How growth marketing can help your business

Transcript

Hi, I’m Tam and I’m the in-house Growth Marketer for Webprofits.

Today, I’m going to talk about how growth marketing can help your business improve its results.

Before we start, let’s quickly talk about the difference between growth marketing and “normal” marketing.

Growth marketing is a term that’s been growing in popularity even though the definition is still ambiguous.

The definition I’m basing my thoughts on is Mike Volpe’s, the former CMO of Hubspot.

He said:

“Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers.”

The approach was made famous by Facebook, who were one of the first to have a team focused specifically on growth, rather than marketing.

Doing this was arguably a key factor in helping them reach 2 billion monthly active users in 13 years.

It’s a popular term in the start-up world, but it’s applicable for large business too, Facebook still has a growth team.

So how do you know if growth marketing is right for you?

Well, have you ever found yourself looking back over your monthly results and wondered why you’re not growing as fast as you used to?

As talented as your marketing team are, it’s possible that they are not set up to deliver fast and scalable growth.

Growth marketing involves strategies and tactics all the way through the sales funnel, rather than on specific marketing channels.

In fact, a lot of the time the tasks and tactics might not be considered marketing at all and could be considered web design, product development, sales or something completely different.

Growth Marketing shouldn’t be confused with growth hacking.

It’s not about quick wins and little shortcuts, it’s about a longer-term strategy that may incorporate some short bursts of growth within it.

A few months ago, after taking a look at our recent results we decided to make some changes to make our internal team more growth focussed. Here are two simple changes we made that helped improve our monthly performance by 150%.

Have a single goal

We’ve always measured growth by the number of leads and sales that we generate, but we found that we were also focussing on side metrics – or even worse vanity metrics – that didn’t fundamentally impact our most important performance indicator – Leads.

By shifting our focus to just the most important metric, our activities and task list changed immediately.

Any task that didn’t contribute enough, in the short or long term, to our growth in leads was dropped and replaced by something that did.

Essentially, having a clear singular goal made it a lot easier to prioritise the tasks and ideas that we came up with so we could reach our goal a lot faster.

This goal can change over time as your business changes, but the best way to ensure that you reach it quickly will always be to focus your efforts on it.

Have all the right ingredients

You need a variety of skills to build an effective growth team.

It takes more than just creative marketing to grow a business.

An article by Andrew McInnes a few years ago highlighted how some of the most successful businesses structure their growth teams, and though there were two different models, all teams contained the following:

1. Product managers – this kind of person understands the product or service best and is responsible for bringing the strategy together
2. Engineers (or as I would usually say developers) – These people have the ability to code and help install or create tools that can make a difference across the team
3. Designers – Creative people who can bring an idea to life and visually display what your team want to show
4. Data scientists – This is really just a fancy name for people who are good at crunching numbers, analysing performance, and spotting trends to help find insights
5. Marketers – The people who do the actual advertising, outreach and production of marketing campaigns.

Each team can have as many people in these roles as required, and people can even span across multiple roles depending on your resources.

But it’s important that each role is represented, and that the person in that role considers it a strength of theirs.

It’s easy for businesses to say that their objective is growth and that all of their efforts are aligned.

However, stepping back and taking a broad look at how you’re set up can sometimes reveal some surprising insights.

So if your business isn’t growing fast enough then maybe it’s time for a change.

Ask yourself, what does growth actually mean, and who’s in charge of making it happen?

That’s all from me.

Thanks for watching and I’ll be back soon with more.

Tam Al-Saad

Head of Growth at Webprofits

A well-rounded and entrepreneurial individual with more than 12 years experience in working with and launching startups, Tam is skilled at managing multiple products simultaneously. With a strong digital marketing background and broad business experience, he’s perfectly suited to head up Web Profit’s marketing initiatives as Head of Growth.