Nine great growth marketing tactics to grow your business in 2021

Growth is the name of the game in business today. Growing your customer base, increasing sales, and getting more people to notice your brand are all keys to a successful business, regardless of the industry you’re in. In this blog post, we’re covering 9 tried and true growth marketing tactics that will help your business grow in 2021.

1 – Focus on getting more website visitors

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Getting more visitors to visit your website is also known as generating traffic to the website. Many individuals and businesses rely on SEO (search engine optimization) as a means to improve their visibility in search results.

SEO is a collection of techniques used to improve the ranking of a website on search engines like Google. SEO is an important part of any website's content marketing strategy, but it's also a very important part of building a healthy online presence.

However, it is possible to achieve this even without SEO. Whether you are attracting your first customer of a thousand customers, driving traffic to your website is an essential part of growing your business. As you focus on driving many visitors to your website, have these questions at the back of your mind;

• Is the product you are offering a good one?
• Is the market you are targeting large?
• Is there a specific market you are addressing?
• Does your product have a great story behind it?
• Is there an available low-cost means to reach the target audience?

If you answer these questions effectively, you will be sure to attract many people to your website and eventually get them to take the desired action, i.e. buy your product or service.

2 - Build a better online experience

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced all people to live their lives online in new and unprecedented ways. This applies to business owners too. The online world is a changed one now, and since it is 2021, you cannot use the older ways to build experience online.

One great way to create better experiences for your users is by investing in content marketing. With content marketing, you're not just trying to get people to buy your product. You will want to inspire them, bring them in, and get them excited about your brand.

Another way to better your experience is to optimize your website for mobile users so that your customers can easily find you and navigate your site with minimal obstructions and fuss.

The marketing strategy you use should deliver the right content in the right form across multiple devices and be able to reach many people.

Also, create more digital spaces to interact with your customers, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Zoom, YouTube, and even WhatsApp. Remember, the more outlets or touchpoints you have representing your brand, the better are your chances for selling.

3 – Build an email list and focus on growing it.

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An email list is the number of your subscribers or customers that visit your website. Normally, every time you sell your products or services to your customers, you add an email to this list.

However, when you are not selling, the list remains the same. You can use various ways to create and grow an email list including; using social media to encourage sign-ups, including sign-up forms on the site, or collect buyer emails at checkout.

But you’re not done here. Once you build your list, it is equally important to nurture it. Consistently sending out newsletters with content that your subscribers will be interested in reading is a good start.

Topics can range from what’s going on in your organizations to new products you are working on to advice, tips, and tricks depending on whether you a B2B or B2C business.

Keep is less “salesy” and more informative; you should offer your subscribers value first and as a general rule of thumb, maybe one in every five issues can be about a special offer or discount.

The idea here is to build a relationship of authority and trust so that your brand can retain top-of-mind retention with your subscribers. That way, when they eventually decide they want to buy – they will first think of you.

Through this, you will create a diverse customer base, thus helping your business grow.

4 - Create a referral program

Referrals are among the most valuable leads you can get, and creating a referral program will help you grow your business so fast.

A referral program is a way of getting a new customer to refer you to their friends, family, and co-workers. A referral program can also be used to refer people to more relevant websites, blog posts, or articles that you have written.

They are useful for businesses because they offer the advantage of getting referrals from people already loyal to your brand; the more people participate, the more you make.

They can also be a good way to reward loyal customers who have already helped your business grow.

Moreover, referral programs drive one of the highest conversion rates among all the marketing channels.

5 - Launch webinars for B2B products and services

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Webinars are a great way to reach a wide audience and can be highly effective for B2B companies. They allow you to share your expertise and expertise and can help you build brand awareness, generate leads, and increase sales.

Moreover, the webinars allow you to tell a story of the credibility of your products and earn recognition from your prospects.

Webinars can be used in different ways to grow business. For instance, live webinars can be sued to tell a story – perhaps the inspiration behind a product or the story behind the success of an individual. You can then build the hype for the product or service during the webinar and then have a call to action at the end where you ask your attendees to sign up for a trial or buy your product or service.

Live webinars are best when you want to gauge the reaction of your attendees and make them instant offers based on their reactions.

One can also use an automated or evergreen webinar to create which is basically a video that looks like a live webinar. This can also be a recording of a webinar that was previously live. An evergreen webinar can be replayed as many times and in many cases, organizations use the “just-in-time” tactic where a potential attendee (or prospect) gets served an ad, goes to a landing page and then signs up to attend the webinar which starts in a few minutes.

Although the obvious downside do this is the fact that you are not live, the main advantage is that you capitalize on the prospect’s immediate intent or interest in your product or service which can help tremendously in making the sale.

This allows you to record the video one time and use it over and over. This will save you the stress of doing the recording again.

6 - Get more traffic with PPC

Earlier in this article, we talked about Search Engine Optimization or SEO and while it’s a great organic way to get found on search engines, it takes time for it to start making an impact.

That’s where PPC or Pay Per Click advertising comes in. In principle, PPC is advertising and in its simplest form, you can choose a target audience depending on the nature of your product or service and have your ads shows to them.

PPC is one way of growing your business through paid traffic generation. You use pay-per-click advertising so that when your customers click to check the availability of the products, they pay for them. This works best if your website pages contain the products the customers are looking for so mainly great for eCommerce websites but can also be used for B2B products and services as well.

Over the years this format has become more and more refined and you can now even do Pay Per Lead advertising with some providers like Facebook and LinkedIn.

While PPC advertising can cost a lot more than SEO, especially if you do it on a regular basis, it is a good way to generate some buzz for launch campaigns, getting people to sign up for an event or watch a video.

It can also be used to complement your SEO strategy, especially when you want to jumpstart traffic to a new website or revive an old product page etc.

7 - Create a blog and create content around your niche

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Most people have used blogs as a means to bring their products to the world. A blog that strictly tells the information about your products, functions, reviews, and general information about the product niche will attract more visitors, which means that your business grows.

Blogs are excellent ways to communicate your business’ value while educating your prospects not only about your brand but about the industry in which you operate.

They are good for soft selling, i.e. winning the hearts and minds of your readers over a sustained period of time and eventually get them to buy your product or service.

If you publish regular articles, you will gradually start building a following and the more people visit your website, the higher it will rank on search engines.

Speaking of getting found on search engines, blogs are also a good way to get found on sites like Google and Bing and can help your business rank higher in SERPS or Search Engine Results Pages.

If you consistently create content that is relevant to your niche or industry, you will end up establishing yourself as an authority in your industry not to mention gain top-of-mind retention with your visitors/prospects/customers.

8 - Build a social media following

About a decade ago, there was still quite a debate about the authenticity and longevity of social media platforms like Facebook and twitter.

Fast forward to a decade later and social media has become an almost essential layer to our businesses and personal lives. If you own or run a business and are not on any social media platform, you are definitely missing out.

Social media platforms are extensively used to build and grow businesses.

There are many platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok that you can use depending on the nature of your product or service and your target market.

Of course, you need to have a presence where your customers are so do not make the mistake of opening an account on platforms that your prospects are not on.

Opening an account on the appropriate platforms and building a positive following by creating and publishing quality and relevant content such that your followers can stand by you; whichever the case, will ensure that you make sales and receive referrals.

When it comes to ensuring your success on these platforms, there are two things to keep in mind:

One: always publish content that will be valuable to your fans and followers. Two: engage with your followers as much as you can and ensure that their voices are heard

9- Include video in your outreach and customer interaction

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Most people would prefer to watch a small video than read many paragraphs to understand a concept or a product. It is essential to include a short video giving an overview of your product and sometimes the customer reviews. This way, you will have many customers wanting to learn about the product and make their purchases.

Video marketing is also a great way to make a good first impression. You can record a video introducing yourself and your company or product/service and embed it in an email. It makes a great first impression and also has been proven to improve response rates.

You can also use video to onboard new customers or send them screen recordings with yourself in a corner window to add a personal touch and make it a bit more interactive.

We at Bizmodo have tested out a variety of tools including Vidyard and Loom but the best one for our kind of business is Sendspark. You can do basic video recordings and embed the videos, you can request video recordings from your customers (great for requesting testimonials and replies to your own videos) and you can also do screen recordings to send t your customers.

To sum up, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a halt to most businesses or slowed a lot of them down. This year is like a reviving year where most business owners are trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do to go back to normalcy and earn as much from their business using all the tools and tactics they have at their disposal.

A small but important note: When you think about growth hacking or growth marketing, it helps to have a growth hacking mindset and that means, planning and executing your marketing strategy keeping growth as the top priority, experimenting with different tactics, keeping an eye on your analytics, and optimizing your processes from time to time. It pays to have a growth marketing or growth hacking plan to help grow your business, whether your business is booming or you're in a recession.

Follow the tips above and you will definitely start seeing signs of improvement to your business in terms of exposure, traffic, and hopefully, your bottom line.