By Raihan Hadi
Have you been struggling with growing your brand despite seeing great potential for it?
Is your target audience not budging to the benefits of the products or services you’ve been offering them?
Are you losing hope for success even though you have an amazing product?
You, my friend, need to reconsider things from a growth marketing perspective, and I’m here to help you see why.
What’s Growth Marketing you ask?
Some call it the secret ingredient to business success, while some others either don’t know much about it or don’t care…yet. But make no mistake, this is 2022, and whether or not you believe in growth marketing, it’s the key to the success of your brand.
You’re already aware of how the marketing funnel works. The growth funnel, however, tends to go the extra few miles as it’s all about acquiring and retaining as many customers as possible.
Then of course there’s the marketing ‘flywheel’, the cog that keeps running around with the customer at the center, I don’t know who came up with the analogy but it’s a good one as it explains how customers are always holding a business in its place – keeping the going concern, well, going.
Speaking from a business perspective, and you can quote me on this – customers are next to God, and you must treat them accordingly. If you’re going to offer something and deliver something else, losing your customers is inevitable.
Now whichever way you look at it, you must agree that unless you’re one of those evil overlords of the world, without whose products or services people in general can’t even go to the toilet nowadays, you really need this.
Growth Funnel or Flywheel?
A simple diagram can speak volumes, and in this case, it does. For those of you who are fixating on just one part of the growth funnel, try freeing your minds of any reservations you may have about multitasking. A marketer who doesn’t multitask is just a salesperson looking for a paycheck.
Growth Marketing, or more specifically, the growth funnel, looks at the entire customer lifecycle, thereby using insights to create compounding returns to drive customers who are more engaged, aware, and over their lifecycle have become loyal to a brand.
Product first
Let’s face it, you can’t reinvent the wheel. What you must do with your product or service is address a problem (or ten, up to you).
There may be a few products like yours out there already, but they may not be addressing the problem like you can, and your product’s uniqueness coupled with fitting growth hacks can certainly do wonders.
I could give you about 30 examples of how different growth marketing strategies have helped innovative products receive major responses, let’s do a couple for now shall we?
Everybody wants to go green one way or the other nowadays. Some South African rich guy (not naming names but you know who) based a third of his life’s work on creating cars that are as green as cars can be nowadays.
However, he had not thought about solving problems related to what will happen to companies selling gasoline and where will we get all that electricity to charge those cars and not leave gigantic carbon footprints?
Moixa Energy’s USBCELL on the other hand, started with a couple of pinpointed issues – the need to recharge your batteries without having to rummage through your drawers looking for that charger, and to cut back the use of alkaline batteries.
Back in 2008, the green battery was awarded a Gold award at the IF Product Design ceremony. They received a funding of about £675K back in 2005, and are a profitable company to date (source: CrunchBase).
Canva
Given how advanced people are these days, I’m sure even toddlers around the world know about Canva already. Being a dedicated user myself, I can’t imagine working a day without this unbelievably simple yet life changing app.
Melanie Perkins wanted to address a simple problem – cutting off the time needed to learn using different designing tools such as Photoshop, InDesign etc.
Not every entrepreneur out there has the resources or time to learn about and master a particular designing tool. Moreover, they are often not willing to pay hundreds of dollars to someone else to design something that only they could execute best.
Not only Canva has solved that problem, but with its simple interface, wide variety of choices available in both free and paid plans, it’s currently the champion of champions in the design tool world (in my humble opinion).
Canva’s strategies for growth have struck gold on multiple points – a clean and simple website with teasers for most of its functions, tailored campaigns for both organic and paid plans, and a ‘freemium’ strategy with a cheap structure for paid plans.
The results of these strategies?
To date, Canva has more than 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries, with giant brands like Salesforce, Marriott International, and PayPal using its enterprise plan. With a valuation of $40 Billion, Canva’s annual revenue in 2021 was expected to exceed $1 billion.
The Secret Recipe to Success with Growth Marketing
So far I’ve only blabbered on about what growth marketing can do for your business, but you obviously need to know more about it before you can actually start your own journey towards success.
I may not be the best expert out here to give you all that wisdom, but my friend Hando Sinisalu is, and he’s coming back at the end of the month with his workshop on growth marketing right here at MARKETING Magazine!
Hando, the Founder & CEO of case.digital, is a marketing expert from Estonia, and has been widely successful with his workshops on various topics related to marketing, and this time he’s bringing out his artillery of wisdom in growth marketing.
The objective of this workshop is to introduce modern growth marketing methods widely used by startups to companies that are still stuck on the legacy marketing approaches – which as I mentioned earlier, is just selling (or trying to sell).
With Hando’s workshop, you can learn the methods of growth marketing and get ideas on how to use it in your business, giving your product the lifecycle it deserves.
So yeah, if you’re a marketing and sales executive, or running a marketing agency (or maybe even thinking about starting one?) – you should definitely dive into this workshop. Personally, I can’t wait, so I’ve saved the dates March 30th and 31st, you should too!
This piece was the cover story for MARKETING WEEKENDER Issue 323
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