It’s difficult to think of a company who wouldn’t have growth as a primary objective of their marketing strategy. But it’s not enough to just want growth. You have to plan for it and set specific goals toward that objective. The area where companies have to be thoughtful and purposeful is in choosing marketing strategies that are specifically designed to generate growth.
Let’s examine a recent Hubspot article that sites The 5 Most Common Digital Marketing Strategies. Their list includes the following:
- Social Media
- Images, videos and blogs
- [Mobile-Responsive] for Smartphones, Tablets and other gadgets
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is a great list and efforts toward these areas would be considered strong investments for a marketing strategy.
But does this represent a marketing strategy that is laser focused on growth?
Is there a way to optimize these for growth? The answer is yes, you can optimize them for growth. We’ll use this time to examine a few of these and show you how and to adjust your thinking. Your new normal will be to view all your investments and opportunities through the lens of generating growth.
Social Media can be used to keep you top-of-mind with your target audience. It’s also a great platform for developing a relationship with your target market in the digital space. This can be achieved when you showcase your employees achievements, document how you give back to the community or post pictures of “bring your dog to work day”. These types of posts are enjoyable, they build good will and they are interactive, which is great. But are they focused on growth? Not in and of themselves. You can tweak this strategy for growth by allocating a percentage of your social media efforts for the following: promote a webinar where you showcase your product and collect email contacts, promote a pricing special that creates urgency for purchase or by promoting lead generating content that helps someone progress down the sales funnel. Can you see how if you charge a marketer with social media alone, they may complete the task, but not accomplish the goal of achieving growth?
Let’s take a look at Blogs. There are companies who do a great job of writing a blog every week, which is very effective. But are the blogs written with sales growth in mind? This can be tricky because you don’t want a blog to be “salesy”. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be crafted with sales growth in mind. The best way to tweak this strategy is to interview your sales folks and ask “what are the initial questions or problems that prospects have at the beginning of the sales process?”. Boom – those are your blog topics. Now your blog is helpful and not salesy, but it’s answering the question that your target marketing is asking! When that prospect clicks on the blog and arrives at your website, they will see how your product is what they are looking for and convert into a sales opportunity.
Now that you have freshened up your view on using marketing to generate sales growth, go back and re-examine your current marketing strategy. Look for opportunities to be specific about growth generation within each of the tactics you employ. If you are struggling with goal-setting for the purpose of achieving hyper growth, we can help! At Hyper Growth Business Strategies we offer a free 30-minute consultation where we will review your strategy and provide you with actionable items you can put into place immediately.