Here are our 5 simple but effective tips to help you drive growth and profitability in your business. Whether you're looking to unlock growth in a stagnating business or scale up rapidly, this advice will help put you on the path to growth.
1. Know your target audience – not all customers are equal
Many companies assume that any customer is a good customer. Not true. Some customers simply aren’t worth the effort they take to acquire, support and retain. Others are like gold dust – repeatedly spending above average amounts. And then of course, there are those that may not spend a huge amount with you but are influential in persuading others to do so.
Adopting a one size fits all approach to customer acquisition and retention will slow or stifle your growth significantly.
So use data analysis to tell you who is who in your existing customer base and allow you to target your efforts appropriately. The results will also give you a tightly defined audience to apply to your acquisition activity - improving its efficiency significantly.
2. Rebalance your retention and acquisition spend to grow more efficiently
Growth = new customers, right? Well, no - not necessarily. Acquiring new customers can be a way to grow but not if you’re letting the existing customers slip out the back door! In fact, growth can be achieved by simply encouraging existing customers to stay and spend more. The vast majority of organisations invest a hugely disproportionate amount in their acquisition activity compared to their CRM. This often creates a vicious circle of expensive acquisition, poor service and support and ultimately churn. And the cycle begins again. So, my advice is to review the balance of investment between your acquisition and retention programmes. Fix your CRM first and keep investing in it to make sure you keep your existing customers happy and spending with you for longer. You’ll find it’s more cost-effective and will drive growth significantly faster in your business.
3. Invest in your brand
There are some companies who have made great businesses by ‘selling off the page’ - with little investment in their brands - but they are very much the exception rather than the rule.
If you want to create long-term, sustainable growth, you need to invest in a brand which people want to buy from. That means establishing your purpose (what you stand for) and your values – and these should ideally differentiate you from your competitors in a positive way.
Non-marketers sometimes consider these investments to be expensive and wasteful. They regard branding as a 'marketing flight of fancy' that makes little difference to customer behaviour. But they couldn't be further from the truth. A brand is an incredibly valuable business asset. We buy products and services for both rational and emotional reasons. A good product delivers the former - a good brand the latter.
Once you're happy with your brand, you don’t need big budgets to promote it. I’m a big advocate of brand response marketing – an approach that elegantly marries brand building with direct response marketing to ensure all your communications add brand value AND customers at the same time.
4. Leverage technology to help you scale at pace
Scaling fast is virtually impossible these days without the use of technology. You can guarantee that if you’re not using it, your competitors will be and that puts you at a disadvantage immediately.
Technology enables automation. And automation allows you to service an unlimited number of customers – often in a better way than you can manually. That’s not to say that face to face customer service is no longer required. Instead, automation should work alongside more traditional and personal channels such as this to make them more efficient.
ESPs, CDPs, DXPs, CRMs - and any other three letter acronym you care to mention - are essential facilitators to help you grow at pace – but choosing the right solution from the many available can be a challenge.
Careful analysis of your current and future needs and the costs and functionality of the various options is required to avoid costly mistakes. But in 99.9% of cases, you'll be better set for growth with them than without.
5. Focus on the numbers and keep testing
It’s surprising how many organisations lack the tracking, reporting and analysis capabilities necessary to drive growth. They simply don’t know what is working, what isn’t and why. As the saying goes, ‘if you can’t measure, you can’t improve’.
Defining the key metrics and establishing a reporting dashboard for your marketing is essential. It doesn’t matter whether this is done in specialist tools such as Tableau or Power BI or a simple spreadsheet – it just needs to be done!
Never run a campaign without the appropriate measurement infrastructure in place and never move on to the next campaign without analysing and learning from your results.
If you put tests in place on each activity, you’ll find you can improve your results incrementally with each roll-out. It’ll also help you explain why things are happening and what growth could be achieved with greater budget – offering the business a reliable basis on which to invest further.
Talk to Firespark today. We'll help you navigate all of the issues above and put you on a trajectory for growth.
Comments