How a growth marketing mindset can help drive customer engagement

ClickZ’s August 2017 webcast The Growth Marketing Mindset: Using Data to Drive Engagement, hosted last week and now available on-demand, looks at the key components of a successful growth marketing strategy.

The webinar focuses on how companies can harness behavioral and contextual data to deliver a personalized experience, featuring presentations from Alyssa Jarrett, Senior Content Marketing Manager at marketing automation platform Iterable, and James Valentine, Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist for smart home services provider Vivint.

The concept of growth marketing is transforming marketing by encouraging practitioners to focus on the entire funnel, rather than simply winning new customers. The ‘growth mindset’ is the term given by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck to the idea that people will be more successful if they believe that their talents can be developed, and work hard to develop them.

Key principles of growth marketing

A key takeaway from the webinar is how there is no limit to how much companies can grow if they follow some basic principles relating to growth marketing.

• Link your messaging to events. As Alyssa Jarrett explained: “Anything that customers do on your digital properties can be a trigger to send a message at the right time … What really matters is what your customers are doing right now.” Use behavioral data, based on events and actions, to help trigger messaging.

• Self-improvement. Marketers need to possess the “spirit of self-improvement” around the tools and tactics that drive their marketing strategy, with a positive attitude and relentless commitment to driving better performance.

• Know your customers. Understand what your customers want, for example by sending them what you know is relevant based on their behavior and digital footprint. Try to develop a two-way conversation so you can identify customer needs more effectively.

• Shift from acquisition to engagement. You run the risk of “unbalancing your company’s economics” if you put too much emphasis on acquiring customers, as opposed to truly engaging people. Without a proper focus on engagement, you are unlikely to reap the rewards of profitable customer lifetime value. “Focus on the entire funnel across the customer journey in order to really gain high-quality customers”, the webinar audience was told.

• Unify your data sources. Many businesses are struggling because customer data is sitting in silos across different business departments. Companies need to choose an integration platform that serves as a “unified scalable hub of information that enables personalized experiences across channels.”

• Deliver the right message. In order to deliver messaging that is more likely to resonate, companies need to be able to harness behavioral data on their digital properties, including websites and apps. Companies should build automated campaigns (or “workflows”) around different segments of the user base, so they can be targeted with the right content at the right time.

The growth marketing cycle

Source: Iterable

People, processes and platform

James Valentine described Vivint’s “product love triangle” which is used to visualize the configuration of people, processes and platform that is required to deliver an experience.

Source: @valentinejames

“People” describes the co-workers, stakeholders, clients, audience and customers who might be involved, while “processes” refer to procedures, practices, habits, rituals, norms and checklists a company uses. “Platform”, the third point of the triangle, refers to the technology or media that are employed to deliver the experience.

When polled about which area relating to growth marketing presents the greatest challenges, webinar attendees were most likely to cite processes (45%) as the most difficult part of the equation, significantly ahead of people (26%) and platform (29%).

But while processes might be the biggest challenge, James explained how it is also the most malleable part of the triangle, which means that companies have a great opportunity to turn this problem area into an opportunity, assuming that they have the right focus.

During his presentation, he stressed the importance of being clear on what you are trying to help users do, and how you know whether you have achieved that. It is also necessary to understand the drivers of the experience as part of a test-and-learn approach, he said, and to have a way of seeing whether hypotheses are right or wrong.

Part of Vivint’s iterative approach to strategy involves “post-mortems”, which involves a review of test results, identification of learnings and determination of next steps.

The Growth Marketing Mindset: Using Data to Drive Engagement webcast, produced in partnership with Iterable, is now available for on-demand viewing.