Growth marketing allows you to align your goals and marketing strategy, understand your audience, and position yourself for success by enabling you to scale and drive revenue.
Growth marketing is a true powerhouse, but its blessings can sometimes double as its curses. ProperExpression explains why growth marketing is so powerful, and the marketing pitfalls you should avoid.
Growth marketing is a branch of marketing specifically focused on revenue and business growth. It combines marketing, sales, technology, and more to scale a business and see measurable results. But with that power comes some major responsibility!
While growth marketing has the capacity to transform your business, if done improperly, it could also bring about some major challenges. As long as you’re aware of the most common growth marketing pitfalls, you can tap into the full potential of this revenue generator.
The Strengths & Weaknesses of Growth Marketing
1. Aligning All the Pieces
Growth marketing is most powerful when you align all of its disparate pieces…but that’s also one of its biggest challenges!
Growth marketers are faced with being jacks of all trades who are tasked with figuring out the integration between marketing channels, and how to align content with a strategy with workflows!
It can be tough to keep track of all of these moving parts, but it’s when each piece of the puzzle comes together that growth marketing can fully succeed. Growth marketing, in many ways, is akin to a watch: a watch is made up of many cogs and gears that turn and impact each other.
When one gear breaks, it causes a domino effect that throws the entire mechanism for a loop. But when everything operates in harmony, the clock seamlessly ticks and tells time. So too, the components of growth marketing are like the gears and cogs of a clock. If one isn’t working, it will adversely affect the rest. But if they’re all aligned, then your growth marketing efforts have a high chance of succeeding.
The key to this alignment is having a clear understanding of how each piece works within your overall strategy and workflow. It also means not assuming that what works for one marketing channel can be extrapolated to the rest.
For example, if you want to increase engagement on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, then create content designed specifically for those platforms (such as videos) rather than simply repurposing existing posts from other sites like LinkedIn or Pinterest.
2. Attribution: Friend or Foe?
True attribution is what makes growth marketing powerful, but it can also be one of its greatest limitations.
Growth marketers often must prove their worth to gain a seat at the strategic table and show that they’re not budget black holes. That’s where tracking and attribution come in.
Tracking and attribution are used to prove marketing ROI and can help marketers explore which strategies, channels, and efforts are working and which aren’t. Periodic reports that display this information are crucial, both internally for marketers and externally for clients, to see.
It’s important to note that tracking and attribution are not limited to any particular part of the funnel. In fact, they should contribute to full-funnel visibility, so that every step of the customer’s journey is being properly tracked.
So, if tracking and attribution are incredibly useful and imperative for marketers, what’s the challenge?
When people overpromise perfect tracking and perfect attribution, that’s when problems start to arise. Although it’s a necessity, the process of tracking and attribution marketing efforts is far from perfect and certainly not consistent.
Traffic attribution can get dropped, different attribution models report on different metrics, and channel sourcing can be flawed.
Growth marketers have to set clear expectations with clients from the onset and drive home that tracking is not a magical, perfect process, nor is attribution. So, while the truth is in the data and keeping track of campaigns is crucial, reasonable expectations from all sides are a must.
3. Marketers = Data Scientists + Psychologists
We mentioned earlier that growth marketers are jacks of all trades, and it couldn’t be more true. In addition to their marketing efforts, all marketers also act as artists, data scientists, and psychologists.
Those last two are especially noteworthy because, in an industry where data is king, it becomes challenging to balance data with interpreting behavior beyond the metrics.
Data tells a story, and it’s one very much worth knowing, but the risk of confirmation bias also exists when analyzing data. To be a truly great growth marketer, you have to also be a great psychologist who understands and empathizes with the audience and thinks beyond numbers.
While that’s easier said than done, it helps to first get to know the client and their company. By learning the passions and motivations behind a certain organization, it becomes easier to create campaigns for and connect with the audience.
4. Nothing Works Forever
Growth marketing efforts work…until they don’t. The final advantage of growth marketing that can masquerade as a challenge is just how necessary it is to be an agile, adaptable growth marketer.
Growth marketing is powerful. It’s what turns a small, unknown startup into a global powerhouse. But what works and what resonates in growth marketing is constantly evolving, and can vary on a client-by-client basis. In other words, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” growth marketing solution.
If a unique growth marketing strategy is developed, executed, and monitored, then it can make massive strides in driving revenue and scale. But if growth marketers don’t recognize the unique needs of each client, and are not quick on their feet when things change, then growth marketing will never reach its full potential.
Conclusion
Growth marketing isn’t easy, to say the least. It requires a lot of trial and error, and there are always new ways to improve your strategy and campaigns. The challenges of growth marketing walk hand-in-hand with the aspects rife with potential.
As long as growth marketers and their clients stay aware of pitfalls and boons, growth marketing can become a revenue machine. If you’re interested in a growth marketing agency that knows how to overcome these challenges to deliver real results, check out ProperExpression.
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