New Digital Age and digital marketing consultancy CvE – Control v Exposed – recently held a roundtable discussion with senior marketers from a variety of mass market and DTC brands. The discussion was focused on how these businesses are all adopting a growth marketing approach, with the brand representatives sharing their thoughts on this emerging discipline. This included Mondelez, Unilever and Weetabix as well as brands that operate with a DTC model such as Bella & Duke, Gymbox and NIVEA.
Growth marketing is now a discipline that is influencing how brands of all types manage and optimise their marketing efforts. Our discussion demonstrated that growth marketing principles can be applied to all forms of data, not just marketing or digital media data.
What may surprise outsiders is that this emerging segment of marketing is as much about culture as it is about data. Marketing is about persuasion and influence, so it is important to recognise the humans that exist behind the data being used to power business growth. The examples given by our participants show that brand tracking and consumer insights data can be a competitive advantage when not all brands think in that same way.
To conclude the report, we leave you with five tips to help leaders adopt growth marketing into their own organisation:
1. You don’t need huge amounts of data to become a growth marketing practitioner.
Our panel included FMCG brands, companies not associated with rich first-party data, and they are able to adopt a growth marketing mindset based on the data that is available to them. A combination of brand tracking, search data, social media data as well web analytics will exist in most businesses.
2. Growth can be driven at all stages of the customer journey.
When growth can be generated from awareness-driving marketing through to loyalty marketing, and everything in between, this means that businesses of all types can benefit from an iterative data-led approach in taking customers through purchase journeys.
3. Documentation is unglamorous, but it is a vital aspect of growth marketing.
For businesses to adopt data-led learnings, it is important that those learnings and assumptions are clearly documented for others to follow. This is a key component of iterative improvement -it is hard to continuously improve revenue results when past learnings are forgotten or misunderstood.
4. Marketing works on at least two timescales; the short term, as well as the long term.
Our panel drew a distinction between growth marketing, which encapsulates all forms of marketing, and performance marketing, which operates on short-term measures of success only. This distinction is important, because an effective growth marketer will need both long- and short-term success data in order to maximise the potential of marketing.
5. Linked to the above point, brands should use data to judge success in both relative and absolute terms.
By this we mean that relative measures of success, potentially metrics that don’t quantify economic numbers, can still be used to power growth marketing. If your marketing is regularly generating improvements to quantifiable data that ladders up to an economic benefit – that’s OK. In simple terms, this might mean using softer metrics like brand tracking and site traffic to judge whether changes in marketing are contributing towards growth.
CvE recommends that brands think about how to build a culture where testing, curiosity and an analytical mindset are encouraged.
