Growth Marketing in 2019

After figuring our your client persona or your customer avatar, your next step is to ask questions to deeply know your customer? How do they spend their day? What apps do they use? What job are they “hiring” your product or service to deliver? What are their other choices when deciding whether to buy from you? Using survey tools like Typeform will ensure that you can engage with your customers in an on-brand way.

Humans are wired to process and remember stories better than raw facts. The reason for telling your brand’s story is so that people can buy based on the rationale (price, utility etc) and based on their need for connection (trust, empathy etc). At it’s heart, your brand story connects your customer’s problem with your well-packaged solution.

The first step is to look at the ways that current prospects find out about your company. Is it through referrals, social content, Google search or other ways? Once you’ve got some basic stats on what’s working, we’d recommend that you look to optimise these channels first. If it’s referrals, build a referral email into your sales process or start an affiliate/partner program to reward your referrers. If it’s Google search, look at the pages people are landing on and refine your on-page content to include links to your other content, include more long-tail keywords and other tactics to boost your authority.

Once you’ve optimised your current best-performing channels, you can branch out and test new marketing channels.

According to Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, some of the main channels for customer acquisition are:

• Traditional & Non-Traditional PR – an example would getting an article in your local newspaper
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – using targeted Google Ads
• Online Ads & Offline Ads – using Facebook Ads, newspaper ads, podcast ads etc
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – refining your website content to draw traffic
• Blog content on your own site and as guest posts on other sites
• Community building – starting groups, associations & member-only content
• Viral strategies – incentivise referrals & find out why people share then refine your process
• Trade shows – set up a booth or attend and speak to other attendees
• Speaking Engagements & Events – build authority and foster community
• Existing platforms – look at using existing social media sites, forums, groups to contribute and build trust

Gabriel recommends test the above channels one at a time, refining your process and doubling-down on the channels where you see engagement at a sustainable ROI (based on time & money).

Your website is often a major marketing channel for your business and all paths on your website should have a clear call-to-action (CTA). By knowing the problems that your customers face, you can highlight these problems (through your content and testimonials) and start the conversation about how your product/service looks to address this problem.

Your main static website pages (Home, About Us, Services/Shop, Contact) outline who you are, the problem you’re looking to solve and the promises your product/service delivers on. The dynamic content on your blog will highlight your industry knowledge, client testimonials, updates to your services and any content that builds trust and tells your story. As an example, if your brand highlights working with your team, create team profiles, videos with staff members and allow members of your team to produce content. Take your key brand propositions and build these through the content you produce.

When you’re looking at growth strategies for your business in 2019, first define your brand story, then communicate that story through customer acquisition channels then reinforce that story through content on your website. Test new strategies each month and double-down on ones that perform well, whilst cutting back on the ones that are underperforming. Through experimenting and building your marketing dataset, you’ll be well-placed to boost the ROI on your marketing and see growth in 2019.