Navigating the marketing ecosystem can be overwhelming for small businesses and nonprofits, especially when your goal is growth. You may have heard the term “growth marketing,” but what exactly is it? And how can it help your business or nonprofit’s success? 

Defining Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is a holistic approach to marketing and business development. It focuses on understanding the customer and donor journey and developing effective strategies to convert them into paying customers and active donors. 

This approach drives sustainable, long-term business growth by focusing on customer and donor relationships, inbound marketing, optimizing marketing operations, and bridging the gap between sales and marketing teams. 

Rather than simply promoting one-time purchases, growth marketing focuses on understanding customer behavior over time and creating marketing strategies tailored to fit the needs of your customers and donors. Collecting actionable data requires careful segmentation of your customers and leads to deliver highly targeted content and messages. 

For example, if a customer recently purchased from you, you might start an email sequence to encourage them to spread the word about your business or make additional purchases. On the other hand, a potential customer may need basic information that introduces them to your product or service and gently nudges them toward making their first purchase. 

Growth marketing also involves optimizing marketing operations and workflow processes. Marketing and sales teams collaborate best when efficient systems for gathering and analyzing data and leveraging automation tools are in place. Their connection helps to optimize customer journeys, convert leads, and establish long-term relationships with customers and donors. 

Additionally, growth marketing enables businesses and nonprofits to gain insights into their customers’ interests so they can identify opportunities to increase engagement, develop deeper relationships, and ultimately increase revenue or donations. 

Understanding the Benefits of Growth Marketing

Growth marketing focuses heavily on understanding customer behavior. Through in-depth and iterative research, growth marketing professionals and agencies develop effective strategies to convert your audience into paying customers and active donors. 

Investing time and resources in building relationships with existing and potential customers levels the playing field for small brands. These relationships maximize ROI for small budgets.

Growth marketing has many benefits for small businesses and nonprofits, including:

• Increased trust and credibility for deeper customer relationships 
• Enhanced customer retention with higher lifetime value
• Expanded brand awareness for more effective lead generation
• Scalable marketing operations workflows for small teams

Understanding the customer journey and developing strategies tailored to fit the needs of your customers and donors gives businesses and nonprofits insights into their customers’ interests. These insights highlight opportunities to increase engagement, develop deeper relationships, and ultimately increase revenue or donations. 

Developing Goals for Growth

Before starting your growth marketing journey, establish clear, measurable goals for your program. Identifying your strategic goals will help you plan and track the progress of your campaigns. 

Start by asking yourself what you want to achieve with your growth marketing efforts. Do you want to increase revenue? Increase donations? Improve your organization’s visibility and establish authority? 

Once you have identified your goals, you can then create specific objectives that will help you reach these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, your objectives might include increasing leads by 10%, increasing conversions by 5%, and increasing average order value by 10%. 

Consider how you will measure your success. Marketing paves the path for sales, but the length of the process makes it difficult to connect a single marketing activity with the resulting sale. Marketers track conversions, leads, or customer and donor engagement to measure campaign success. Having measurable targets and metrics in place will help you accurately monitor the progress of your growth marketing campaigns.

Crafting Your Growth Strategy

A well-rounded growth strategy will help you identify opportunities to attract and engage new leads while retaining the loyalty of the customers you’ve served. Identify the channels and platforms that your customers and donors use. Knowing where your audience is most active and engaged will help you create and optimize campaigns for maximum reach and impact.

Using the customer journey as a guide, you can engineer connections and content to ignite a response at every stage:

You would create fun content for potential customers who don’t know you yet. They don’t know they have a problem – they’re completely unaware of you and your value.

You’d craft educational content for those potential customers with a stronger inkling of their issue. Use this awareness stage to establish your authority as a resource. It’s time to shine with your case studies and social proof.

Potential customers who understand their challenges are seeking a solution and need help making the final decision. They need to know the price and how to pay. Don’t muddy the waters. You want to encourage action.

Remember that growth marketing is an ongoing process. As customer needs and behaviors change, your strategy should evolve to keep up and capitalize on new opportunities. Staying ready for change means monitoring and analyzing data regularly and pivoting as needed.

Implementing Your Growth Plan

Now that you’ve developed a strategy, it’s time to implement your growth plan. This phase is where a growth marketing agency can help. A good agency will provide a comprehensive suite of services ranging from customer research and data analysis to content creation and social media marketing. 

The agency you choose should understand the unique needs of your business or nonprofit and be able to craft a strategy that fits your goals and budget. Additionally, they should have the resources and expertise to help you implement and manage campaigns and measure their success. 

Meet with a few providers before making your decision. Since they will work very closely with your team, look for a team that’s highly compatible with yours.

Measuring Your Success

Measuring the success of your growth campaigns is essential to ensuring that you are on track to meet your goals. Evaluating key metrics such as revenue, conversions, leads, and customer and donor satisfaction provides a baseline for your performance. 

Consistently analyzing your data will help you identify which campaigns are performing well and which need to be adjusted. Regular data analysis can also spotlight opportunities or potential setbacks early. 

Competitor analysis is an underemphasized component of market research. Knowing what your competitors are doing and how it’s impacting their growth will help you stay ahead of the game and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Growth marketing is a holistic blend of marketing and business development. With the right strategy, tools, and data-driven insights, you can accelerate your small business or nonprofit’s growth and get closer to achieving your goals.