GROWTH MARKETING: WHAT IS IT AND HOW TO DO IT? (part 2)

3 – The need for data
For growth hacking, growth is paramount. The idea is to launch massive, global campaigns, then refine them later. Virality is at the heart of this strategy, even if it means acquiring unqualified prospects at first.

A growth marketing strategy requires a prior analysis. It relies on data to launch targeted, personalized and more efficient campaigns, which is why growth marketing generally follows growth hacking.

How to do growth marketing? Presentation of the AARRR framework
AARRR is the acronym for : Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Recommendation and Revenue. We talked to you about these 5 major steps previously.

The AARRR framework is an essential tool to understand your customers, and it highlights the buying journey and helps you optimize your sales funnel.

Each step must be treated and measured separately to optimize your conversion rate.

Let’s take a look at the 5 stages that make up your sales funnel!

Acquisition: attracting customers
This is the stage where the customer discovers your site or brand. It’s important to consider the acquisition part holistically.

This means not only analyzing the volume of visitors to the site, but also understanding how they land on your site and what their behavior is afterwards.

Regarding acquisition, you need to ask yourself three fundamental questions:

Which channel generates the most traffic?
Which channel generates the most qualified traffic, the one that gets the best results in terms of conversion?
Which channel has the lowest customer acquisition cost?
The objective is then to focus your acquisition efforts on the best performing channels and/or to improve those that are not performing as well as you would like.

Activation: the first user/customer experience
Activation is about your customer’s first experience with your offer. The objective: to prevent them from stopping using your product or service after the conversion.

At this stage, growth marketing consists of helping the customer in his use. They must immediately understand the real value of your product. What you can do? Send tutorials, tips and demonstration videos via email.

Depending on the complexity of your product or service, you can also offer training sessions or face-to-face demonstrations.

Retention: the loyalty stage
Retention means that visitors come back regularly to use your service or to buy your products again. For example, for an e-commerce, it is about making a consumer come back to buy complementary items to his first purchase.

In the context of a service, retention consists in encouraging the renewal of a subscription, or even in making the user upgrade to the next offer.

Several marketing techniques can be used here, such as emailing (personalized, based on the customer’s purchase history) or retargeting campaigns conducted on social networks.

In the context of a mobile application, you can also send push notifications with promotional offers.

Referral: turning customers into brand ambassadors
The absolute way to drive growth for your business is through referrals. According to a Nielsen study, 83% of satisfied consumers are willing to recommend a product or company. However, only 29% actually do so.

Moreover, a lead that comes from a recommendation is 4 times more likely to convert.

Needless to say, you understand the importance of encouraging your customers to become influencers! To do so, you have several strategies at your disposal:

Set up a referral program: if your customers can earn gifts or discounts by referring you, they won’t hesitate.
Use influencer marketing: if influencers speak publicly about your company, consumers will be encouraged to do the same.
Send reminder emails after a purchase that encourage them to talk about you on their social networks (and to follow you on those networks as well).

Income: How can you increase your income?
If you optimize the previous four AARR metrics, your revenue will most likely increase naturally. However, there is a way to optimize your profits: increase the customer lifetime value (CLV), while decreasing the customer acquisition cost (CAC).

CLV is the amount of revenue you get from a consumer over their lifetime as a customer of your company.

The CAC is the budget spent to acquire a customer. This includes the cost of marketing, sales, prospecting meetings, or whatever is necessary to get your customer to convert.

Now that you have a clearer picture of your customer journey, you can see areas of spend to reduce, including dropping or reducing underperforming channels. On the other hand, now is the time to increase the value of CLV by pushing your long-time consumers to up-sell, for example!

Growth marketing is the key to your company’s survival. It allows you to ensure the sustainability of your brand by retaining your customers on the one hand, and by regularly generating new prospects on the other. If you want to be successful in your market, in the long term, this is the strategy to adopt!