Generating customer leads is often a top priority for business owners. However, many find it challenging to adopt the right strategy to generate those leads — especially quality ones. So what happens? Sales blame marketing for insufficient or unqualified leads. Then marketing blames sales for being unable to close. It becomes a vicious cycle of underperformance.
Before we get into the tactics, let’s get into general definitions of growth marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing can simply be described as an area of marketing focused on helping a company grow more rapidly. However, there are different growth marketing nuances that help generate and close leads.
This article will explain the best growth marketing tactics you can implement now to start generating more, better leads.
1. A/B Test for Success
Why did this email perform better than that one? Why isn’t your lead generation form earning the leads you expected? It’s one thing to see that things aren’t working. It’s another to know how to fix it. For this reason, A/B testing plays a significant role in growth marketing. You can grow faster and more efficiently when you actively test for optimization.
Nowhere is this more apparent than lead generation.
Ultimately, everything is testable. But not so fast. Growth marketing always focuses its efforts. Only then can you get more done with less. Follow general rules with this tactic to home in on the testing areas that will make the most significant impact.
Target Low Hanging Fruit
Testing headlines, CTAs, and landing page elements on your lead forms will deliver some of the fastest and most obvious winners. And what’s more, you can take what you learn here. Then, apply it throughout your funnel and marketing strategy.
Case in point, simply improving your headlines can increase the open or view rate by 100%. Now, you’ve got their attention. Then, you can work out from that to increase your conversion rate drastically.
Identify Leakage
If you’re noticing some funnel leakage in a part of your sales funnel, take a closer look. First, see if you can figure out what the hang-up might be. Now, test it. Fixing this one funnel leak with A/B testing can net a huge improvement in lead-generation potential.
At the same time, don’t focus on things already running reasonably smoothly. Double-back to testing those “good” areas you want to make “great” after addressing these quick wins.
Make It Significant
In scientific terms, your result is only significant if the result is beyond the possibility of chance. Make sure your impact is substantial by limiting variables that could influence the outcome, such as seasonality. And make a considerable change. Be sure that one thing you change is very different.
In other words, you probably shouldn’t be testing slight variations in shades of orange for your CTA button. What’s the point? That’s fine-tuning you can do later.
2. Get the Most Out of Your Omni Channel Presence
According to Forbes, omnichannel marketing produces a measly 9% customer churn rate. Now, compare that to those heavily focused on two to three channels losing as many as 66% of their new customers. Yikes!
You recognize that people typically engage with brands across platforms. Well, omnichannel allows you to meet your target audience where they are. These platforms can include your website plus a variety of social media sites, email, review sites, ads, remarketing, and, yes, influencer content.
Increasing your visibility across channels gives people more opportunities to see and interact with your brand. The posting frequency in your media can build affinity and trust — and assists your brand in growing on so many levels. All of that equals more and better leads.
Just look at how this growth marketing tactic supports outrageous lead generation from top of funnel to bottom and back again.
Potential Customer
Those new to your brand see others interacting. They want to know what’s happening. These interactions equal instant credibility because many people appreciate your content and brand. This translates to social proof that tells people you’re “alright.” And maybe not just alright, but “fabulous.” Who doesn’t want to be fabulous?
Now, enter your lead magnet stage right. Because of this “instant” trust and interest you’ve generated across platforms, this person who was until recently a stranger wants to sign up for the experience they see others having.
Lead Nurturing
Once a casual fan becomes a lead, you have a greater ability to track how they respond to content to personalize the customer experience. For example, combining email segmentation with automation generates custom experiences automatically. And you can do it with less work and greater efficacy than possible manually. Combine this with ongoing omnichannel engagement that furthers the customer journey. Now, you have a delighted customer in the making.
And that’s not all. We are talking about generating leads here, after all.
You have a greater understanding of the actions of this person across channels. So now, you’ll know the moment they shift from being a qualified marketing lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL). Then, add some lead scoring analytics and automation to hand this lead off to sales automatically. Wow! You just achieved perfect timing. Sales and marketing are working together — creating a rewarding and productive team experience.
Promoter Activity
Through this growth marketing tactic, you’ve set yourself up for success. People are saying great things about you on TrustPilot, Google, Facebook, and Yelp. And we’re back to generating quality leads again. The benefits of omnichannel just came full circle.
But you may be saying, this all sounds nice. In a perfect world, of course, you’d want to be everywhere. But there’s a little thing called limited time and limited resources. So how is this even possible unless you’ve got a corporate mega-budget?
How to Create an Omnichannel Experience
First, realize you won’t build it overnight. You’ll develop a growth marketing strategy that lays out your plan to create an omnichannel presence. Start with the basics. Make sure your website is fast and mobile-friendly. Identify which channels your target audience uses.
If you’re selling athleisure, maybe LinkedIn isn’t the place for that. Or perhaps it’s perfect. So start collecting customer data to learn which type of marketing platform is your sweet spot.
Research and deploy automation wherever you can. Utilize it to collect better customer data, so you can streamline and grow your omnichannel experience. Leverage it to personalize the customer experience, lead generation, and lead nurturing. Automation can have a hefty price tag, but there’s a reason companies license it. It can turn the efforts of one person into 5.
Above all, keep your focus on the customers. You’re planting the seeds. But they’re the fertilizer that helps a community grow.
3. Partner with Other Businesses
When you partner with other businesses, you pool resources and can achieve results you wouldn’t have as a lone entity. You can hire a growth marketing agency that already has many of these growth marketing relationships in place, or you can build things out on your own. You can reach new audiences for less. And you’ll build trust quickly with your target audience. After all, if business X trusts you, why shouldn’t these potential customers? That translates to more leads.
The truth is that business marketing partners can come in many shapes and sizes. The three most important in growth marketing are partnership marketing, influencer marketing, and customer community building.
Partnership Marketing
Share it if your business and another business are on a reasonably even playing field, and you both have similar audience makeup. You can mutually-beneficially leverage this relationship in several ways. For example, consider cross-promoting events and products. Engage in social sharing or email blasting for each other’s announcements. Or why not co-produce webinars and events?
Influencer Marketing
If you’re partnering with a business with a more significant following than you, this would be influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a $15 billion industry in 2022. No industry reaches that size unless it’s getting results for the businesses investing in it.
In the case of influencer marketing, you have a power differential. The influencer has something you want — an audience. You have something the influence wants — a willingness to pay for their expert visibility. But is it worth it? Well, 130 million people click on the paid content of influencers every month. Working with the right influencer generates leads and becomes the catalyst for incredible growth.
Community-Building
Some of your most incredible business partnerships can come from your customers. Proactively managing the customer relationship can blossom into a full-blown community of people who enjoy interacting with your brand. But what’s more important is the fact that they interact with each other and new customers.
You get genuine customer feedback from people who want to see your brand prosper and grow within your community. By fostering communication and connection across channels, you can turn your community into an extension of your customer support team.
If a potential or new customer has a question or problem with the product, they can reach you across channels. But they can also turn to this community for support.
When a customer can reach out to you across channels and find support in a like community, it works together for an overall dynamic customer experience that attracts new customers. It convinces them to become a part of your community. As a result, you generate more leads.
Growth Marketing Tactics Generate Leads
There’s no denying it. These tactics can help you generate more and better leads. Improve your lead generation through A/B testing. Invest in omnichannel experience customers love. And partner with others to amplify your lead generation potential. What other lead-generation tactics do you use? Comment below.
Image Credit: by Anna Nekrashevich; Pexels; Thanks!
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