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Business growth is something every startupper or business owner is concerned about. Because let’s be honest: in today’s fast-paced world, you either move forward or backward. What could be the consequences if you decide to follow the latter scenario? Well, we believe there is no need to explain how a company that doesn’t develop may end up. Let’s better talk about more interesting things like growth marketing, lead generation and customer acquisition.
If you spend some of your time in the business community, you probably hear all these words quite often. But as we see from the practice, people rarely understand what they mean, especially when it comes to growth marketing. So we think it’s a high time to debunk the most popular myths about it and explain how it relates to other concepts we mentioned earlier. In this article, we’ll also give you some hints on how to do growth marketing right.
What is growth marketing?
In general, the purpose of growth marketing is making a business grow intentionally and fast at the lowest possible costs and based on data. It usually comprises a number of business efforts and covers a wide range of channels. Growth marketing strategies may, for instance, include the increase of sales (or so-called market penetration), entering new markets, utilization of new sales channels, development of new product etc.
Note: you may also sometimes hear a term ‘growth hacking’. It’s similar to ‘growth marketing’ but focuses on a specific strategy and usually executes only one channel. So, basically, growth marketing is a continuous and comprehensive activity while growth hacking is a one-time campaign.
‘Growth marketing’ is a buzzword among startuppers so you may wonder is it something your company needs if it’s not a startup already. So let’s take a brief look at the business life cycle every company goes through.
Stages of business growth:
- ideation stage — when you just decided to start a business and think how to that (i.e. create a business plan)
- start-up stage — when you make the first steps (i.e. search for investments, gather the core team etc.)
- growth stage — when everything is established and your company starts generating some income
- expansion stage — when your market share is growing
- maturity stage — when your company receives more or less stable revenue
When people talk about business growth, they often mean only the growth and sometimes expansion stages. If we followed this logic, we would end up concluding that only business owners whose companies are at the early stages of their development should think about growth marketing. Yet, it doesn’t work like that in reality because when any company does not grow, it declines. That’s why growth marketing is relevant even for the ‘mature’ businesses for which customer acquisition is equally important.
How to optimize your growth marketing efforts
The short answer is: with the help of software. More specifically: with the help of custom software development.
And the reason is quite obvious. To develop an efficient growth marketing strategy and to make is really data-driven, you need to continuously gather customer feedback, collect a great amount of different data and do a lot of analysis. Performing all these tasks without effective technical tools is just impossible.
Why custom software development is the right choice? If you google it, you may see that the market is full of ready-made solutions. However, if you do the deeper research, you’ll hardly find even a single one that can fully satisfy your needs.
To see the big picture, you, of course, may try some off-the-shelf applications which caught your interest. Most of them have trial periods so it’ll cost you nothing. But as we mentioned, growth marketing is something that should be done on a permanent basis. This means that you need software that has functionality specifically tailored to your goals and business objectives. It must be able to help you optimize your growth marketing efforts in long-term perspective.
At the same time, most ready-made tools are aimed at satisfying the needs of a wide range of clients (basically, the wider, the better). They can definitely resolve some of your challenges, but they won’t allow you to take a comprehensive approach.
Software solutions for growth marketers
As mentioned, when it comes to the development of apps to help you with growth marketing, a starting point should be your needs. And they will greatly depend on your company’s activity, the product you sell and the way you sell it, as well as on the stage of the business life cycle your company is currently going through. That’s why the below are just examples of functionality you may have in your growth marketing app. Feel free to tweak and combine them as necessary.
Applications for increasing traffic flow
Solutions of this type with help you measure traffic, optimize your SEO, perform all the necessary analytics, find new traffic sources, monitor competitors’ online marketing activity etc.
Ready-made applications that partially cover this functionality: MixRank.
Tools for lead and customer acquisition
They will allow you to set up conversion goals, perform A/B testing, monitor the behavior of your website visitors (where they go, what they click and so on), build a conversion funnel, separate good leads from average visitors, create reports automatically etc.
Ready-made applications that partially cover this functionality: SessionCam.
Software for gathering customer feedback
The primary goal of these apps is to make surveying easy and effective, but it also may include some additional functionality such as analytical and reporting tools, filtering capabilities etc.
Ready-made applications that partially cover this functionality: Qualaroo,
Tools for marketing automation
These solutions will help you collect email addresses of potential leads, segment website visitors, send targeted emails to specific groups of contacts, automate email sending process, perform analytics, create reports, manage your social media and blogging activities etc.
Ready-made applications that partially cover this functionality: MailChimp.
Putting it all together
It doesn’t matter at what stage of the business life cycle your company is, to stay afloat and survive the competition, it needs to grow constantly. That’s why growth marketing is something that is relevant for any business regardless of the industry and size. The best way to optimize your marketing efforts is to develop applications specifically tailored to your needs and objectives. Among other things, they may help you increase traffic flow to your website, generate more leads, acquire new customers, gather their feedback and automate your marketing activity.