BEFORE YOU BUILD A GROWTH MARKETING STRATEGY FOR YOUR STARTUP

Over the last few years, the definition of marketing has changed, as well as the ways marketers reach to potential customers. Growth marketing is the process of experimenting with innovative techniques to help your business and audience grow quickly. Here are what an entrepreneur needs to do before creating a unique growth marketing strategy.

Build Customer Personas

The best way to understand your customers is to create customer personas. The first step is to do a little research. The more research you do, the more realistic personas you create. You can utilize tools such as online surveys, or more traditional methods such as conversations with potential buyers to quickly gather information. This will provide a detailed understanding of your personas:

• Age, gender and education
• Key information sources
• Goals, values, challenges and pain points

You can classify your customers after collecting information. Each client category will have different goals, needs and interests, but they will also have some similarities. Categorization will make it easier for you to communicate, and give them exactly what they want.

Understand the Customer Experience

As well as knowing your customer, the best growth marketing strategies and tactics rely on understanding and nurturing the customer experience. You cannot reach your goals without knowing the path people follow from first becoming aware of your company to becoming actual, revenue-producing customers. Each customer has a different journey but they have 3 three main stages in common:

Awareness Stage

Awareness stage is where your clients are aware of a need or a problem, and searching for information. They are looking for an answer to solve their problem, but the thing is, they don’t know that you are the one who can help them. In other words, they don’t know that they don’t know you. Make sure that you start thinking about how to show your future customers that you exist.

Evaluation Stage

The next stage is evaluation stage. Now that your client is aware of the problem or need, and has some potential solutions. This is the stage where they compare you with other solutions. Here is where you offer something that makes a difference. You need to have an excellent understanding of your value proposition, and start thinking about how to implement it in your growth marketing strategy.

Conversion Stage

The third stage is conversion stage. By now the potential client has done all the research, and is ready to choose. They have to make sure that you are offering the right solution. When it comes to decision making, buyers rely on a good number of parameters including quality, cost, and testimonials. Convincing someone is not easy, let alone making them pay for a product; start thinking about how.

Understand Trends

It is crucial to study trends regarding the products and services you offer before you start working on your growth marketing strategy. You have to make sure that you know what is fresh and what is outdated. For example, text size, number of hashtags, usage of visuals are some of the few online marketing characteristics that have changed dramatically in the last few years as well. Facebook has been very popular for a long time, and it still is for a good amount of people, but other channels such as Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram might be much more popular amongst the audience you are targeting.

Keep up to date

After gaining some interest from your customers, you should be able to keep in touch with them and understand their needs. Updating your understanding of the customer personas and trends as well as the customer experience will help you maintain a strong relationship with your clients and help you give them exactly what they want.

Marketing your startup requires a lot of studying. You can create and execute your growth marketing strategy only by knowing the current trends, having a good understanding of your customer personas and offering them a pleasant journey. You can then experiment with different tactics such as referral, freemium and viral marketing to see what works for you and your customers. Good luck!

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” Steve Jobs

This article is written by Mehmet Umut Ermec and Tugce Akman.