Nobody needs growth marketing… until they do

2024-09-09 17:22 Industry

Having to self-explain is a sign that something in the perception of you or your business is broken. And, truth be told, we are still looking for ways to explain how growth marketing (the thing we do at Solid Water) is different from all sorts of marketings. Sometimes growth marketing is confused with digital marketing, sometimes with performance. And most times, people are just not interested in learning new marketing terms - rightfully so!

All they want is ‘simple solutions that work’ if we may quote one of our clients.

From a client perspective that’s the only way forward, but these solutions don’t come naturally. Clients must know that simply hiring agencies with expertise in ‘digital’ is probably not going to be the solution that works - and when clients say ‘work’ they mean actual ‘sales’ (then comes ROI and cost-benefit ratio).

The main difference about working within the growth marketing paradigm is the inevitability of facing the North Star metric.

‘Maybe’ is just not good enough to justify the budget allocated.

Basically, growth marketers are religious about attribution modelling, i.e. we absolutely must know what it is within the funnel that’s triggering purchases and, further down, customer loyalty.

This is especially relevant for businesses that are in the pre-launch phase. The unknowns are plenty, the budgets are tight and the investors are expecting you to deliver against steep targets by the end of the year (or quarter).

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How do you walk this tightrope?

The answer is almost certainly in the growth marketing approach which always starts with a detailed study of your future customers, their pain points, their needs, feelings and vocab - how do people describe the problem you are trying to solve with your product. Is there anything that is/will be stopping them from buying from you or from buying from you repeatedly, or from recommending your products to their friends?

Daria Partas, co-founder of Solid Water marketing agency:

"One of our clients had built a profitable digital-service business but was now reaching a plateau in its acquisition rate. The ROI was coming down and the client was looking for new sources of growth. We asked them about their retention rate and strategy - turns out it had not been [ever] considered as part of the business growth trajectory.

The service was very much intended as a one-off purchase and customers never felt the need to return, as the product fulfilled its purpose once purchased and no complimentary services or upsells were promoted by the company. The brand identity, or rather lack thereof, also did little to help - no stand out design, community element or engaging comms program.

We offered to rethink the business’ North Star from the number of one-time sales transactions to repeat purchases.

In order to start working towards a new North Star, we sat down with the product team, and together conducted an in-depth customer research that helped inform ‘actually very simple’ additional product features that were 100% relevant to the customer base of the business.

We saw the return rate going from under 5% to 20% in just 3 weeks".

Growth marketing is not married to tech startups

Although growth marketing has established itself as a marketing approach strongly associated with well-funded cool and ambitious startups (pretty much every ‘Monzo’ and ‘Revolut’ have a Growth Lead doing growth marketing for them), the principles guiding it can be applied to all businesses with appetite for unlocking new paths for revenue.

Growth could be in the untapped customer vertical or in a new geography or in a new product bundle. And the good news is that a growth marketing programme can run alongside your established marketing operation.

Anastasia Dobronravova, Head of Strategic Marketing at Solid Water:

"Recently we worked with a client whose only source of leads was a Paid Search campaign. The campaign was bringing enough leads to sustain a profit but the owners were hungry for more — they wanted to establish their brand in the coveted US market.

However, simply launching a Paid Search campaign in the US didn't work. The US market is very competitive and expensive. Winning a sophisticated customer in a saturated market with a single channel-approach is a rarity. Our conversations with the founders fleshed out the need to better understand the pain points of their potential US customers. And in a market like the US, launching a ROI-positive campaign requires a deep understanding of your target audience addressed with multi-touchpoint strategies.

To develop distinct acquisition and retention strategies, we conducted in-depth qualitative research and identified underexplored customer segments. Our outreach strategies targeted geographical clusters where these segments were concentrated. This research also informed the product roadmap for this particular market.

It is worth noting that while we were working on launching in the US, the client's main Paid Search campaigns continued to generate leads — nothing had to be put on pause. Additionally, some insights from our research later enhanced their performance".

Maria Tsarkova, CMO and co-founder at Solid Water:

"Shifting to growth marketing from your conventional mix of paid and organic social might not be something on your radar but if you are raising a funding round to move from PMF to the next stage, you really must think differently - and that means your marketing operation must be completely reformed.

This is what we recommended to one of our clients.

Before raising the Series A, the company’s strategy was dictated by the product roadmap. Product decided which features to release first and how to present them to the customer. It worked well, as the product had proven to be very relevant to the beachhead segment and had generated some organic growth.

However, now they had to prove they could scale fast and that required a sound experimentation framework and mindset adjustment. The investors were giving money to help the business achieve 200,000 users on the platform in a year with 40% weekly return rate.

In order to achieve these steep targets, the company had to shift to the growth mindset which implies establishing an experimental calendar run by a growth team (for Series A startups this task can be outsourced to a partner agency aka Solid Water).

We developed a backlog of 30 initial hypotheses and ran experiments to verify them. These are crude, stick-man style tests on several digital acquisition channels and a few within the product, covering everything from the onboarding journey to comms leading to the first purchase.

It was a real mentality shift for the client - product feature releases, marketing campaigns and even operations models suddenly needed to be adjusted quickly to scale based on the hypotheses that were being proven during these tests. This is also not a one-off event, the client needed to prepare the team to a new modus operandi where ‘agile’ was to become their new mantra. In order to scale fast, you need to be fast at testing and implementing the learnings - no way around it".

It is worth noting that although ‘growth marketing’ as a new marketing paradigm has emerged recently in the world of tech unicorns, it is nothing more than a strategic and holistic approach to doing marketing, underpinned by a robust martech infrastructure which allows to collect real-time data and transform it into actionable insights to run ‘growth sprints’, another fashionable word to describe agility in running marketing campaigns.

So growth marketing methods can be applied within pretty much any business, including traditional brick-and-mortar businesses such as hotels and retail shops.

And while we see growth marketing as an evolved version of strategic approach to doing comms, it is still scarcely available as a service - something we blame to the hyper fragmentation of services in the marketing industry. We touched upon this in one of our earlier newsletter editions. Take a look here.

More about our services on our website.

Get in touch: marketing@solidwateragency.com