting audiences along these vectors gave LEGO a deeper focus on the needs and expectations of audiences on social media. These insights helped it implement new ad campaigns that took an individual prospect’s unique brand-journey into consideration, eventually helping it become the world’s fourth-largest toy manufacturer.
While most businesses want to offer world-renowned products or services to the widest possible audience, it’s not an effective way to design a marketing campaign. The ideal growth strategy narrows its focus to specific audiences or buyer personas with unaddressed needs, then crafts resonant messaging that will guide each group through the marketing funnel.
This approach helps marketers identify valuable customers, such as frequent spenders or the occasional big purchase customer, and enables them to target these customers more precisely.
Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the most popular file hosting services on the web, not to mention one of the world’s most valuable technology companies. One of the biggest reasons for its massive success is usability — its UI is intuitive, minimal, and easy to understand.
Many don’t realize that usability is not simply a design choice but a significant contributor to the success of Dropbox’s onboarding experience.
While any user can register for a Dropbox account and upload multiple files, the interface focuses on the basic experience. The primary call-to-action button encourages users to upload a single file, subtly easing them into the platform before making them aware of other capabilities.
This additional step prevents new users from becoming overwhelmed by Dropbox and churning before they’ve derived value from the product.
Optimizing the onboarding process is one of the most important contributors to long-term retention and growth. After all, if you can’t retain your customers, no acquisition campaign will bring long-term value.
Every product’s onboarding process will be different, but there some shared best practices to keep in mind:
- 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.
Zalora
Zalora is one of the most successful fashion e-commerce platforms in the APAC region, thanks to multiple expansions over the past decade.
One of the most significant reasons for this growth is Zalora’s ability to pinpoint optimal inroads with new markets. It’s worth remembering this skill requires no exceptional talent — in many cases, it reflects a dedication to A/B testing.
For example, Zalora’s customer service team analyzed data from their web platform that suggested customers were unaware of an existing free returns policy.
Believing the issue was the brand’s current product pages, Zalora ran an experiment — it created two variant page designs that highlighted returns and delivery policies and compared performance to a control group. One of these designs vastly outperformed the rest, prompting Zalora to implement it sitewide.
Zalora customers became aware of policies, but the most significant impact came afterward — the brand saw a 12.3% increase in checkouts after implementing the page changes.
This detail is a vital lesson that simple practices like A/B testing directly impact your financial bottom line. By testing variant product pages, ad creative, and other marketing content, you can better connect with target audiences and drive conversions.
Hatch
The marketing world loves to experiment with different tools for each job, but a growth marketer should prioritize automation wherever possible.
This lesson comes from Hatch, which shared a case study on the benefits of Hubspot marketing solutions. One important but easy-to-miss detail is that automation was a substantial contributor to Hatch’s success — by leveraging tools that optimized and streamlined the company’s nurture process, lead generation increased by 300% in a single year.
This lesson applies to growth marketing as a whole. New research consistently shows that when brands automate repetitive tasks, it frees teams to focus on higher-level activities. If you’re prioritizing growth, then growth automation is an invaluable process.
This technique requires marketers to automate most tasks that drive conversions and enhance the lifetime value of a given customer. It includes displaying personalized advertisements, segmenting buyer groups, sending follow-up emails, and more.
When marketing leaders effectively coordinate growth automation efforts, it can increase revenue and allow marketing teams to focus on other 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 and closing more deals in the process.
Conclusion
6sense’s account engagement platform with powerful revenue-driven Pipeline Intelligence capabilities can help your company become a successful example of growth marketing.
Our platform includes state-of-the-art planning and forecasting tools that can maximize efficiency and help reduce overspending on targets with minimal returns.
When you can target qualified accounts when they’re ready to buy, successful growth is just the beginning. Get in touch today to find out more.
