Building growth channels to scale your business. - Review

This post will look at how my experiences at CXL Institute has, in a lot of cases, consolidated my views on the importance of digital channels to driving growth. Let me hasten to add, though, that I have also unlearned and deconstructed some convictions that I had about this subject matter of growth marketing.

My third post on user-centric marketing ended on the note of prototyping, and I intend to touch on that subject as a prelude to my submission on identifying the digital channels that contribute to growth.

Prototyping is a valuable piece of the customer engagement juggernaut that a business needs to put together. To be able to achieve hard core customer-centric marketing across all relevant channels, digital assets like websites, apps, emails and other such touch points. Prototyping brings together the results of top task surveys, in a coherent and logical manner to reflect what is important to the user. It's at the very core of meaningful engagement with the customer, and a strong indicator of whether the platforms or campaigns being built will be able to make the prospect or customer take the actions that are required of them, to convert.

A project design based on prototyping the findings of a top task survey is more likely to deliver on user-centric marketing best practice. This is because the faster a user's objections are answered, the more like that they will slide further down the funnel.

Of course, a team that is concerned about iteration based on user feedback will test a prototype amongst both remote and physical focus groups to consolidate the veracity of the prioritization of the various elements considered.

Now that we've established the the importance on prototyping for designing platforms, lets dive into the subject matter of digital channels, and how important they are to driving traffic to optimized touch points.

What are growth channels?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing and Content Marketing are the five (5) digital marketing strategic platforms that we will look at, as key channels for growth, for any business.

SEM, dominated by Pay-per-click (PPC) which expressed in search or display campaigns. PPC campaigns are mostly run on Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing, and these allow for marketers to show contextual ads to match search terms in these search engines, on the search engine results page (SERP).

When set up properly, PPC campaigns deliver huge returns on advertising spend, especially when combined with SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing websites, landing pages, apps and other digital assets so that Google's algorithm will rank them high on the SERP. The more optimized a digital asset is, the more probable that its content will be ranked high on a relevant keyword.

SEO involves on-page and off-page optimization activities. On-page, optimization starts from domain name choice, page titles, copywriting that incorporates relevant keywords, image tags, site structure, amongst others, while off-page optimization involves link-building, directory listing, back-links, guest blogging and many other activities that play to search engine requirements.

SMM is another digital strategic platform that helps businesses to achieve high visibility. It's great for creating awareness for a brand's products and services. It's the most popular of all these growth channels, because of its mass appeal.

Social media networks, notably Facebook, provide a platform for brands to engage with the biggest audiences that could be found. Unlike the early days of Facebook, the platform algorithm has now changed to be biased against campaigns from brands, therefore making it harder for businesses to leverage the opportunities presented by its large audiences. Moreover, businesses now have to spend larger advertising budgets to achieve a fraction of the results they had in the "good old days" of Facebook advertising.

Email marketing is an undervalued, but high effective digital marketing channel that converts higher than most. Done right, it has the potential to drive growth of a brand's customer engagement and satisfaction levels. It's also proven to be a valuable element of the conversion process, within sales funnels.

Last, most important, is Content marketing. If you ask me, content marketing is the "primum mobile" of all growth channels. Content is King, as is popularly said, and even though it sounds like a cliche, it is actually what drives every activity across all the other channels.

Whether through messaging, sharing information like guidelines, infographics, videos, blog posts and emails, content has proven to be an arrowhead for growth marketing.

A few examples of organizations and experts that have leveraged the power of content, include HubSpot, Moz, and Neil Patel. They are classic examples of how content can be used to promote a business, while empowering the audience with information.

In effect, content marketing is central to all other aspects of digital marketing, and therefore its imperative that growth marketers who want to engage meaningfully with prospects and customers, to increase satisfaction and CLV should invest the resources need to maximize the benefits to be accrued.

Now that we've looked our 5 (five) most vital digital channels for growth, let's tie it all together nicely, from a strategic point of view. Because, without strategy, one cannot leverage the strengths of these channels in the right manner, thereby wasting the opportunity.

Bringing it all together to achieve growth

One key thing I have learned from my on-going scholarship at CXL Institute, is the need to identify the channel that works best for each project or campaign and use that as the focus to drive growth. Of course, the other channels will have a role to play, but the trick is to be able to strategically place each channel at the right place in the customer journey to measure the right metric.

The various platforms afford the growth marketer the statistics and insights required to measure audience size, including estimated advertising audience, keywords, demographics, and automated optimization amongst others.

All these features are helpful in the strategy development process as they help to make strategic choices based on strength of these channels, as well as what purposes they can be leveraged for.

In conclusion, the fuel for growth, which is traffic, can be acquired in enormous proportions by the right adoption of channel strategies. When this is achieved, then the real work of conversion starts, where the growth marketer works on attrition to make sure that all that traffic is translated in to sales, further down the funnel.

I have enjoyed sharing these simple nuggets with you, and hope you enjoyed reading them too. Let's go out there and achieve massive growth for our clients and businesses!