Growth Marketing. How you make it happen.
We’ve already dedicated a page on this website to explaining why your brand is the foundation for growth. But it’s such an important topic for so many people, I think it deserves its own dedicated blog.
I mean, if you’re going to dedicate your precious time, energy, and money into a project, you want to make sure it’s going to make an impact or deliver maximum return.
This is why I base my approach around the principle that brand + content + campaigns = growth. And when I say ‘growth’ I mean a return on your investment (ROI), the growth of an idea, growth in awareness, or growth in market share.
If you’re not achieving growth or ROI from your campaigns, then something in your brand, content, or campaigns isn’t working. Maybe your brand doesn’t represent your business any more (it’s a common problem for growing businesses); or maybe your content isn’t aligning with what your audiences are looking for; or you simply might not be connecting and engaging with people effectively in a way that feels natural and authentic to your audiences.
Literally, everything you see on this website relates to solving these issues. But I deal specifically with them in my Brand Strategy, Marketing Strategy and Sales-led Marketing engagements.
Anyway, on with the blog.
First, let’s get some simple definitions in place.
Brand = anything you do (say, write, design or develop) that represents what you do. As we’ve discussed in other places on this website, it needs to be developed with authenticity, so people believe in it. Your brand can be presented by a logo. Or it could be encapsulated by your tone of voice.
Content = anything you create (written, designed, filmed, animated or in person) that explains or expresses what you do and why this is relevant to your audiences. It is the source of relevance and understanding for your brand. When your brand is presented by a logo, the logo becomes content. So the way you design your logo is important.
Campaigns = any way you combine your brand and content into coordinated activities, over a period of time, with a particular objective in mind. Like launching a new product or driving sales of an existing one. An effective campaign should cut through to your audiences and give them compelling reasons to connect and engage with you, and ultimately, buy from you.
Growth – in an idea, a cause, a profit margin, share of voice, or share of market. ‘Growth’ is essentially you shifting the dial and achieving an outcome that justifies the investment in your brand, content and campaigns.
Bring all these together and you have effective brand and marketing. So, what’s the secret to pulling it all together?
Build a brand people can believe in.
The first step in developing successful brand and marketing campaigns is to overcome the idea that branding and marketing is purely transactional. It isn’t.
It’s actually a process that people engage in over a period of time. The process is part rational and part emotional, and it evolves in much the same way as a relationship develops.
My belief is that people don’t just buy products and services. They actually buy into the promises and values that surround them. It’s the promise of an experience or outcome that makes people buy from you.
These promises are encapsulated in your brand; they’re communicated through your content; and they’re usually delivered to audiences through coordinated campaigns.
For your marketing to be successful, and for all these things to deliver growth or an ROI, you need to approach your marketing in the same way you’d approach a relationship.
Understand how people connect, engage, and then buy from you.
The Customer Decision Journey has the potential to be different for every organisation and every product or service. What it does is create a framework of engagement with your audiences so the experience feels genuine, logical, and natural.
Just as you wouldn’t ask someone you just met at a party to go on a two-week holiday with you, it’s unlikely you’d buy something that you’ve only just become aware of. Impulse purchases do happen, but very rarely in the business-to-business world.
Instead, a customer decision journey happens over a period of time. And during the journey, you’ll be connecting and engaging with all sorts of people to help you make the right decision.
Step 1: Your business as usual is challenged.
The Customer Decision Journey starts with your customer going about his or her everyday routine, doing business as usual (or just ‘minding their own business’).
Something then happens that triggers them out of their ‘everyday’ or ‘business as usual’. This could be a crisis moment (like a security breach), or having the realisation that the team isn’t being productive or efficient because they don’t have the right tech in place to empower and support them.
A crisis moment, like a security breach, will elicit an immediate response from your potential customer. But realisations can be formed over a long period of time and can be an accumulation of many different messages from different people or businesses.
In either case, there comes a moment when they’ll decide to act, and start the next phase of their customer decision journey.
Step 2: Reach out and socialise the challenge.
However that crisis moment or realisation happens, the next logical step people take is to ‘frame’ the challenge or opportunity by searching around it. In the first instance, most customers will do this online. And the words they use to search for solutions to their challenge become their intent signals.
These key words, search terms, or intent signals are usually the first indication you have that this person is in the market for what you do. But because they’ve only just entered the market, or started their search, they’re not yet signalling an imminent purchase. But this is your invitation to start a conversation with them, which you’ll do with relevant, branded content.
Some organisations will go heavy on landing page content, blogs and thought leaderships. Others will provide ROI calculators or short surveys, or they’ll gamify the experience. Others will run regular webinars or seminars to engage with prospects directly. All these decisions are based on your brand - because they’re all reflections of your character and personality.
All these experiences and content need to be developed and shared in a way that aligns with your prospect’s journey. You need to understand where that person is on their journey, so you can help them move onto the next step, and the next, until they’re ready to engage with you, or meet you.
In the consumer world, this process can be very quick. But in the business-to-business world, it can take months or even years. Typically, there’ll be a team or committee involved in the decision-making process, and they’ll all want different information at different times through the journey.
Therefore, coordinating this customer decision journey, so the right people are getting the right information when they need it, requires a strategic approach to marketing.
Stage 3: Engagement: Talk to the experts and engage
Sooner or later, you prospect customer is going to be ready to talk to someone real. Because their customer decision can be so long, and because they’ll likely bring different people into the process who’ll all influence the decision they make, many of my clients advocate for an approach that introduces an Inside Sales Representative or internal Sales Development Role into the process as soon as possible.
This enables you to build a profile of the prospect and begin to take an Account Based Marketing approach.
This inside sales person can then coordinate or curate the buyer’s journey and ensure the lead doesn’t go cold or disappear. But that person requires an investment and needs to be fed a constant stream of marketing qualified leads.
Hower you decide to manage this engagement process, it needs to ensure that leads can be qualified as marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and then nurtured to sales qualified leads (SQLs) and Opportunities as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, to ensure the efficacy of your funnel.
Result: Growth Marketing
My belief is that the success of this entire customer decision journey process relies on having a strong brand and marketing strategy in place. This is because a strong brand ensures a consistent experience through each step in the customer decision journey. And a strong marketing strategy ensures the user experience is coordinated and relevant.
A strong brand builds presence, so when that first trigger happens, your brand will be one of the first that comes to mind. And as your prospects start that second phase of the journey where they frame the challenge or opportunity and search around it, a more familiar brand will get more clicks.
An effective content strategy then ensures your website pages, user case studies, video explainers, and round table events all explain and express what you do and why this is relevant to your audiences.
And your campaigns ensure all these things come together to meet specific objectives, like launching a new product or increasing your sales of existing ones.
Sometimes you need a partner to make it all happen
Putting all this together is either something you enjoy doing because you’re a marketer and you love the challenge (like me); or you find it quite daunting and a bit of a headache (like most of my clients).
But the fact of the matter is: it has to be done. And the more effectively you do it, the more successful your sales and marketing campaigns will be.
Sometimes, people prefer to outsource bits to me, while they get on with the other bits they enjoy. That’s fine too. The important thing is to realise that effective marketing is a team sport and it’s a process that happens over a long period of time.
But when it all comes together, the end result will be worth it. Because you’ll be experiencing the growth of your ideas, your profit margins, your share of market, or share of voice.
It will become the outcome that enables you to shift the dial and achieve an outcome that justifies the investment in your brand, content and campaigns.