Growth Marketing Trends That Aren't Going Away

Growth marketing is a critical part of business today. Understanding the best trends allows companies to capitalize on their value by building loyalty with new customers while strengthening their brand presence with those familiar with your goods and services. Companies that understand the value of growth marketing have an advantage over those that don't understand its dimensions. The customer experience is a top priority.

Before we dive in, let's go over some definitions.

Many use the phrases "inbound marketing" and "content marketing" interchangeably, but there are subtle differences between these marketing approaches.

• Inbound Marketing: An approach that builds customer loyalty through helpful and relevant interactions and content. This approach entices but doesn't interrupt or impose. Common methods include adding incentives to attract customers to your brand. Importantly, inbound marketing is an approach that works for traditional and online marketing initiatives.

• Content Marketing: This approach creates and consistently distributes relevant and valuable content. The goal is to attract, build, and sustain an audience that appreciates your firm's offerings while enhancing your bottom line. Blogs, how-to guides, infographics, and instructional videos are content that informs and builds loyalty; content marketing drives growth. 

While content is the lifeblood of both approaches, content quality matters since the focus is on the customer. The primary difference involves whether the firm decides to create an emphasis on a specific type of buyer or a broader audience.

Choose Growth Marketing

What is growth marketing? Growth marketing taps into other marketing approaches by using data to expand and maintain your audience. Your business will scale up good ideas and discard those that fail to make the desired impact. Collecting and reviewing data allows you to assess, evaluate, and redirect your initiatives and overall approach. 

Metrics Matter

The key to growth marketing involves understanding the importance of data and metrics. Best practices require that marketing professionals understand current industry trends and rigorously review industry literature, including blogs by authoritative voices. In addition, the company should develop quality content and focus it narrowly and in a focused manner. A customer-centered approach offers proof of value for goods and services offered. It does so in a creative manner–if your business doesn't offer cookie-cutter solutions, neither should your marketing approach. 

Cultivate Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is an essential aspect of any marketing campaign. Although growth marketing emphasizes the value of interpreting data, this approach must remember that people are more than numbers. As such, their impression of the products or services you offer is more than a numerical rating on a bland scale where one person's "10" may be the equivalent of another person's "7."

Expand the Customer Base

Growth marketing involves a concerted effort to build a base of loyal and satisfied customers. This may occur through various channels, such as blogs, social media campaigns, measures, and email outreach efforts. In each approach, the focus must remain on giving customers the impression that their experiences and decisions while interacting with your business are your top concern and priority.

Blogs Build Business

Blogs remain a vital marketing strategy--one that will remain significant into the future. Businesses wanting to maintain a marketing advantage should develop a blog content strategy, one that focuses on the needs of current and prospective customers, not on simple self-promotion.

Not all blogs are equally valuable. Like fruit rotting on a branch, the content will decay over time. This is true for both impactful and less frequently accessed content. New blogs supplant older content, and some blogs never attract much interest in the first place.

Knowing this truth helps businesses blog in ways that support the overall marketing objective. Consider the life cycle of a blog entry: influential blogs experience a spike, but response becomes stagnant over time. At some point, interest in the content plateaus before the inevitable period of decay begins. The goal is to sustain the plateau for as long as possible since it's more efficient to maintain the effectiveness of preexisting content than to create anew.

Small blogs aim to maintain a compound monthly growth rate of about six percent each month when creating new content. Content should be refreshed occasionally to limit decay. Harvest the fruit while it is in its prime, but remove or prune content that no longer serves its purpose, has superseded content, or has low traffic numbers that don't seem practical. 

Similar to press releases from a while ago or other outdated content, these pruned blogs can be kept on an intranet or an archive page if they have some enduring value. However, cluttering a primary blog page with them years after their prime may send the wrong message.

Customer Testimonials Inform

Customer feedback has excellent value for both internal and external marketing purposes. Internally, patterns in these testimonials offer guidance to different units within a firm. This is especially true if adverse testimonials, complaints, or ongoing concerns about a reasonable service require damage control.

Externally, these testimonials allow customers to see how their peers have reviewed the overall performance and individual aspects of a business's items or activities. Collecting feedback will remain a vital growth marketing trend well into the future. Capturing, analyzing, and sharing the user experience remains imperative. 

This approach should get beyond a simple numerical measure on a scale or a tally of likes and dislikes. There are many ways to encourage customer feedback through testimonials, though ten basic approaches stand the test of time in the contemporary landscape. Some of these focus on contests or links on heavily-used social media. In contrast, others focus on already-existing chatter on social media or other outlets and request that customers provide feedback if they abandon their cart while shopping.

Getting the data is half the battle. Reviewing it, learning from it, and understanding its marketing potential are equally important. 

Organic Reach Adds Authenticity

Organic marketing occurs when your customers find you naturally -- rather than through generic, impersonal ads -- and conclude that what you offer has value and is worth acquiring or purchasing. Tailored advertising campaigns can fit this strategy as long as their touch leaves the impression that the message is geared to a specific consumer rather than blandly broadcast to everyone around them. 

A time-proven approach to improving brand recognition with current and potential clients involves a well-designed email marketing campaign. Sharing messages about your firm's goods and services allows the organic reach of your business to expand. Strategically placed buttons to allow customers to share on social media or to communicate with others on their social web improve marketing impact, enable customers to validate the authenticity of their positive experience and expand your firm's organic reach.

Hashtagging helps as well. Not just the branded hashtags that marketing departments always encourage team members to attach to products and practices but also more generally used hashtags that speak powerfully within a given audience, sector, and industry. Adding these general tags boosts individual aspects of your business. The traction they get when shared allows marketing professionals to assess the best ways to concentrate funds for ad campaigns.

Growth marketing isn't going away, and neither are these trends. While it's essential to introduce new methods to your marketing strategy, these are tried-and-true approaches to finding suitable leads, engaging with them effectively, and nurturing them into loyal customers.