Start your engines: building a growth marketing strategy

Growth mar­ket­ing has been gain­ing trac­tion as a B2B mar­ket­ing phi­los­o­phy in recent years. So much so that agen­cies and clients alike cit­ed it as the top trend. But what does it real­ly mean?
Mar­ket­ing has been built up in a series of silos, from brand to dig­i­tal to field or account-based mar­ket­ing. The approach has been to try and opti­mise each part of the sys­tem by giv­ing every­one micro-KPIs – the dig­i­tal team is opti­mis­ing for con­ver­sion, field is opti­mis­ing for leads – but that’s not how you cre­ate growth.

Growth mar­ket­ing is about cut­ting through those silos and using mod­ern prin­ci­ples to work togeth­er, bor­row­ing from growth hack­ing and the world of agile. Very com­mer­cial in its focus, it’s a clar­i­on call for B2B mar­keters to cut through the com­plex­i­ty.

The chal­lenge is that growth mar­ket­ing is out­come focused rather than out­put focused. That’s quite a shift. From client to agency or team, instead of say­ing ‘build a web­site’ or ‘deliv­er 10 cam­paigns’, it becomes ‘how to gen­er­ate a cer­tain amount of rev­enue from a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence over a peri­od of time’.

For a dis­ci­pline that often only knows how suc­cess­ful it is going to be with any strat­e­gy after the fact, this can prove a dif­fi­cult adap­ta­tion to make. If you’ve got these prob­lems – a lack of mean­ing­ful met­rics, siloed skills and a lack of account­abil­i­ty, it can be very hard to get things done. It’s a prob­lem that is com­pound­ed by a cus­tomer audi­ence that, while often recep­tive to ideas, ulti­mate­ly strug­gles to take the final step towards com­mit­ment.

There is enor­mous com­plex­i­ty in the buy­ing and sell­ing process. In order to respond effec­tive­ly to the needs of the buy­er, across mul­ti­ple chan­nels, with rel­e­vance and time­li­ness, you need qual­i­ty data and you need to be able to organ­ise it and make it avail­able in the right for­mat to your teams to act.

In B2B, the addi­tion­al com­plex­i­ty comes from the large buy­ing group. Recent research from The Chal­lenger Group found that the aver­age num­ber of deci­sion-mak­ers in a B2B buy­ing group has risen from 6.2 stake­hold­ers to over 10, and it’s still grow­ing. The Mar­ket­ing Practice’s own research would sug­gest it’s poten­tial­ly as many as 15. The data and sig­nals need to be under­stood not only at the lev­el of an indi­vid­ual – the old ‘lead’ mod­el – but also at an account lev­el. There’s a big shift towards account-based tech­nol­o­gy in B2B. This is why.

As a result, the buy­ing process is hard to pre­dict and typ­i­cal­ly het­ero­ge­neous across organ­i­sa­tions. An addi­tion­al com­pli­ca­tion comes from the fact that ‘buy­ing by com­mit­tee’ tends to make the col­lec­tive audi­ence more risk-averse. The high­er the num­ber of peo­ple, the hard­er it is to build con­sen­sus. For a lot of com­pa­nies, the B2B marketer’s biggest chal­lenge is the pre­vail­ing desire to… do noth­ing.

Tack­ling that chal­lenge means find­ing that new mar­ket­ing mind­set. Growth mar­ket­ing argues for a broad range of skills work­ing tight­ly togeth­er in small mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary teams, focused on the cus­tomer. Tri­an­gu­lat­ing insight, get­ting per­spec­tives from brand and field, sales and prod­uct, being able to look at lead­ing indi­ca­tors in the data that show the strat­e­gy is on the right path, adapt­ing and learn­ing as you go.

It asks mar­keters to go beyond tra­di­tion­al lead mea­sures and take respon­si­bil­i­ty for growth out­comes, bring­ing them into clos­er col­lab­o­ra­tion with sales and the front office. It means hav­ing a com­mon go-to-mar­ket strat­e­gy across mar­ket­ing, sales, prod­uct and ser­vice where they all share the same belief and the same sto­ry they’re try­ing to tell.

And by cre­at­ing a more account­able, col­lab­o­ra­tive approach to growth mar­ket­ing, it smooths the way to a more con­struc­tive rela­tion­ship with the board – some­thing long sought after by mar­keters from every sec­tor, not just B2B. McK­in­sey has shown that high-growth com­pa­nies are sev­en times more like­ly to have a ‘uni­fi­er CMO’ – some­one who fos­ters robust, col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ships across the C‑suite.

It’s one thing to begin to think dif­fer­ent­ly. It’s quite anoth­er to begin to act dif­fer­ent­ly and restruc­ture the organ­i­sa­tion accord­ing­ly. In some cas­es, the skills most attuned to agile, mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary teams might not even be present in the organ­i­sa­tion at all. This is an exer­cise in tran­si­tion.

A sol­id place to start is to go back to the mea­sures of suc­cess. As an organ­i­sa­tion, are you still focused on out­put over out­come? By switch­ing think­ing in this sim­ple, sin­gle area, it very quick­ly becomes clear where mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty is deliv­er­ing val­ue.

The next step is to view those out­comes and mea­sure­ments in the wider con­text of the busi­ness. How eas­i­ly can mar­keters under­stand the dif­fer­ent incen­tives and behav­iours of teams across the rest of the organ­i­sa­tion, and how eas­i­ly can they be aligned so you’re all look­ing at a sim­i­lar pic­ture?

When KPIs and mea­sure­ment are aligned, then it comes down to prac­ti­cal­i­ties. Who do you col­lab­o­rate with on what issue, where and when? It may be some­thing as sim­ple as a group chat, or it could involve the cre­ation of a scrum under an agile frame­work to bring togeth­er a broad group to tack­le a broad­er, longer-term chal­lenge. Under­stand­ing the cadence of col­lab­o­ra­tion is key.

How­ev­er organ­i­sa­tions choose to reframe their approach to growth mar­ket­ing, there remains one guid­ing prin­ci­ple: the buy­er is now in charge. No longer behold­en to sales for infor­ma­tion, they can direct much of the process them­selves. In order to be where they are, when they want you, a more joined-up approach between mar­ket­ing and the rest of the organ­i­sa­tion isn’t just nice to have, it’s essen­tial.

For more infor­ma­tion, please vis­it themarketingpractice.com

Pro­mot­ed by The Mar­ket­ing Prac­tice