How to Align Growth Design With Your Marketing Strategy
Do you know what type of companies achieve the biggest success in the tech market? Companies that are good at two things: providing the best solutions for customers’ needs and growing fast.
Have you already created an outstanding, innovative product? That’s great. Now you should take the next step and align growth design with your marketing strategy. You need to do it to ensure that you will be able to scale up your startup in an effective and timely manner and survive the competition.
Define Your Goals
The first step you should take is to answer the following questions:
- What are your short-term and long-term goals?
- What specific results do you want to achieve?
- Is growth critical to your startup’s success?
- How big should your company be to surpass the competition?
For some companies, growth is not essential. They stay intentionally small to gain maximum profit. So before you focus on a growth design, you should find out whether your business will benefit from growing.
When setting a goal, be specific. For example, define your goals as the following: “to grow from 10 to 100 employees in three months” and “to grow from 50 to 5000 users in ten weeks.”
Focus on Future Needs
Building a marketing strategy, startup owners typically focus on one question:
What steps should I take to meet my target audience’s current needs?
However, for achieving success in the long run, it’s also important to think about the following:
What steps should I take to predict my customers’ future needs and provide a proper solution on time?
You should strive to learn more about your customers and track the changes in their behavior. You should design your product in the way it will be easy to adjust it to new changes. In fact, your marketing team and growth designers should work together. They should monitor the changes in the market and search for ways on how to make your product a better fit.
Prioritize A/B Testing
When it comes to growth design, A/B testing plays an important role. Without testing new features, it’s impossible to create an ideal product and grow a startup.
For this reason, you should give your growth team permission to A/B test every detail they find necessary. Besides, you should encourage your marketing team to collaborate with the growth team to get the most of A/B and multilevel testing.
What should be tested? Literally, everything that influences your marketing results: ad copies, email subject lines, content pieces, call to actions. Once you understand that Instagram ads generate higher conversion rates than Facebook ads, or that essay writing services create more compelling content than your team, you will be able to tweak your strategy the right way and maximize your efforts.
Take Into Account The Customer Life Cycle
Growth design goes hand in hand with the customer life cycle. While customers are moving from one stage to another, growth marketers design need-specific campaigns to keep the company growing.
There are three critical lifecycle stages that every growth team should focus on - activation, nurturing, and reactivation. All stages are equally important and must be marked by specifically-designed campaigns.
- Activation stage. At this stage, the growth team should grab the target audience’s attention with lead magnets, free trials, giveaways, and other introductory campaigns aimed at raising brand awareness and building credibility.
- Nurture stage. This stage is about boosting engagement and strengthening relationships. The growth marketing team can connect to the customers using newsletters, social media content, interactive content, promotions, etc.
- Reactivation stage. It’s the final stage where growth marketers should re-engage the target audience and drive retention through loyalty programs, win backs, abandonment cart emails, and well-designed content marketing campaigns.
Don’t Underestimate Your Current Achievements
Growth designers and marketers are perfectionists. They are continuously searching for improvements. Sometimes, it happens that they overlook things that already work well and try to improve things that are already perfect. And that’s a problem.
Since the resources of every company are limited, it’s important to use them wisely. It means it’s necessary to invest the company’s resources only in those aspects of growth design that really require improvements.
Product managers, marketers, and growth designers should guide each other. They should help each other to define the actual drawbacks of their strategies as well as to see areas of their work that doesn’t need any improvements.
Get Outside Help (If Necessary)
Have you just started your company and don’t have money to hire a team of growth experts? No worries, there is a solution for you. You can hire freelancers, get help from growth mentors, or take advantage of new online services.
If there are one talented product manager and one genius marketer in your team, nothing will hold you back from growing your company. If needed, you can get outside help to get one step closer to your goal. Let’s say your marketer insists that you should focus on blogging and content production. You don’t need to hire in-house content creators to source quality content – you can get content online. There are many great writing companies over there!
Find a Balance Between Solving Customer Problems and Business Growth
Your customers and their needs must be your priority. However, there is an exception.
If your company’s problems outweigh the importance of your customers’ problems, you should solve your company’s issues first. Your customers will not benefit if your company fails, will they?
Chasing growth goals, designers and marketers focus mostly on what happens in the market. However, they should also take into consideration things that occur within a company. Every decision they make must be balanced and studied.
Your growth team should actively communicate with other teams and departments to have a clear understanding of where your company is heading. Otherwise, your business may grow in the “wrong direction,” and you will be disappointed with the results.
In Conclusion
Growth design is still a new thing for many companies. So if you align your marketing strategy with growth design today, you will get a competitive advantage – you will get more prepared to embrace new business opportunities.
It’s time for you to become curious about how different aspects of your business are interconnected and build a strategy that will lead your company to fast growth and big success. Don’t wait any longer! You can do it right now!