Is your current marketing strategy a ticking time bomb counting down to disaster? If you aren't adapting to the current digital marketplace and embracing Growth Marketing, the answer may trouble you.
In today's digital-focused, information-saturated world, Traditional Marketing approaches are less effective than ever. Companies who cling to these outdated methods will find it harder and harder to find a foothold in the marketplace, all while throwing marketing dollars down the drain.
But what is the alternative? Lean Labs has helped dozens of clients and partners overcome their struggles with old-school marketing efforts by introducing them to a new way of thinking and working.
This article will give you an idea of what exactly Growth Marketing is and give you a heads up about the risks of ignoring this marketing approach.
What is Growth Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Current Marketing Efforts Could Sink You
Growth Marketing is a holistic approach to marketing that considers your entire customer buyer journey instead of just looking at lead acquisition, as Traditional Marketing often does. This is often called a full-funnel approach.
This approach focuses on all six levers of growth, which allows you to focus on development at every stage in the process. The six levers of growth are:
- Awareness: How much traffic are you getting to your website and landing pages?
- Acquisition: Are the leads you are acquiring high-quality leads that are likely to convert?
- Activation: Are you doing all you can to nurture those leads and encourage them to step into the sales pipeline?
- Revenue: What are you doing to convert those leads into paying customers?
- Retention: How are you making sure you continually provide your customers with an experience that encourages upsells, cross-sells, and resells?
- Referral: Are you delighting your customers enough that they will give testimonials?
A cornerstone of Growth Marketing methods is content generation. By creating high-quality, valuable content for your target market and leveraging SEO, you can bring organic traffic to your website that will compound over time.
Maybe you’ve just read the description of Growth Marketing above and said to yourself, sounds interesting, but I don’t think it’s for me. Perhaps you are comfortable with your current marketing efforts. Maybe you are confident that your product or service is such a stand-out that you don’t need to try anything too innovative on the marketing side of the house. Allow us to provide some information on the risks you’re taking by ignoring this industry shift and sticking with your old, Traditional Marketing approach.
Reason #1: Your Results Won’t Compound
We mentioned above that traffic coming from high-quality, helpful content will have compounding results. The more valuable your content is, the more often it will be shared or linked from outside sites. The more often this happens, the higher you will rank in search results. The higher you rank in search results, the more leads will find your content organically, continuing the cycle.
Conversely, Traditional ad campaigns stop returning the moment they stop running, which will constantly be a financial drain. Instead of spending time and money upfront creating a piece of content that will continue to generate traffic, a Traditional campaign will slowly drain your budget over time. As soon as you stop paying, that flow of traffic is gone.
This isn’t to say that ads have no place in an effective marketing strategy. Ads can be a great short-term play, but they need to align with specific campaign goals. In short, relying on ads as your sole means of traffic generation is a costly solution to a problem that can be solved much more effectively using Growth Marketing techniques.
Reason #2: You Don’t Always See The Big Picture
Growth Marketing looks at all six levers of growth, but Traditional Marketing is far less holistic. You may be asking, What’s wrong with a targeted approach? To use a very overworn adage, focusing on only a few metrics rather than the whole picture runs the risk of losing sight of the forest for the trees. It’s like continually turning up the water pressure without bothering to check if there is a kink in the hose. Don’t you want to ensure your entire conversion funnel is performing before you start pushing leads toward it?
A typical example of this in the marketing world is when a company uses paid ads to push its leads to an underperforming website. When those leads fail to convert, they simply run more ads. But the problem isn’t traffic; it’s conversion. It’s always possible to focus on growth metrics during a more targeted campaign, but that requires you to continue to gather data with the intent of taking further action toward optimization in the future. By solely pursuing a Traditional Marketing campaign, you may miss critical points of friction that are siphoning off your leads—and your profits.
Reason #3: Your Current Method Isn’t Nimble Enough
Traditional methods of marketing just aren’t as flexible as Growth Marketing. Consider, for example, a website redesign. A conventional approach to redesigning a company website involves several months of work on the back end, followed by a formal launch, followed by… nothing. Once the new website is out there, chances are you will let it sit for a few years, then start the whole process over again.
Contrast this with a more Growth-oriented approach to a website redesign. In this process, the team continually uses actual user data to iterate and improve the site in smaller increments. This allows them to target their efforts, energy, and resources on the parts of the website they know aren’t working, rather than just trying to guess which site features they think aren’t working.
In short, Traditional Marketing approaches are too slow for the current marketplace. While you are stuck spinning your wheels planning your next big move, your competition is working in sprints toward incremental growth goals. You're falling behind.
So, What is Growth Marketing?
What is Growth Marketing? It’s the future - and we've seen its success in action. We have helped brands gain success through generating over $100M in revenue and raising over $90M in funding. If you're ready to explore the benefits of Growth Marketing, your next step is to download our Growth Playbook! It will offer you helpful resources and additional information about our approach to determine if working with our growth team might be a good fit for you and your growth goals.
Mallory is a Growth Marketer at Lean Labs, working with brands to ignite their growth engine through conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing growth marketing strategies.
