Growth marketing and digital customer experience explained: Growth marketing focuses on all aspects of the digital customer experience, giving you the best chances of success in an increasingly competitive business landscape.
Key Takeaways:
- What growth marketing really means and how it differs from traditional strategies
- Benefits of growth marketing
- How to apply growth marketing strategies to your business
The increasing adoption of advanced technology in our daily lives has disrupted the business world, making it more difficult than ever to attract, engage, and retain customers. As this phenomenon continues to sweep across organizations, businesses are looking toward new strategies to maintain their competitive edge and achieve sustainable growth.
Growth marketing is a game-changing hybrid approach that combines new and highly sophisticated solutions with traditional marketing techniques (public relations, advertising, and brand awareness) to accelerate business growth. It focuses on every touchpoint driving the digital customer experience from the initial contact and beyond. This strategy requires businesses to step out of their comfort zones and look deeper at the psychographics and behavioral influences of consumers to catch things competitors might miss.
This guide takes you through all you need to know about leveraging growth marketing and the digital customer experience to grow your business sustainably.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a holistic, data-driven approach to revenue generation that focuses on optimizing the customer experience. While traditional marketing techniques primarily focus on top-of-funnel activities, growth marketing focuses on the entire pipeline. It goes beyond lead generation and customer acquisition to nurturing and retaining customers for long-term sustainable growth.
Growth marketing takes traditional marketing up a notch by adding layers such as growth metrics monitoring, constant experimentation, and quick iteration of growth tactics to refine the entire process.
In this approach, Growth marketers continuously tinker with app and website pages, and A/B-test various hypotheses to improve customer acquisition and revenue. They deploy a myriad of sophisticated monitoring tools to learn how people interact with their content, then they use this data to adapt to the audience, leading to higher conversion rates, click-through rates, and lower churn rates.
Why your company needs growth marketing
Whether you’re running a startup or an established business, growth marketing might be more important to your survival than you think. Here are some reasons it’s beneficial to adopt a growth mindset:
- Enhanced brand loyalty: Growth marketing can help you better understand customer profiles and create personalized experiences. As a result, you’ll attract and build a community of loyal, repeat customers who are happy to spread the word about your products and services.
- Better decision-making: Since growth marketing is data-driven, you don’t have to rely on gut feelings. You can easily measure what’s working and what’s not and make the necessary adjustments to optimize your marketing efforts.
- Improved flexibility: Growth marketing gives you the flexibility to adjust your strategy to the needs of the market and your customers. Moreover, you can easily scale your marketing efforts up or down to match your cash flow requirements.
- Unification: Growth marketing fosters cross-functional collaboration by integrating the product, sales, customer support, and analytics teams for a holistic pursuit of goals and greater efficiency.
- Increased revenue: The primary goal of growth marketing is to maximize revenues. It helps you boost your revenue strategically and achieve sustainable growth.
With these benefits in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of the ways to apply growth marketing strategies to your business.
Optimizing growth marketing with the AAARRR framework
Your businesses can optimize the customer experience and increase revenue using growth marketing strategies. As a rule of thumb, you should base your decision on six stages—Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AAARRR framework, also known as the Pirate Funnel). Here’s how to make the most of each stage:
Awareness
The awareness stage focuses on educating prospects on howyour product or service can address their pain points. The best strategies for this stage can include SEO optimization for your articles and website, in-depth how-to videos, viral content, cold email outreach, social media ads, or top-of-the-funnel offers. You can also experiment with different types of content to see which one drives the most traffic or yields the most engagement.
Acquisition
This phase focuses on generating leads, getting customers, and information gathering. You should prioritize the optimization of gated content, landing pages, and subscription forms. Experiment with your site’s messaging, color, or button/page orientation to improve visual appeal. You can also provide free trials to encourage leads to sign up or offer free tools that address some of your customers’ concerns.
Activation
This refers to the customer onboarding process. After customers sign up for your product or service, you need to get them to use it as quickly as possible, so they discover your product’s unique value and “WOW” factor. Personalized emails are a great way to start a conversation. You can also provide a tutorial if your product has a steep learning curve.
Remember, this is an excellent time to learn how they would like to connect with your brand. Keep all lines of communication open and track how they interact with your website, then optimize their experience based on their behavior and preferences.
Retention
The goal of this stage is to delight your customers. To improve retention you’ll need to increase the product’s value and offer personalized support. This means regularly collecting feedback and acting on recommendations and negative feedback for product improvement. You can also offer reward programs to encourage customers to make a subsequent purchase or continue using your product.
Referral
Referrals and testimonials are a fast, agile, and cost-efficient way to build brand equity and acquire new customers. When customers are delighted with your product, they’ll recommend it and leave you positive reviews. However, you can also launch reward-for-referral intiatives to incentivize them to recommend your products and services.
Revenue
The ultimate goal of this stage is to maximize revenue. Some useful ideas to incorporate into your growth strategy include:
- Cross-selling/upselling personalized complimentary products
- Creating higher subscription plans with premium features
- Adjusting price strategies
- Sending users notification messages as their existing subscriptions approach their limit/expiration
You can also analyze the product and experiment with different concepts to explore other value-added opportunities to boost revenue.
The AAARRR framework gives you a simple metrics model to use to measure your company’s success, so you can easily track your growth.
Why grow your business with Shockoe?
Shockoe is a leading growth services provider with collaboration, trust, and creativity core values. Over the last decade, we’ve helped several companies drive profitability through stellar growth strategies, UX and app optimization, and market planning. For example, Shockoe recently developed a new app for Winn-Dixie that boosted its customer engagement and tripled the user base in just a matter of weeks.
Our team also helped Virginia Credit Union to simplify its app’s UI and improve its password reset process from a 70% failure rate to an 80% success rate, creating more seamless mobile banking experiences for its users.
No matter your industry, Shockoe can lead the way.
Contact us today for a comprehensive growth marketing strategy for your business.
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