How to Create a Growth Marketing Strategy

One of the most important decisions a B2B organisation makes is to plan how it will grow. As a B2B marketer, you play a critical role in driving revenue growth and profitability through organic growth.

The digital revolution has fundamentally altered how B2B marketers capture growth. It has accelerated the pace of business, expanded the scope of competition, and introduced new ways of connecting with audiences. And in this rapidly changing environment, traditional B2B marketing approaches are failing to meet business needs or customer expectations.

The Problem with B2B Marketing

One problem is that the standard B2B marketing and sales process is highly fragmented. Frequently, teams are structured according to layers of the marketing funnel. For instance:

• The marketing team operates at the top of the funnel (awareness and interest).

• The sales team rules over the mid-funnel (consideration and conversion).

• The product/customer service team handles the bottom of funnel activity (loyalty and advocacy stage).

In this system, cross-collaboration between teams is almost non-existent. Branding, digital, and field teams are all focused on their own tasks, and no one is talking with business development, sales or customer service. Moreover, each team only looks at performance metrics for their specific part of the funnel. And because this data is not shared, teams then optimise strategies and tactics at the expense of each other.

Take lead generation as an example. In a traditional setup, responsibility for generating a consistent stream of leads sits with the marketing team. To meet quotas, they often rely on outbound tactics like paid advertising to get as many new leads as possible, as quickly as possible. However, a focus on quantity over quality negatively affects sales and service, as low-quality leads are harder to convert and retain.

Do not get us wrong, paid advertising is a valuable tool and it can provide good results when used correctly. But should it be the main growth driver of your marketing strategy? Similar to M&A activity, paid marketing can provide a nice short-term boost, but only for so long. As time goes on, competition and audience saturation will drive up costs, making it increasingly difficult to maintain performance.

The solution is to use a mixture of organic and inorganic strategies to optimise performance on multiple growth fronts (more on this later).

The second issue with a traditional approach to B2B marketing is it is past-oriented. Everything is developed based on last year’s performance data. In a fast-paced environment, that might reflect very different market conditions.

Marketers use assumptions about audience behaviour to design big annual campaigns months in advance. Rather than looking at emerging opportunities, this means traditional marketing looks at what worked in the past—and does more of the same.

These disconnections make it difficult for marketing to deliver any meaningful growth. What is needed is an approach that takes a comprehensive view of the modern B2B buyers' journey. One that keeps an eye on future growth.

What is growth marketing?

Enter ‘growth marketing’— a discipline that emerged from the tech startup scene in the noughties and has slowly gained traction in the wider B2B world.

Also known as ‘growth hacking’, this agile approach to marketing takes a full funnel view of the customer experience. The point is not just to acquire leads. It is also to continuously build audience engagement and ultimately turn each existing customer into a brand advocate.

Growth hackers employ collaborative idea generation and problem-solving across marketing, sales, development, etc. They collect and analyse qualitative research and quantitative data to gain insights into present customer behaviours.

They then use rapid micro-experimentation to test, refine, or eliminate ideas to optimise performance. Doing so allows them to quickly pivot campaigns and dynamically invest in initiatives that are driving growth.

For growth marketers, the focus is on accountability. Campaign success is not measured by the number of leads generated, but rather by the growth it creates.

By injecting creativity, agility, and analytics into B2B marketing strategy, they transform it into an engine for creating business value. Rather than focusing on the past, they look to the future.

A Simple Framework for Thinking About Growth

To create value, growth marketers are active across three broad growth dimensions: investing, creating, and performing.

• Investing: Growth marketers look at existing sources of leads, traffic, and sales and double down on current high-growth activities. For example, finding ways to deepen their relationship with existing customers and create more brand evangelists.

• Creating: Growth marketers build value by designing new ways to draw fresh audiences in, creating demand and finding new sources of growth. They track performance trends, dig deep to understand their customers, conduct rapid-fire experiments, and learn from failure.

• Performing: Growth marketers are agile and able to iterate quickly. They continually optimise core activities and align marketing, sales, and customer service to create a seamless buyers' journey.

This is not to suggest that each dimension needs to be weighted equally. Nor do you necessarily have to focus on all three of these dimensions simultaneously. There is no single formula for driving organic growth - you need to find what works for you.

Savvy marketing managers either amplify or dial down each dimension based on their strategic marketing goals. Success comes from executing your growth strategy with vigour, across multiple paths, using a test-learn-adapt mindset.

Building the Foundations of Organic Growth

There are some essential B2B marketing capabilities you must possess to capitalise on growth opportunities. These core competencies include content creation, a consistent and engaging social presence, and marketing automation, data and analytics for customer experience and a 360º customer view. 

Depending on the growth dimension you are pursuing, you must also hone different strategic marketing qualities to set yourself apart from competitors.

For instance, if you are focusing on performance, key differentiators will include using automation and advanced analytics to improve the customer experience. As a creative grower, you need the design-thinking skills to analyse data and extract customer insights to identify new opportunities. To activate the investment dimension, you need to understand where growth is currently occurring within your existing strategies and aggressively reallocate resources. This entails having analytic capabilities embedded in your processes so that you can identify and unlock funds for growth priorities.

And it is not just the marketing team. To effectively develop these capabilities the whole organisation must be aligned on growth. It is a whole-system goal that requires buy-in from sales, IT, operations, finance, products and services, etc. Therefore, you need to develop a strong internal marketing strategy to bring everyone on board.

Taking Steps Towards Growth

Now that we have a framework for thinking about organic growth, it is time to put theory into practice. Namely, steps you can take to inject a growth marketing mindset into your existing digital marketing strategy to make it more effective.

Have a Clear Strategy

Above all else, you must have concrete objectives and a clear marketing plan. Yes, you want to drive more growth. But what exactly does this mean?

What constitutes growth for your purposes? It is increased newsletter subscribers, conversion numbers, cart value, or subscription length? What business goal does your strategy support? Know what you want to achieve, set KPIs, and then execute in a focused and deliberate manner with your eyes on the prize.

Do Your Market Research

Capitalising on organic growth requires solid market research to identify external opportunities. So, observe your competitors and learn where they are succeeding (and failing). Research your target market to determine pain points and buying behaviours.

Use this information to find gaps in the market you can occupy and ways to position your brand.

Do a Marketing Audit

Any business focused on growth should also take stock of its current status, assets, and internal opportunities.

Take a look at each marketing campaign. What is working, and what is not? Where do your leads and traffic come from currently, and what are your conversion rates? Look at existing customers—what was their route to purchase, and how did they interact with your brand online?

Run Experiments

Be agile, try new things, and cultivate a (healthy) attitude of one-upmanship when it comes to competition. Do not just rely on hunches. Create a hypothesis on the types of marketing that would resonate with your audience. Then design small-scale experiments to test your theories and only grow what works.

Bring on team members with a firm grasp of data and analytics to help run experiments and measure the results. Document and talk about your results and iterate quickly.

Invest in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content forms the core of your organic growth strategy. Invest in long-form, SEO-focused blog posts, organised into content pillars.

From there, branch out and try different formats. Give yourself license to be creative and find what your audience responds to. Try infographics and animation, original research and interactive tools, video, podcasts, downloadable ebooks, webinars, and other online events.

With every iteration, make sure that the content you publish has a clear purpose and gives the user direction for what to do next.

Find New Purposes and Outlets for Your Content

Use social media marketing and email marketing to extend the reach of your blog posts by sharing them with your target audience.

Brainstorm opportunities for getting more from your content. Can you turn a blog post into a video for YouTube or other social media platforms? Or use a social livestream as inspiration for a blog post? Can an interview series become a podcast? Explore ways to expand your reach through multiple channels.

Look beyond your digital marketing for re-purposing opportunities. Many people overlook content from in-person events, for example. You can transform a keynote speech into lots of snackable content for social.

Encourage Collaboration

The internal team is key to understanding your customer and uncovering new opportunities, but external partners are also vital. Crowdsource ideas from across your company, but don't forget to tune in to your customers and competitors directly.

Cultivate relationships with influencers in your industry/niche, and with brand evangelists. Crowdsource ideas by using social listening tools. Turn your website into a platform where community members can engage with each other and share relevant user-generated content. Use tactics like referral programs to recruit existing customers. 

Optimise Your Technology Stack

Today’s B2B customers are quite adamant that they want suppliers to provide a B2C-level customer experience. They want more channels, more convenience, and more personalised service across the purchase journey. 

Sales and marketing automation is key to meeting these expectations long term. With automation, you can create a tailored and targeted customer experience for customers. For example, you can use behavioural triggers and workflows to provide each individual customers with exactly the right information at exactly the right time. From the customer's perspective, you are practically a mind-reader.

Understand Your Customer Journey

Understand that the modern B2B purchase journey is anything but linear. Use marketing automation to track how your customer interacts with you online, and use this data to serve more of what they want.

Reduce friction wherever possible. If they are interested in a topic, give them more about that topic. Create a landing page offering immediate access to high-value resources. Follow up with an invitation to a related event, and make it easy for them to book. Optimise your website for conversion and create self-service tools, so they can take action without having to wait on a salesperson.

Enhance Organic Growth with Paid Strategies

Organic growth does not happen overnight, but the careful application of paid marketing can help speed up the process.

For instance, use retargeting to stay top of mind with people who have already visited your site to ensure they convert. Or expand your reach by boosting social media posts or using lookalike audiences to find more people just like your existing audience.

You can also use paid ads to make sure your content lands in front of exactly the right people. Or use lead generation ads to capture details, then follow up with an email to cultivate a deeper conversation.

Closing Thoughts

B2B organisations are currently facing a challenging environment. Rapidly evolving customer expectations demand a change of approach. By adopting future-oriented strategies like growth marketing, B2B businesses can leverage agility, insights, creativity, and tech to not only survive but thrive in this brave new world.

If you want to learn more about transforming your B2B marketing efforts into a growth engine, please get in touch. Our team will provide advice, support, and guidance for developing an effective growth marketing strategy.