One of the things that makes us different is our approach to marketing. We identify as growth marketers. But what does that mean? This article breaks down what growth marketing means to us.

We define growth marketing as:

Employing strategies across all of your sales and marketing functions to attract more engaged customers.

The Entire Funnel

For us, being growth marketers means paying attention to the entire marketing/sales funnel. Sales and marketing functions are too often kept separate. We treat them as if they’re one and the same.

Right now, we’re focused on digital channels. So, minding the entire funnel often means considering everything from the time a new visitor lands at your website, to (and beyond) the time they make a repeat purchase from you, and everything in between.

Gaining the high-level view that growth marketing requires can be difficult. There are so many things to consider and manage. But we believe that keeping tabs on the big picture like this is part of the right way to handle marketing.

Data-Driven

We also define our flavor of growth marketing to be strongly data-driven. We believe that an objective view backed up by concrete data is essential to effectively execute growth marketing strategies.

Without a data-driven approach to your sales & marketing strategies, we believe it’s impossible to reliably produce positive results for your business.

As we perform client work, and as we build products, we seek to back up marketing ideas and decisions with data. There are reasons why more leading marketing agencies are becoming more data-driven in their work. Not only is being data-driven more effective, it’s becoming more and more necessary in an increasingly competitive and complex digital marketing world. It also helps us be accountable for our work and for the quality of our products.

Holistic

To us, being growth marketers also means considering the business and all of its functions as one entity, and seeking as much cohesion between business functions as possible.

If one of your key sales/marketing functions is producing little to no results, it can cripple your entire sales stream.

This philosophy is a flavor of what has been coined as holistic marketing, and we believe it to be a necessary part of growth marketing in general.

Even when you assess where you business’s sales and marketing currently stands, you want to look at all of your sales and marketing functions. Your business’s sales stream is it’s lifeblood, and that stream is a product of many of your sales and marketing functions. If one of your key sales/marketing functions is producing little to no results, it can cripple your entire sales stream.

Marketing decisions should not be made in a vacuum, separate from your core business. Unfortunately, this separation can happen, and does often happen. The promotion of your products and services is best done alongside the actual execution of your business activities.

Overall, to us, growth marketing is a flavor of marketing that considers your entire business, all of your sales and marketing functions, and pays attention to data when promoting your products and services.

Small businesses have a bevy of goals in its early phases. The most important is to continually grow their business and create awareness for the brand. Typically, through marketing efforts.

Marketing for small business is especially crucial since the main goal is to grow. What growth may look like can vary from industry to industry, even business to business. Growth can come in the form of increased revenue, a larger audience on social media or growth of the business itself-expanding to a new region or adding in additional departments or team members. But most small business owners can agree that growth is the goal, and we believe marketing is key to achieving that.

Many small businesses touch on the basics of marketing, but a lot are still facing challenges especially when it comes to digital marketing. Many small business owners feel they can’t afford digital marketing efforts in their business planning when in reality they can’t afford NOT to include it.

Digital marketing is where your time and money, when spent wisely, has the most considerable impact on your company. Owners sometimes make the mistake in assuming they need a considerable budget to reach their consumers through digital marketing, but that’s not always the case. There are strategies that can be implemented to tailor your efforts to get the most bang for your buck and make sure your marketing dollars are being spent wisely.

Small Business, Big Operations

Small business owners lack the luxury of being able to delegate work as larger companies do. As a result, they often have to pick and choose what efforts get their time and money. There are things that must occur on a regular basis just to keep the enterprise running. Operational items such as purchase orders and payroll as well as legal related things like insurance and permits are required to stay in business and keep the day to day running.

While marketing is still a “must-have” it can often take the back seat because it does not apply the same daily pressures other business aspects.  If you don’t complete purchase orders then you may not have enough supplies for the upcoming week, so you may skip your social media postings for the week to take inventory and complete your orders. So at a cursory glance, it can appear that you’re making the right decision putting your efforts towards the things that keep your business running on a day to day basis, however, if you take a closer look you may be setting yourself up to plateau.

By skipping crucial digital marketing points, you could be missing those important steps for growth.  If your business is struggling to grow your audience or increase your reach, take a look at where your efforts are and see if what you are actually doing is getting you to your growth goals or just keeping you stagnant.

These are choices small business owners face every day, where to put their time and efforts. But you don’t have to choose, all the efforts are important. Find ways to streamline your processes, if purchase orders are time-consuming, consider using software or updating your process.

Perhaps your business is still doing manual payroll, which can take up to a day. Automating your payroll gives you the day back and you can use that time to set up postings for social media or other marketing efforts. Optimize your current process and free time for marketing or find software that helps you optimize your marketing.

Don’t Outgrow Your Website

Websites are one of the first things created by a new small business. It’s a great way to increase exposure and reach your audience. Many small businesses outsource this task to get it completed. Some, however, don’t continue to maintain and update their site as business grow and change.

In an article by Mass Live Media, not putting enough effort into a professional and updated website will decrease the amount of through-traffic and sales conversions you make. How many times have you visited a website for a business or service and decided not to buy or even click through the site further because the site had outdated information or was difficult to navigate? It’s an easy and common mistake to make.  

A way to avoid this mistake is to build maintaining and updating your website into your weekly or monthly schedule. You don’t have to be tech-savvy to make changes and updates to your website. Sites like Squarespace and WordPress make website building and maintaining simple.  

You can also reach out to a digital expert if you need help. Sites like Upwork allow you to post jobs and search for freelancers within your budget. If you do plan to outsource the work, but sure to budget for updates and maintenance for the future.

Get Social!

Social Media is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing efforts. It’s a great way to boost your brand’s visibility. There are of course things to consider when implementing social media for your business.

Be sure to choose your platforms wisely. As I talked about, time is the most scarce source (and maybe money) for a startup or small business. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, start with a few sites then add in as you grow.

Also, consider the sites that don’t require daily engagement. Platforms like Twitter get the best engagement when postings are happening daily. If you are a two-person team, you may want to explore other sites like Facebook which may not require the daily interactions to get the desired engagement.

There are also scheduling tools available. Hootsuite and Buffer are some of the most popular ones. These scheduling tools will allow you to plan and set your social media posting calendar in advance, so you won’t forget to post about an upcoming special or event. Some scheduling tools have a schedule optimizer available which allow you to post at times that give you the highest traffic and social media engagement.

Keep your content fresh and engaging. Research top trends in your industry and share articles related to your business. Be sure to tag the origin and use of relevant hashtags. Organic content, meaning the copy that you create and write has the best chance for engagement.

Finally, try and identify with key influencers in your industry and try and engage with them. This will require some old fashioned outreach to build a relationship– try offering a favor and/or sharing their content. The goal is to try to get people with a vast social media presence to share your content and drive traffic to your pages.

Scaling your business is widely regarded as a necessity. Competitive pressures often create conditions where a company’s only has two choices: to grow, or to fail.

Here are some tips on how to successfully scale your business:

Know Where You’re Going

When you think about scaling your business, a good place to start is making sure you’re clear on how you measure success. Knowing where you’re going will increase your chances of success by creating focus and minimizing wasted resources.

It doesn’t matter whether you are creating a new business or already have an established business: it’s never too late to create, or even update, your metrics for success.

Trying to scale a business without a particular goal in mind, or the right goals in mind, can hurt the entire effort. Setting the right goals for your company is required to become clear on your success metrics and to successfully scale your business.

Let’s take a new Fintech startup for example: some goals that you might have are to achieve a certain number of people using your new product, or maybe to process a certain number of financial transactions through your platform. Or, even earlier than that, you may be trying to validate your product idea by aiming to find a certain number of people that match your buyer personas, for purposes of product planning and marketing.

As a startup, in general, it’s very important to diligently select metrics for success, because you’ll have particularly limited resources to leverage in attempting to reach your goals.

Learn From Others

Do you know how other success stories of scale came to be? Working in a vacuum when it comes to your growth strategy is not only unnecessary, it’s pretty foolish in this day and age.

With all of the information we have access to, blueprints for growth are never too far away, along with the pitfalls of others that you can avoid if you stay informed.

Become familiar with common growth strategies. Find other companies in or near your target space that quickly achieved scale. How did they do it?

Keeping with our previous example, if you were starting up a Fintech company, you might research Robinhood’s explosive growth through their legendary execution of a referral strategy (aka the “One Million-Person Waitlist”,) strategic hiring, and automation.

Think Ahead

When you do things for your business on a day-to-day basis, do you think about what your business would look like if it were doing the same thing 10 times more frequently? 100 times?

When you (or someone) perform tasks for your business, think ahead to when your company has to do the same thing at scale.

It’s important to create repeatable systems for the operations of your business.

Are there parts of your operation that can be automated? Find and take advantage of software that can automate your business processes. Or, if you have a strong software engineering force, give them some direction, space and time to help you automate some of your more important or expensive processes.

Are there parts of your operation that are “stuck” to one person? Take steps to make sure that your on-boarding and training processes allow an effective distribution of work, and prevents bottlenecks from forming.

If you can proactively take steps to ensure repeatable and scalable processes, you’re more likely to avoid bottlenecks and major failures down the line.

Go Forth and Scale

As you think about scaling your business, make sure you have your bases covered:

1. Know where you’re going by having clear goals and metrics for success.

2. Learn from other success stories of scale.

3. Think ahead to what your business might look like when looking at your current operations at scale.