The Growth Marketing Strategy Starts with The User — Review.
Traditional marketing focuses on the product, but the best growth marketing strategy focuses on the customer and providing them with value since the beggining of their buying journey.
Why do we need a user-centric approach to marketing?
Because of the boom of information and options consumers have on the palm of their hand when they search for something, it’s critical to change from promoting a product or a service to providing value immediately to the consumer.
In this wonderful new world, it is about more than who shouts the loudest. It is about who provides the most value and best experience to the consumer and to do that we need to understand what the user values.
And how do we start to adopt a user-centric approach?
Your customer journey is the most fundamental part together with an empathy map, here are some good questions to better understand your persona.
- What questions do they have?
- What pain points do they struggle with?
- What are they trying to achieve?
This approach led marketers to adopt some useful tools to help them have this user-centric mindset, some of those tools are customer journey map and empathy map.
While the best digital marketing strategies still rely heavily on data collection and quantitative analysis, they also incorporate qualitative techniques such as field surveys and interviews.
The best growth marketers recognize that the only way to deliver value to consumers in their interactions is to provide regular content for their audience.
This form of user interaction not only forms consumer communications, but it can also begin to shape the product itself.
The Best Growth Marketing Strategy Adapts to The User
It should go without saying that the most effective growth marketing strategy is one that is based on tracking and adjusting to how users respond to the content we publish.
However, though we all know this in principle, the truth is frequently different.
However, although we all know this in theory, often the reality is different. It’s all too tempting to skip A/B testing in order to push a campaign out the door, or to neglect the campaign’s analytics because we’re already thinking about the next one. Ironically, many businesses appear to be more concerned with the quantity of marketing material they produce than with its efficacy.
A astonishing number of companies seem more focused on the quantity of marketing material than its effectiveness.
Only by ensuring that our growth marketing plan creates a campaign cycle that provides time for analysis and adaptation will we be able to prevent this issue.
We must abandon the notion that when we launch a new piece of content or campaign, we will strike gold. Instead, we should be able to monitor the campaign’s progress and refine it over time.
This approach applies whether you are talking about a website, outbound campaign, Facebook ads or even an email campaign. Always launch, monitor and refine.
Some extra tips to better know your audience without spending a cent.
- Finding existing research
2. Interview the sales team, they are talking to your customers everyday! What are the reasons they are not to buy? What are they good reviews they are giving about your product or service?
3. Interview who is running social media on a daily basis, those people will have incredible insights into what customers are asking online, about your products and services, but also into who those customers are! here are some questions:
- What do our users share?
- What are the most common questions they ask?
- What do they post about?
- What do they say about related products and services?
- Who do they follow?
4. Interview who is responsible for your analytics, talking to a person that for example is responsible for Google analytics and Hotjar you can discover lots of stuff like:
- Search terms to find your company, products and services
- Questions people are asking related to your products or services
- Where people are giving more attention when they visit your website? This will give insights of the areas people are more concerned with!
- Check out recorded user sessions to understand the underlying motivations, if you do not have this on your website and apps check out Hotjar.
5. Finally, talk directly to your own customers, data tends to focus on their behaviours, what they do. Talk to them to understand their motivations, for this specific exercise I really recommend a book called The Mom Test, it is a fantastic book for you shape your customer discovery skills.
This was just the tip of the iceberg.
This post just covered a bit of growth marketing. If you want to deeply learn about it I recommend you to check CXL and Growthtribe, both have very practical content about growth, with the elite practitioners in the world and an affordable price.
