How does Marketing fit into growth?

Growth is the number one business goal for many organisations at the moment, along with disruption, transformation and digitalisation. It’s certainly an exciting time, but with so many moving and evolving customer behaviours to try to navigate and leverage, how do you ensure marketing is properly contributing to growth?  

There is often a disconnect between how people view marketing and how it can support business growth; reducing it to branding, logos and colour palettes and overlooking marketing’s multi-channel touchpoints, communicating and imparting value throughout each stage of the sales funnel and converting prospects into tangible, qualified leads. 

By properly aligning marketing with your growth goals, marketing can prove an invaluable tool in capturing new audiences’ attention. However, this requires an inquisitive and thorough approach from digital marketers to explore new avenues rather than relying on the same tried-and-tested approaches. Standing out from the crowd has never been so important to offset increased client churn, low profit margins, and a shortage of quality digital talent! 

What is the link between marketing and growth? 

Growth involves increasing revenue and resources simultaneously, and in a nutshell boils down to getting enough new clients or customers to support increased headcount whilst still generating profit. Marketing should seem like the natural tool for scoping out new target personas and audiences to drive conversions, however this is usually attributed to sales or business development teams instead.  

What is the role of marketing in business development? 

Whilst marketing and business development may have common goals, business development would be in a much trickier position without the qualified leads that marketing provides by identifying new personas to target, testing and optimising content, and using a multi-channel approach to reach out to them with targeted messaging in line with the customer journey. However, while marketing may have access to detailed analytics and an empathic understanding of their target personas, they don’t have face-to-face contact with clients or customers.  

This is where business development can support marketing by providing insight into the language customers or clients use to communicate their pain points. With a greater sense of collaboration between the two teams, marketing would be better able hone its communications to align with client and customer needs, thus generating more conversions and qualified leads for business development to nurture through to a sale. 

How to enhance and align your marketing and growth strategies 

Since 2011, there has been an emerging area of marketing called ‘growth marketing’. Growth marketing seeks to leverage different digital channels to create completely optimised, personalised and highly-efficient campaigns to capture new audiences’ attention at multiple touchpoints.  

Pardot’s research suggests that: 

• 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to a salesperson  

• 57% of the purchase decision is already complete before the customer even calls the supplier 

This means the groundwork that growth marketing puts in reaching new target personas and communicating value on multiple channels can significantly increase the efficiency and likelihood of a sale or conversion; supporting company growth and revenue. 

But how do you achieve this? With the right digital marketing function! To create a honed growth marketing strategy (for your own organisation or to offer it to your own clients) you will need the following in-house skills: 

- Insightful persona identification 

Identifying new audiences and thoroughly putting together a persona outline requires a lot of insight into the sales funnel and the different modes of communication that will meet their different pain points at each stage. To do this, digital marketers need great experience and written communication skills to be able to capture their audience’s challenges and meet them with your brand’s value proposition.  

- Analytics to drive strategy 

Analytics is a broad discipline within digital marketing and can be used to better understand your efforts across your marketing channels and efforts. Being able to understand the insights from your SEO, paid and organic social, email marketing, PPC, your website’s user experience functionality, and so much more are all part of a great digital marketer’s arsenal to identify areas that are working well and where improvement or refinement is needed.  

Allowing analytics and insights to inform changes in strategy contributes to a macro level of optimisation of your overall marketing efforts too! 

- Optimisation to increase efficiency 

At a micro level, however, top digital talent know how to utilise A/B testing to create completely optimised campaigns targeted to align with their target personas’ pain points down to the last detail. Whilst this may take some initial time in set up and gathering data, fully-optimised campaigns increase conversions whilst decreasing acquisition costs by up to half, according to McKinsey Digital. 

- Cross-channel marketing for greater reach 

With customers and clients using online resources for all areas of life, ecommerce, research, leisure, education – and so much more – there are a multitude of available touchpoints to leverage to increase your brand’s visibility. Being able to coordinate cross-channel digital campaigns based on customer behaviours will be an increasingly sought-after skillset in digital professionals.  

- Data-driven lead generation 

Properly documenting and presenting the data collected by marketing will better secure the relationship between marketing and business development, and ultimately growth. Mapping out intent signals, goal completions and conversions will create a map of quality leads to follow up with from the sales team. This can involve data analytics, knowledge of different CRMs, and a range of communication and inter-personal skills. 

Integrating your business growth strategy with your marketing plans requires top-down buy in, support and open communication between teams and departments. Easier said than done, some might say! But with the right digital team behind you, sophisticated growth marketing can better support your business, drive revenue and allow you to scale and grow your operations. 

How can Energize Digital support your growth strategy? 

Energize Digital helps build businesses with cutting-edge digital strategy at their core, partnering with leading agencies and client-side brands for over 10 years. With a talent network of over 100,000 digital marketing professionals, Energize Digital is a preferred supplier to many of the world’s leading media agencies and brands. Our consultants specialise solely within one digital marketing channel, giving you access to a true market specialist who is continually developing their knowledge of technology, market conditions and employment trends, so you only get quality CVs aligned with your tech stack and growth plans.  For expert guidance, contact Energize Digital today.