In our previous blog post, we outlined the difference between growth hacking and growth marketing. In this follow-up blog, you’ll discover what a B2B growth marketing strategy might look like in practice, and the benefits this approach could bring to your company.
A B2B growth marketing strategy can involve a wide range of different tactics and campaigns – it doesn’t just involve one type of marketing activity. Read on for an overview of the key areas in which growth marketing could help your business.
Acquisition activities to improve your marketing funnel
We all know that potential customers are lost at each stage of the marketing funnel, with most leads not resulting in a sale. Combine this with leaky bucket theory which suggests that regardless of what you do, your organisation will steadily lose customers like drips from a leaking bucket, and it’s clear that customer acquisition strategies are vital for reducing the impact of these on business growth.
It’s obviously not realistic – or even desirable – to prevent these losses entirely, but growth marketing typically involves creating targeted campaigns for each stage of the funnel to help reduce unnecessary loss and improve the buyer journey.
From top of funnel engagement activities such as offering free, value-added content on your website, to onboarding campaigns involving automated welcome emails and additional options for user personalisation, there are countless growth marketing activities you can target at different stages of the funnel.
Growth marketing activities to reduce churn
As well as targeting new customers, B2B growth marketing also focuses on activating and retaining existing customers in order to increase growth by reducing churn and preventing unnecessary loss of business.
The marketing rule of thumb is that it typically costs up to five times as much to acquire a new customer compared to retaining an existing one, so this aspect of B2B growth marketing shouldn’t be overlooked, especially in competitive sectors such as technology, engineering and manufacturing.
Highly targeted cross-selling campaigns, loyalty campaigns, insightful email newsletters and referral programmes are all examples of B2B growth marketing activities which can help increase customer lifetime value, reduce the loss of customers and win back lapsed customers.
Achieving growth through content marketing
Content marketing is at the core of any B2B growth marketing strategy and can help you both acquire, reactivate and retain customers.
Without people finding, visiting and gaining value from your website, you’re highly unlikely to grow your business, so content marketing and excellent SEO are must-haves. Content marketing is a long-term strategy, so you shouldn’t expect immediate results. Don’t forget we’re not growth hacking here – instead, we’re building a sustainable long-term growth marketing strategy, and content is king.
Discover 5 key SEO considerations >
The success of a B2B growth marketing strategy based on content is consistency. You can’t put out a couple of blog posts then sit back and wait for the enquiries to roll in. Instead, growth marketing activity could include a mix of regular, value-added blogs, data-driven email marketing, carefully-considered SEO, and social media campaigns with targeted messaging aimed at different stages of the buyer journey. If you hit the right people with the right information at the right time, you’ll be well on your way.
The importance of data for B2B growth marketing
Data is at the core of any successful growth marketing strategy. When implementing growth marketing in the B2B sector, it’s important to remember that B2B sales cycles are typically much longer than those in B2C, so this needs to be taken into consideration when selecting the metrics you will use.
Whatever data you choose to measure effectiveness, you need to record and analyse it properly. Rapid marketing experimentation without a detailed process and plan will simply end up with a lot of wasted time and expense and no way of knowing if it was successful.
The results of successful B2B growth marketing campaigns are likely to look very different to B2C campaigns and require the use of different metrics to measure results. One B2B growth marketing strategy might be to consider campaigns aimed specifically at reducing the length of your sales cycle or increasing customer lifetime value.
Metrics you might track as part of your growth marketing strategy can fall into the following broad categories, in line with the AAARRR funnel:
Awareness
Reaching more people with your messaging
Acquisition
Acquiring new customers and reducing loss in your marketing funnel
Activation (and Reactivation)
Getting people to engage with and try your product, and re-engaging lapsed customers
Retention
Keeping your existing customers and reducing churn
Referral
Ensuring happy customers are recommending you
Revenue
Generating sales and increasing the value of each customer
The specific measures you use will depend on your exact growth marketing activities, however A/B testing and experimentation is a key feature of all growth marketing. It’s therefore imperative that you record and analyse the right metrics for your campaigns to ensure you gain enough useful insight to enable you to quickly adapt your strategies when needed.
Do you need help with business growth? If you need advice on whether a growth marketing strategy is right for your business, or if you’d like to explore other marketing strategy options, get in touch with Motion Marketing and we’ll be happy to help develop the right strategy for your company.
