Marketing Kickstarts Brand Growth in 4 Ways

Did you know marketing kickstarts brand growth? Without a strong, effective marketing strategy, you’ll struggle to survive, let alone grow your business. That’s especially concerning to owners/ managers of SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises) because they face unique constraints of time (employees often wear multiple hats), funds (there’s never enough money to do everything needed to support your brand), lack of awareness (as getting the word out for an unknown brand takes more time and money), and talent (as hiring people with the right marketing chops is hard and expensive). As shown below, these problems are pervasive in SMEs, with only 20% of them responding that they’re currently meeting their business objectives.

Read on to learn how marketing kickstarts growth when you manage these four marketing functions effectively. Also, we’ll discuss how to optimize your strategies in each of these four areas. If you want to learn more about how to use marketing to build your brand, consider signing up for my small business coaching program, with affordable options for every small business.

Marketing kickstarts brand growth

Many small businesses fail to appreciate the contribution of marketing to the overall success of their business. Often, marketing is viewed as a cost and a waste of time and money. For others, marketing is an afterthought relegated to an intern or untrained (and underpaid) employee. Meanwhile, the reality is that marketing brings in the funds necessary to build and grow your brand. Without a sound marketing strategy, your business is nearly doomed to failure.

Here are the four functions where marketing kickstarts growth:

• Attraction
• Conversion
• Measurement
• Scaling operations

1. How do I get the right people to notice my brand?

Notice in asking this question, I insert the word “right” rather than settling for getting the word out to people. Thus, embedded within this question is the more fundamental question of who the right people are, which gets at the notion of market segmentation. While most businesses say that everyone is their prospective customer (and we’d never suggest ignoring someone who wants to buy your products), the reality is that there’s a subset of the entire population who are more likely to buy your products (we call this your target market) because they possess:

• Need
• Money
• Authority
• Desire

Once you discover who makes up your target market, your next task is to learn about their habits (including media habits), what they look like, what’s important to them in choosing products, and where they are. This involves building robust personas, often giving them fictitious names to distinguish different customer groups. Here’s a graphic depicting three possible personas:

Now that you know who you want to attract to your business, marketing kickstarts your growth by helping you build a strategy for creating awareness, which is the first step along the customer journey that ends with conversion, then loyalty (in the best-case scenario).

In building your marketing strategy to attract prospective customers, you must:

• Determine which media channels are best suited for reaching your target persona. Your choice depends entirely on the media habits of the specific target market or persona you’re trying to reach. You might have several channel strategies for each persona, as well as different channel strategies for different personas. You must balance your efforts and spending across the following options:
  • Email marketing, which offers the highest return on spend (between $36 and $42 for every $1 spend) of any channel strategy, is a no-brainer.
  • SEO, including local SEO, although recent changes in search engines that present answer snippets that use AI to address queries without requiring a website visit, have seriously reduced the potential of organic reach (once the primary driver of website visits) to decline precipitously, as shown below. This decline continues today. The partial solution is to use GEO (generative engine optimization) to gain brand mentions in the answer snippet and on direct search using AI tools like ChatGPT.

  • Social media, although the decline in organic social media reach is even more pronounced. 

  • Paid social and search, which is about the only way to get attention in a post-AI world.

  • Other sites, such as Reddit and Medium, continue to attract attention, although it’s harder to break through the clutter in these sites.

  • The key to success is to choose a few of these channels, ones you have the bandwidth to sustain and dovetail with your chosen persona.

• Posting the right content on each platform is another way that marketing kickstarts your growth. Posting consistently is essential, while posting content that stands out from the noise produced in each channel offers the best returns. Often, the difference between the success or failure of your content is as simple as the image you chose to share (consumers like to see themselves in your images) and the specific meaning implied by the text you use. Since you’re making a significant investment in each piece of content, especially video, it’s critical that you make each post deliver. Later, we’ll discuss using measurement as a means to do this.
• To stand out among your competitors and the noise they create, create a unique selling proposition (also called a unique value proposition, which is more in line with marketing thinking) that resonates with your market persona.

Marketing kickstarts growth when you build a strategy around attraction using these elements.

2. How can I turn traffic into revenue?

Obviously, attraction is only the first step along the customer journey (see below). While critical, you need to entice visitors down the journey to get your cash register to ring. Marketing kickstarts your growth when you’ve hit on ways to streamline this journey, as well as employ tools to recover lost sales and entice future purchases from your visitors.

To ease movement toward conversion, marketing kickstarts by crafting appeals to your target market’s hot buttons and promoting your product’s value on your landing pages. That means:

• Ensuring your value is transmitted clearly in the first three seconds.
• Using an image, screenshot, or video that attracts your target market, letting them know this product is “for them”.
• Offering a clear call to action, often as a button that stands out on the page, so visitors know what action is expected.
• Using trust signals, such as reviews, ratings, and the number of people who have already bought the product.
• Streamlining the conversion process by removing roadblocks, excess clicks, requests for information that aren’t essential, and offering multiple payment options.
• Establishing multiple landing pages, each tailored for various personas and the current stage each visitor is in, by addressing the most pressing concerns and offering the most salient incentives to complete a purchase.
• Entice customers to increase the value of their purchase by offering additional purchase options to enhance their experience. Don’t fall back on the lame appeal of “Do you want fries with that?” by making the offered options attractive, such as offering a bundle at a reduced price, and limiting the number of additional products offered.
• Follow up each purchase with clear, accurate information on delivery, thank each customer for their purchase, offer additional purchases (maybe at a discount or by including a coupon for a future purchase), and keep sending email messages with new products, offers, and other information to help retain customers over time.
• Don’t give up on customers who leave without making a purchase. Follow up with remarketing campaigns on social platforms like Meta and search. These ad campaigns target folks who visited your website in the past, using a small snippet of JavaScript (called a pixel) to identify users on these platforms. If the visitor left products in their shopping cart, a friendly email reminding them to complete the purchase, often by offering a discount or reinforcing the value proposition, is another way marketing kickstarts your growth.

3. How do you assess that marketing kickstarts growth effectively?

Most businesses emphasize collecting data on ROI (return on investment) or ROAS (return on advertising spend). That’s a great way to demonstrate whether marketing kickstarts growth. However, remembering that conversion is simply the end of the customer journey, it’s important to assess your marketing campaigns at every stage along this journey, which is often convoluted with cycles rather than linear progress.

Yesterday, I posted content that outlines many of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should assess on a routine basis. Rather than repeat that discussion here, I’ll refer you to that post, especially the section on how to assess the performance of your marketing campaigns. Suffice it to say you must:

• Assess KPIs across the entire customer journey across all communication channels used. That often means following clicks from various marketing efforts (at the post, platform, and campaign levels), through to your website or physical store using URL tags and asking in-store customers what prompted their visit.

  

• Follow performance across time for different personas, regions, product lines, or any other nuanced vision that makes sense based on your business model.
• Benchmark your performance across competitors and even other industries to discover ways to enhance performance. For instance, a construction company monitored on-time delivery to a job site against Domino’s on-time pizza delivery. They sweetened the pot by betting on who would win based on these percentages, with the loser buying pizza for the winning staff.

4. How to balance growth with sustaining current business and creating a sound work-life balance?

Marketing kickstarts your growth, but managing that growth is important for sustaining both your current commitments and retaining some semblance of a work-life balance. Managing that tension isn’t easy and there are no rules to make it easier.

When marketing kickstarts your growth too quickly, you can find your business unable to keep up with the demands of inventory, on-time delivery, and ensuring customer satisfaction over the long run. Having too much business can just as easily lead to failure as having too little business. SMEs, with their resource constraints, are more likely to face this problem than larger businesses. The key is to leverage what you have to both sustain and grow your business. Here’s how to do that:

• Use AI to expand your ability to do repetitive tasks, such as creating content (only drafts, not final posts or you’ll lose your authenticity), performing routine analysis tasks, monitoring and repurchasing inventory, and other tasks you do routinely, such as some administration. Many smaller firms also outsource logistics to specialists. Gig workers are a great way to add additional staffing quickly, when you won’t need them long-term.
• Leverage your physical plant by outsourcing non-core roles, such as HR and accounting, to outside firms. This allows you to acquire the talent you need when you can’t afford full-time trained staff. You can quickly scale up your physical plant by leasing equipment, facilities, and vehicles. You can even use contract manufacturing to test out new products or quickly ramp up production, especially if you don’t anticipate needing increased production forever.
• Software and the tools they provide are a great way to do repetitive tasks, such as building dashboards and graphing data for easier analysis.

Another scalability issue revolves around retaining existing customers. What might happen if you lose a large customer? Marketing kickstarts your growth, but you must constantly balance efforts between retaining existing customers by ensuring customer satisfaction and attracting new customers.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are various ways that marketing kickstarts your growth. The essence of this post comes down to creating a repeatable system that produces predictable results that allow you to more accurately plan for business growth and maintenance.

How will you use this post to ensure marketing kickstarts growth in your business? What will you implement starting tomorrow? Let me know in the comments section below.

Also, if you have additional questions that might help you plan for more robust growth or comments about how marketing kickstarts growth in your business, share them!

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our affordable coaching programs to help your business thrive into the future.