Companies That Can Do Growth Marketing Consulting

Every aspect of our life has a digital component in this hyper-digitalised world. This includes social media, websites, blogs, or other online content. Individuals and companies today transact largely through the internet without engaging in human interactions.

Companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, are harnessing the power of the internet and digital media to grow their business faster. The growth of e-commerce and social media has given companies an essential and valuable means of engaging customers directly. This applies to any company, B2B or B2C. However, the competition for customer “eyeballs” and attention is fierce. It is a massive challenge for a company to be visible in the online clutter.

Enter…growth marketing!

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a highly personalised marketing strategy. It uses data from marketing campaigns to increase customer engagement and acquisition. It helps companies forecast business environment changes and modify their systems accordingly.

The term “growth marketing” was coined by entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010. It was initially adopted by companies in the hugely competitive SaaS space. Today, it is used by any organisation that wishes to grow fast using data from digital marketing.

Visually, growth marketing (also called “growth hacking”) can be shown as:

Image source: https://ladder.io/blog/growth-agency

Why should companies adopt a growth marketing strategy?

Growth marketing helps companies answer a key question: “How can I grow my customer base as quickly as possible?”

Growth marketing uses continuous experimentation and a sharp focus on the customers’ unique motives and purchase drivers. This helps attract, engage and retain these customers. It allows companies to build and push highly individualised messages directly addressing a customer’s unique problem. Thus, growth marketing helps organisations optimise multiple channels to increase customer engagement.

It is important to note that growth marketing builds a larger customer base and helps create a very engaged target audience that reduces dropouts and increases the customer’s lifetime value!

Growth marketing addresses customers at all marketing funnel stages – Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, and Advocacy.

According to the consulting firm McKinsey, using growth marketing allows companies to reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, increase revenue by up to 15% and improve the ROI on marketing spend by at least 30%.

(data source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/marketings-holy-grail-digital-personalization-at-scale)

Growth marketing allows companies to provide customer experiences that add value to the customer buying journey. It focuses on building customer relationships and helps build brand loyalty. By using growth marketing consistently, a company promotes its authenticity over the long term to grow organically.

Components of growth marketing

Every company must adopt certain key elements of growth marketing to derive the maximum benefits of this approach. These include metrics covering the entire marketing funnel: customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, retention rates and customer lifetime value.

Let us look at these components of growth marketing.

1. A/B testing
   • Also known as multivariate testing
   • A core growth marketing practice
   • Helps companies identify the content option that does a better job of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers
2. Customer lifecycle
   • The entire customer buying journey
   • The marketing funnel is a representation of this journey, from awareness to acquisition and beyond
   • Growth marketing typically focuses on 3 stages of a typical lifecycle: activation (generate interest, build familiarity and credibility in the brand), nurture (to strengthen relationships through marketing campaigns), and reactivation (loyalty and rewards campaigns to retain or re-engage customers)
3. Cross-channel marketing
   • This is the marketing route that the company adopts to reach its customers
   • It is designed based on the target audience’s preferences and can include email marketing, SMS messaging, direct mail, etc.
   • Cross-channel marketing helps companies engage customers at whichever stage of the marketing funnel they happen to be on
   • Cross-channel marketing also helps companies use past consumer behaviour to finetune their campaigns to engage the target audience better.

The components can also be presented visually as follows:

Image source: https://www.inlat.global/growth-hacking-for-startups-explained/

None of these components is “more important than the others” – customers progress through each stage during their buying journey, and growth marketers must accommodate their changing needs using various marketing tools and techniques.

The “growth” of growth marketing agencies

Not all companies have the means, resources or skills to run a growth marketing strategy independently. This has created a niche for a specific kind of consulting company called a growth marketing agency.

What do growth marketing consulting agencies do?

A growth marketing agency helps companies design and execute a growth marketing strategy that drives customers through the entire marketing funnel and converts them into paying, and returning, customers!

Growth marketing agencies customise their approaches to the needs of their client companies to centralise all core functions of the company. This provides a unique vision of growth through focused leadership.

Growth marketing agencies design specific strategies, track cross-channel marketing campaigns and use content to attract and retain more customers.

How to choose a good growth marketing consulting agency?

A company that has decided to implement growth marketing should choose its growth marketing agency carefully. Ideally, a company should use the following means to identify and select the growth marketing agency that best meets its requirements:

1. Vet all agency proposals thoroughly
2. Ask for previous work samples, case studies, or client testimonials
3. Ask for a free consultation to “test” the agency
4. Start with a minor, one-off assignment to determine ability, quality and fit for purpose

The top growth marketing consulting agencies today

Growthmentor.com, a leading online aggregator of growth marketers, provides experts to guide companies in developing and executing their growth strategies. As a meta-growth marketing platform, its views on the industry are essential.

The platform has identified/endorsed nine growth marketing agencies with which it can work regularly. Let’s take a quick look at the top five agencies in this list:

• Relevance
  • Founded in 2018
  • Website: https://www.relevance.com
  • Specialities: SEO, Digital PR, Content Marketing, Thought Leadership, and Content Strategy.

• Swidia

• Founded in 2018
• Website: https://swidia.com/
• Specialities: Paid Social, Paid Search, Performance Creative Testing, User/Customer Acquisition, Retention, Growth Hacking Strategy

• Ladder.io

• Founded in 2014
• Website: https://ladder.io/
• Specialities: PPC, CRO, SEM, SEO, Growth Hacking

• Tuffgrowth
  • Founded in 2016
  • Website: https://tuffgrowth.com/
  • Specialities: PPC, SEO, CRO, Social Advertising, Growth Hacking

• Growth Shop
  • Founded in 2019
  • Website: https://growth.shop/
  • Specialities: Funnel Analysis, Modeling, Landing Pages

(Data source and further information: https://www.growthmentor.com/blog/best-growth-marketing-agencies/)

Conclusion

Growth is non-negotiable for any organization today, irrespective of size. The increasing use of digital marketing, availability of high-quality first-party data, and the development of tools and technology to use this data meaningfully has given companies a new marketing platform – growth marketing – to continuously enhance the customer buying journey and design better experiences for customers, which help in acquiring and engaging customers through the buying journey.