Creating growth-driven strategies is a vital part of growth marketing, as it forms the cornerstones of your marketing strategies. This phase of our growth marketing journey is where you will take all of the outputs of the growth checkup phase and turn them into tangible tactics. The growth-driven strategy phase includes the following steps:
In our previous section about Customer Research, we explained what type of information you need to get from your current or potential customers in order to gain insights. In this section, we will go through how to create personas based on your customer research and analysis. This will include narrowing down your audience by looking for commonalities in your customer research and turning those insights into personas.
A persona (or a buyer persona) is a hypothetical and generalised representation of your ideal customers. Creating personas for each product/service or solution is essential for your future marketing activities or anything else that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
Every persona’s pain points, goals, and reason for buying your product/service will differ, so all of your marketing activities and future communications have to be done accordingly. For instance, a sales representative might be interested in a different product feature of a CRM tool than an IT manager who also uses the same product.
Defining your buyer persona(s) will enable you to easily tailor your funnels, landings, ads, content marketing, and email marketing activities around their needs.
We will now walk you through how to easily create personas. In the end, you will be able to compile all your raw data into clear-cut persona information.
Your questions will vary whether your company caters to businesses (B2B) or individuals (B2C), so you need to identify your persona type first.
Here you will indicate demographic information about your persona, such as:
At this step, you will indicate essential information about your persona’s business, including:
Your persona’s objectives and challenges play a big part in your future marketing activities. They will answer the question: why does this persona need my product/solution/services? So make sure you elaborate with as much information as possible to better determine how your business can meet their needs.
Here are some helpful things to consider:
Here’s an example of possible answers:
You have completed your first B2B persona creation!
You should start with your B2C’s demographic information, including the following:
At this step, you will indicate the daily routines, habits, and financial information about your persona. Below is an example of how to describe these characteristics:
Now it is time to clarify your persona’s purchasing preferences. This will give you a better understanding of where your personas spend their time online. Armed with this knowledge, you can audit where you’re currently spending resources (e.g. on Facebook ads, retargeting, etc.) and reallocate those resources based on your persona research.
You can answer the following questions:
It is time to go deeper with your understanding of your persona. Great product managers know the mindset of their persona and can really put themselves in their persona’s shoes to understand the wants and needs and, most importantly, the emotional triggers of their users.
Answer the following questions:
Lastly, indicate which brands your persona is loyal to (their “love brands”). The brands people are loyal to can uncover insights about what they value, types of voices they prefer, and strategies that impact them.
You have completed your first B2C persona creation!
We have gone through the persona creation step that will help you build a smooth growth marketing strategy. Once you finish defining your personas, you will be able to easily:
You don’t have to go through this critical process alone. Schedule a call with one of our consultants to help you through these steps for growth-driven results!
Schedule a callA positioning (or a brand positioning) refers to how a given product, service, or brand meets a particular consumer need in a way that its competitors don’t.
A positioning statement is a 1-2 sentence declaration that emphasizes the distinguishing or unique features of a brand and creates a particular brand association in customers’ minds.
In order to build a successful positioning statement, you need to determine:
Based on the outcomes, your positioning statement should:
Positioning Statement Example - Amazon
“For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.”
You will need the data from your full brand check-up, research, and buyer personas in order to create your positioning. First, you should determine for which persona you will create your positioning.
The key point here is to establish your brand’s uniqueness and identify what differentiates you from your competitors. You should fill in the following blanks:
For (persona name),
who (have the following problem),
our brand/product is (describe product/solution)
that provides (the following solution to the problem).
Unlike (refer to competition),
our product/solution (describe unique selling proposition).
Here’s another example to help you understand the process:
Let’s say you provide anti-money laundering solutions in the finance industry. In this case, your positioning statement could be:
“For compliance managers who tackle financial crimes, our solution is an AI-based, anti-money laundering application that provides assistance to financial institutions. Unlike our competitors, we become our customers’ AML partner and provide an end-to-end solution powered by AI, with extensive know-how in the payments system.”
Your brand positioning will be the foundation of your marketing messages and provide content for your taglines, slogans, elevator pitch, etc. And don’t forget: create different positioning statements for different services, solutions, and products.
This completes our positioning creation step in carrying out a smooth growth marketing strategy.
Looking for some expertise to guide you through creating positioning for your growth-driven strategy? Don’t hesitate to schedule a call with one of our growth consultants!
Schedule a callThis is the next step in our Growth Marketing Strategy process. In this section, we will clarify the importance of funnel building by looking at key points to be considered when implementing growth funnels successfully.
A growth funnel (or a marketing funnel) is the set of stages that a potential customer goes through when making a purchase. These stages start with awareness and end with conversion, including either the purchase of your product/solution or post-purchase activities.
It is a way of breaking down the customer journey until the goal you set according to your business strategy is achieved. So funnel architecture depends on what your goals are and what actions you want your visitors to take.
Since they involve a series of end-to-end tactics that are interrelated, growth funnels are the foundation of your growth marketing strategy and activities.
There are various tactics you can implement in your growth strategy according to your funnels and your budget. Below, you’ll see an example of different tactics based on organic media in all growth areas that correspond to a buyer’s journey and traffic source.
As mentioned above, growth funnels are the foundation of your overall marketing strategy, and here’s why:
1. Growth funnels help you understand how to relate to your potential & current customers
In a customer-centric world, you need to relate to your customers’ needs depending on where they are on their buyer journey. For instance, if a potential customer is in the awareness stage, this means they are less likely to have full knowledge of your product/service. So communicating with them about your product features or using technical jargon would be irrelevant to them.
Therefore, growth funnels play an important role in identifying the way you communicate with your customers and this has a significant effect on driving customers further down the funnel.
2. Growth funnels help give direction to your growth strategy and tactics
Efficient growth marketing strategies, plans, and tactics need to be based on data. Monitoring growth funnel data will give you significant insights for you to optimise your tactics. For instance, when you have a great number of visitors who don’t convert, you might think about redesigning your landing page or ensuring that your ad/content is relevant to your target customers.
3. Growth funnels help you allocate your budget efficiently
You can easily identify which strategies work best and which marketing tools and tactics to invest in with a funnel-based strategy. This way, you can allocate your limited resources to generate more sales.
Your growth funnels provide the perfect opportunity to have valuable data about every step of your sales process, including macro and micro-level insights.
Macro Insights
Growth funnels allow you to monitor where you are losing potential customers and give you the insights to adjust your marketing activities accordingly. When you have enough data, you will be able to see the complete customer journey, such as how many visitors become leads, and from there, how many leads are qualified- until they become customers. This way, you will have a clear plan to generate or optimise your marketing tactics.
Micro Insights
Growth funnels not only give you a macro view of your sales process, but they can also give you a zoomed-in, micro understanding of customers’ journeys. With CRM software, like Hubspot, you can see exactly where and why customers make decisions.
For example, on Hubspot, you can view from which source (Google ads, Google search, or LinkedIn campaigns) you converted each customer. You are also able to see if they open your emails, if they click the link you provided, and how many times they visit your website.
Considering these data points allows you to know your customers inside and out and helps you tailor their onboarding experience. You can alter your communication, such as highlighting the points important to them and leaving out insignificant details. This is why effectively using a CRM tool is vital in understanding your leads at the micro-level.
Want to add some support and expertise to your funnel-building process? Look no further. Let’s set up a call to talk more about how NBT’s growth experts can help you.
Schedule a callOur last step in creating growth-driven marketing strategies is the OKR and Test & Learn stage. As we’ve mentioned throughout this guide, sustainable growth is not about hacking your way to success. Instead, you need to define your long-term strategic goals to achieve long-term growth.
And this step is not something only high-level positions should implement. This is a structural change that everyone within the company understands. It’s important to invest in ensuring that commitment to long-term goals is embedded in the company culture. Once everyone is on the same page about what goals the company is working towards, every plan, tactic, and task will be infused with those targets. Even the smallest of tasks will be aimed at the bigger picture.
OKRs (objectives and key results) are a way to set company-wide goals and that can be measured through tracking progress and results.
It’s first important to decide on the annual goals of the company. This can be anything from profitability and revenue generation to North Star metrics. These company-level goals can be supported at the product level and sub-brand level.
Let’s say that to grow company revenue, according to your projections, growing the user base of Product A by 15% will be helpful. You can then assign OKRs to your teams. Each team (content, performance, design, product, brand) should have certain goals to achieve, and each should be related to a bigger goal of the company. You can decide on these goals on a quarterly basis and then turn them into monthly action plans.
For example, to grow revenue, you need to generate more leads, and to generate more leads, you should brainstorm some tactics. One tactic can be creating a Youtube campaign targeting certain channels. Then, on a weekly basis, you can look at the numbers and monitor whether Youtube ads helped you achieve more leads. These tactics can be designed and monitored according to the Test & Learn methodology.
Designed by NBT, Test & Learn is a mechanism with which we achieve successful results for B2B and B2C brands. This structure allows us to quickly test and optimise marketing campaigns (whether it is a paid media campaign or not).
With our “Test and Learn” structure, we can constantly monitor, measure and optimise for sustainable growth, so we never lose growth momentum. It eliminates the overwhelming and inefficient process of deciding on a fixed budget for each channel at the beginning of the year and then creating campaigns accordingly. We first look at a goal and come up with different paid and unpaid campaign ideas to make it happen. Then, we analyse the campaign data and iterate.
Test and Learn enables us to reach the right location and persona with the right budget in each campaign. More importantly, it allows us to gain the right insights and iterate.
By using OKRs and Test & Learn methods, you will be able to set significant goals, encourage alignment and motivation, and track every step towards achieving growth!
Our team of growth experts can help you set up your company and team OKRs. So kickstart your growth journey and set up a call today with us to learn more!
Schedule a callON THIS PAGE
How to Create Growth-Driven Strategies
MORE IN THIS GUIDE
