3 steps to marketing powered growth.
Whether you are a startup or an established brand, everyone wants to know how your business will grow. It's one of the most highly valued characteristics of any successful company. However, not all growth is good. For example, exponential, uncontrolled growth can be damaging (if costs, revenues and cashflow are not well managed).
The best growth is stable, steady and reliable. It's carefully architected and adapts to the changing business environment and optimised though continuous learning. It's a strategic, agile process and is built on the following foundations:
#1 Defining Purpose
Growth starts with defining your true purpose and articulating a clear value proposition.
This involves knowing who you are and who your customers are – and creating a compelling 'value exchange' that will attract your audience to you. Getting this right accelerates your customer engagement strategy and marketing efforts.
Know your brand: A great model for understanding WHY you are in business, rather than just WHAT your company does, is Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. This serves as solid foundation for defining your target audience and how you will truly engage with them.
Know your customers: Creating 'Personas' is an established way to bring your key customer groups to life. There are many tools available that can help, like Hubspot's Contact Tool, but the important thing is to ensure they are based on real data and insight from your existing and potential customers. If you're a B2B (business-to-business) company, then try Lincoln Murphy's Ideal Customer Profile framework.
#2 Creating Desire
Every relationship starts with desire. Creating desire for your brand means finding and engaging with your audiences – wherever they may be.
Building an integrated, inbound marketing strategy is a cost-efficient and agile approach to reaching and interacting with your customers. Inbound marketing is all about creating a desirable brand and value proposition that act like a magnet, drawing your target audience in and earning their attention (rather than trying to buy it).
This modern marketing strategy includes techniques such as content strategy development, social publishing, native advertising, SEO, email marketing, PR and partnerships. It's a multi-disciplined and data-driven model that can flex depending on budgets and growth stage.
#3 Building Relationships
Raising brand awareness and interest is the first important step, but achieving sustainable growth comes from carefully nurturing relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.
Customer lifecycle marketing has been around for at least two decades, but is now more complex than ever. It requires bringing together insight, creativity data and technology to understand and optimise communications and interactions along the customer journey. Done well, it can be truly transformational - evolving casual conversations into brand advocacy.
It's an advanced approach that demands both integration and intelligence to enable a brand to have the best conversation with the customer at any given time or touchpoint.
Need help putting this principles into practice?
Understanding these three principles is easy - adopting them is slightly more challenging! And mastering them takes years of patience, persistence and practice! Luckily for you, VerveIQ can help you at every step. Get in touch to find out how.
