“Growth” is one of the biggest marketing buzzwords these days, with an endless array of ideas promising to make your brand go viral virtually overnight. Those ideas might get a lot of eyes on your brand, but they won’t necessarily attract people who are likely to buy.
Really, growth marketing is all about boosting brand awareness — and all you need to achieve this is a growth marketing tool to make the most of your customer data.
A growth marketing tool makes it easy to manage campaigns for B2B and B2C companies. These tools can also help you run a/b tests with new content ideas and keep your loyalty program organized, all in one space.
We’ll show you 4 ways to get the biggest impact out of your growth marketing tool. Whether you have one already or are just trying to decide if you need to embrace growth marketing, these features will help you create sustainable brand growth. No buzzwords, no growth hacking, just tried-and-true methods to boost conversion rates and grow your customer base.
1. Capture First-Party Data Through a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs traditionally offer a “one-size-fits-all” approach to rewards, which makes it hard to unpack why customers choose your brand over a competitor.
The new trend toward personalization is turning traditional loyalty programs on their heads. Across the board, marketers agree that personalization is the key to gaining more loyal customers: 55% of marketers have experienced an increase in conversions as a result of personalized content.
One simple way to leverage personalized rewards is to use a growth marketing tool that securely collects first-party data, or 1P data, to help you to better understand your customers.
First-party data is any information you collect and own about your customers — and you probably already have loads of this data right now.
For example, imagine you have an uptick in shoppers finding you through Instagram. You can use that information to target those customers, asking them to join your brand’s loyalty program upon checkout.
Leveraging first-party data can also help you identify customers who are at risk for churning. Consider that you have a rock-solid loyalty program and want to offer a special coupon to those customers. Analyze first-person data by looking for customers who haven’t redeemed their offer yet — these are at-risk customers you want to try and re-engage.
Pro tip: A growth marketing tool that offers a secure way to pull first-party data will help you maintain customer privacy, a major concern considering 67% of companies experienced a data risk incident in 2021.
2. Quickly Build Campaigns From Templates
Building creative assets from templates will save your team the hassle of starting from a blank screen each time you build a new marketing campaign.
Look for a growth marketing tool that offers no-code templates, so you can drag and drop elements you need without involving your IT department. This is in line with the 76.2% of marketers who plan to boost agility and reduce dependency on IT when it comes to their loyalty programs.
You’ll want to look for template sizes that are compatible with social media, pop-up windows, and landing pages, but pay particular attention to email.
That’s because email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your referral program. According to Litmus, email is cost-effective, with brands seeing an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. Email templates can make this low-cost, high-yield tactic even easier for your brand.
Whether you have a SaaS company or an e-commerce brand, you’re probably sending your loyal customers a lot of email touchpoints. Here are just a few examples:
- A welcome email for newly referred customers
- An announcement for special shopping windows or exclusive promos
- A reminder email when a time-sensitive promo or deal is ending
- A points notification email
- A birthday email
Plus, you can create a/b tests with the same template, using different photos or subject lines to experiment with assets that resonate the best with your customer base.
Pro tip: Certain tools, like Extole, can also track revenue that comes in from emails that feature a referral call-to-action.
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3. Grow Your Audience With Discovery Features
Discovery tools help you grow your audience based on your existing hero customers, aka your most loyal customers who frequently engage with your brand.
One useful discovery feature to look for is the ability to pull look-alike audiences to serve targeted ads based on your own customer data.
Say, for example, you want to find potential customers who resemble your existing top spenders. Most growth marketing tools can analyze your customer data based on parameters you control — like transaction amount or customer lifetime value (CLV). From there, your tool will give you a segmented list.
Then, you can use that list to build look-alike audiences to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok. This helps you reach a target audience that’s more likely to go to your website and make a purchase because their behavior matches people who already love your brand.
Certain tools, like Extole, have bonus discovery features to help connect brands with social media influencers who can hype products or services to their own audience.
Extole collects data from customers who share your brand’s referral program with their friends on social media. From that data, Extole can segment high-influence people (meaning someone with a dedicated follower base) for you to partner with on influencer campaigns.
Pro tip: Give your brand’s lead generation a boost by building an email pop-up form on your homepage. That way, you can collect data from new users as soon as they visit your website, even if they find you through other marketing channels like social media or email.
4. Use Integrations To Push Growth Even Further
Consumer needs are constantly shifting, and it’s tough for any growth marketing tool to keep up. That’s where integrations come in handy, helping future-proof your growth marketing strategy without investing in dozens of software solutions.
There are a few kinds of useful integrations to look for:
SMS Marketing
If you’ve ever gotten a text message from a brand, you’ve experienced SMS marketing. At its most simple, SMS marketing is a strategy that involves sending texts to your customer base to stay top-of-mind.
Integrating an SMS messaging service into your strategy puts you ahead of the competition. A recent study showed that 91% of consumers want texts from brands, but most businesses don’t offer this service yet.
Like email, SMS messaging is a form of opt-in marketing, where a customer gives a brand permission to use their phone number to receive messages.
SMS is also one of the most popular and fast-growing trends being embraced by both B2B and B2C companies. That’s because personalized text messaging lets brands talk one-on-one with their customers.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A customer data platform, or CDP, is useful for any marketing team who has multiple tools that should “talk together.”
A CDP is particularly useful for brands who have already invested in a lot of tools (hey, it happens!) and need to consolidate their data in one place.
For example, if you want to pull in email marketing data from your CRM to use in a brand ambassador campaign, a CDP can help bridge your two tools.
Pro tip: When looking for a growth marketing tool, choose one that integrates with other software you already use.
Go Beyond Traditional Marketing and Build Sustainable Growth
With traditional marketing, the focus is on generating brand awareness. Growth marketing, on the other hand, moves customers through your brand’s marketing funnel in a more sustainable way.
It’s not just about selling a product one time — it’s about acquiring high-value customers who not only want to buy from you again but want to share your brand with their friends and family.
A growth marketing tool can help you with customer retention by collecting valuable data throughout the customer journey. Then, using that data to create positive and meaningful customer experiences.
Find out why Extole is the leader in helping brands see sustainable growth. Watch a free demo today.