The heart of growth marketing is building brand awareness.  Growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel rather than just feeding the top while putting an emphasis on the lifetime value of a customer instead of just the initial sale.  Growth marketing requires building an audience and a following to move your products rather than focusing on selling an individual product.  It also entails a great deal of lead nurturing and marketing to current customers.  Here we outline seven key components of building a growth marketing strategy.

Valuable Content

Content plays a key role in every stage of the funnel, whether it be marketing or sales.  Blog posts help to improve SEO and draw visitors to your website.  Premium content helps to convert visitors into leads.  Social media posts help to grow your following and build brand awareness.  Email fulfillment pieces help to make teleprospecting outreach more effective and efficient.  Email blasts help to shake out already interested prospects and build awareness.  Email workflows act as drip campaigns to nurture those that aren’t quite ready to buy as well as to encourage current customers to toward renewals and the sale of additional products or services. Each of these helps to build a community of prospects and customers that will contribute to the continued growth of your organization.

Free Trials

Free trials are a great way to bring awareness to your products or services and show your target audience just how valuable they can be.  Allowing a prospect to test a product will increase your credibility and give them a chance to experience the functionality and uses for themselves.  Offering a free trial can give you a foot in the door with a target prospect and even open up opportunities to sell additional products.  Make sure the terms of your trial agreement are clear and that it is truly a free trial.  Fine print that locks a customer in can be damaging to your reputation and will eliminate any of the benefits of your offer.

Free Tools

Several companies have seen success from offering free tools to their prospects.  HubSpot offers a marketing grader that provides insight into the functionality and optimization of your website.  Many companies offer ROI calculators that show what kind of return they can expect from a certain purchase.  These are just a couple of examples of free tools used by companies to drive awareness and website traffic.  Taking some time out to create a tool that will be useful to your target audience can help draw prospects in without even mentioning your product offerings. 

Networking Community

Building a community of prospects, customers, advocates and partners is a great way to accelerate and maintain steady growth at your company.  Leveraging live events, online events and social media to build your network will provide you with a community of supporters that help to build the reputation of your business and increase brand awareness.  Including current customers in your community can help to spread testimonials and case studies from those that have experienced your offerings first hand.  Word of mouth advertising still carries a great deal of weight and can be one of the most trusted sources of information for prospects.

Online Presence

Your ability to be found online will directly impact the rate at which your company grows.  There are several components to establishing a strong online presence.  The first is to build a well optimized website with a plethora of valuable content.  The next is to establish optimized profiles on each of the major social media sites and consistently post visual, interactive and written content.  While having valuable content is a great way to gain inbound links, you’ll also want to establish a strategy for obtaining them.  This may include creating a strategic outreach to targeted media sites and engaging customers and partners to share each other’s content.  Search engine marketing and paid social media ads will also help to build your online presence, your social following, website visits and even drive conversions.

Account Based Marketing

Account based marketing has become an extremely popular topic and strategy in the marketing world over the last few years.  While there are many definitions, it is essentially taking a particular company, industry, vertical or micro-vertical and treating it as a market of one.  Meaning you dissect every level of the organization and perform personalized and targeted outreach to each level.  Determining the companies that will provide you with not only big business, but continued business and then going after them with everything you have is a sure way to help your company grow.

Multi-Channel Approach

With so many different ways to communicate with and reach prospects, using a multi-channel approach is necessary in order to have an impact on your target audience.  This includes using a blend of both inbound and outbound tactics while concentrating on those channels where your audience prefers to get their information.  While omni-channel marketing can be effective, it can also be inefficient.  Creating detailed buyer personas will enable you to focus on the tactics and channels that will be most effective in your target market.  This ensures you obtain your desired reach while still maintaining a healthy ROI.