How to Implement a Growth Marketing Strategy for your Online Business

• Read original article here

Growing an online business is a complex process. Besides determination and persistence, the key ingredient for a successful company and business is great growth marketing strategies. If you know how to market your business and target your efforts towards growth you'll be on the right path.

How to implement a growth marketing strategy?  That’s the question that we’ll be tackling in these lines. A viable idea of what you need to do is the very foundation of forming and using a suitable marketing strategy. For the purpose of growing your business, the actions you want to take are correlated to growth marketing.

Growth marketing is a data-driven process that aims to achieve growth fast. It uses the traditional marketing model as a foundation and upgrades it with processes such as analysis of whole customer experience, A/B testing, experimenting with new approaches, data-driven email marketing campaigns, and similar.

Growth marketing strategy is your best bet and here’s what you can do to implement it in your business.

Here's a tip that can be applied across all your channels. The compelling nature of storytelling is what surfaces new customers for businesses and (not rarely) transforms them into loyal consumers.

So what makes storytelling so effective?

The answer is the emotional response that provokes. When content manages to surface an emotion in readers, it has a better chance of being remembered than generic content.

Experiment with storytelling in email campaigns, on social media platforms, in blog posts, or on your website. Brand storytelling, for example, is very useful for building trust in consumers and assuring them that you are a brand they should rely on. By telling them what makes your company tick, how you came up with the idea of your brand, or who are the team members who keep the company running, you’ll win them over. This emotional connection that is established through storytelling can’t be achieved with any other form of content.

Did you know that 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know?

It is quite logical when you think about it. Everyone would trust more in the recommendation made by a friend rather than a brand. That's what makes referrals a customer-magnet.

To give you an example, we should reflect on Dropbox’s referral program. The platform works on a free to a premium model. All users get 2GB of storage for free when they sign up. But, whoever is consistently using Dropbox will realize that these 2GB can be used up quickly. And there's the incentive. Dropbox offers its users an additional 500MB for every friend they successfully refer to. With the referrals, the users can get up to 16GB for free.

The key to a successful referral program is motivating users to bring new customers with something good. It needs to be an offer that will make the users instantly think “I want this!” Dropbox found the solution in extra storage space. What could that be for your brand? That’s what you need to determine.

Often these referral programs are powered by discounts which are the simplest solution if you sell goods. Online businesses whose niche is concerned with software can offer the incentive in the form of free trials or free upgrades. To enhance the effect of referral program you can add a sense of urgency with limited-time opportunity for referrals.

Blogs have shown to be one of the most effective investments for driving traffic organically. While you work on email campaigns or social media strategy, interesting and informative blog posts lure a new audience to your website. Isn't that amazing?

Considering that companies express that generating traffic and leads is one of the biggest marketing challenges, blogs can be a perfect fix for that.

In order for your blog to drive traffic to the website, you need to make it worthy of the audience's attention.

Blog posts need to have the following features:

Each of these factors ensures that your blog posts will attract readers and retain them on the website. Both quality and quantity are essential. Meaning, that you should have a professional writer on your team and publish fresh content 3-4 times a week at the very least.

When it comes to blog topics, they should be relevant to your niche.

Otherwise, you’ll attract users with zero chance of website conversion. Try to add a few evergreen topics that will drive traffic consistently. While trending topics tend to peak during a specific moment, evergreen topics bring a moderate but regular flow of new readers to the blog.

Besides creating content on your website, you can tap into unexplored platforms with guest blogging and interviews. What this does for your online business is that it introduces your brand to a new audience. You might have exploited all your channels but you can never run out of platforms where you can be featured.

However, you should be careful with choosing a website for your guest posting or interview. It should be a website in your industry so that their audience overlaps with yours.

In the interview, your brand will be mentioned for sure as you will be introduced as an important figure in your company (whether you are the owner or the marketer). On the other hand, in guest posts, you need to be the one who will link back to your blog with branded keywords. Of course, you need to make sure that the link makes sense in that content which leads us back to the previously mentioned point that the other platform should be in your industry.

Besides guest blogging and interviews, there are other platforms where you can share your thoughts and get traffic to your website in return. Use platforms such as Quora and Reddit to answer users’ questions, post content on Medium or LinkedIn publishing platform, and overall, use authority domains with a massive audience where anyone can post on.

When posting on any of these platforms, again, ensure that you add a link to your website or blog post relevantly. This strategy will give you immediate reach and you’ll notice that your volume will pick up with time.

Originality is always a praised trait with brands. Team that up with great opportunities and your business will experience the desired growth.

As the opportunities that you can offer depend solely on the type of business you are, let’s unravel the mystery of these unique opportunities with an example.

Before Airbnb became a multi-million dollar company, they were investing in their growth. What made these investments profitable is their originality. One of the ideas they came up with is providing free professional photography services every individual that lists on their site. An incredible way to offer something to your potential customers don’t you think? This wasn’t just an amazing engine for driving growth but it also made their website look more professional.

If you want to stand out among competitors and drive people to your website, you need to give a good reason for users to choose you. Create a special opportunity for your potential customers that will allow them to get to know your brand and your services better.

Social media can be a gold mine in terms of customer acquisition if you know how to exploit it to its maximum capacity.

To maximize your social media activities, you need to revise your social media metrics and impressions. Identify your current status on social media and then build up from there.

Use analytics tools to collect data or rely on internal analysis features such as Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights gives you information about your page’s performance, including customer demographics, engagement of your posts, and similar.

Ultimately, you need to adapt your actions to your target audience. All of these ways of implementing a growth marketing strategy start from knowing your audience and providing relevant content, offers, or information. It is impossible to achieve growth without tailoring your efforts to your target audience.

Besides that, you should consistently monitor your progress. Each action you take should be followed up with an analysis of the results. The data will provide you with the direction in which you need to steer your future marketing plans.

Thank you! Subscribe to our newsletter! Join us on social networks! See you!