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Top Growth Tactics for Aspiring Entrepreneurs in 2022

Top Growth Tactics for Aspiring Entrepreneurs in 2022

It’s never the wrong time to create or refresh your digital marketing strategy. Building brand awareness and achieving rapid growth are vital for small and new businesses to survive.

But, with each new year, there are new challenges, tactics, and strategies needed to help you stand out in an increasingly competitive business world.

Throughout this article, we’ll go over growth tactics and how you can use them to build a digital marketing strategy to boost your business growth.

What are growth tactics?

Simply put, growth tactics are marketing strategies used to enhance business growth. They involve implementing and testing growth hacks to find the best digital marketing strategy to attract and convert customers.

Rapid growth is vital for the success of new and small businesses. Using a short-term growth strategy is essential to boosting brand awareness and sales.

As a business owner, you’ll have multiple growth goals. These objectives may include increasing revenue, driving email subscriber signups, or establishing ecommerce partnerships to increase brand awareness and credibility.

By using growth tactics in your digital marketing approach, you carve out a shortcut to your goals while saving on time, money, and resources.

Benefits of digital marketing for your business

Building a strong digital marketing strategy will help you scale your business and provide several benefits:

Wider reach

While the internet has enabled worldwide ecommerce, the digital marketplace is competitive, and standing out is imperative. Using digital marketing strategies like social media, online ads, and content marketing gives you the ability to reach out to your target audience more effectively, boosting your conversion rates.

Additionally, using the best VoIP service, you can provide worldwide support, improving customer experiences and retention.

Brand awareness

A wider reach also improves your brand awareness. Using social media channels like TikTok, you can make your target audience aware of your brand. It attracts and engages potential and existing customers, building better customer relationships.

Another way to build better relationships is through partnership marketing platforms, like Affise Reach. With over 500 global brands and agencies available in one place, it’s easy to recruit and connect with diverse partners to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and promote your products to new target audiences.

Cost-effective

With digital ads, you can target specific platforms and demographics to get your marketing messages to potential customers, unlike TV or newspaper ads. Generally, social media ads are less expensive, making them a cost-effective choice.

Better revenues

Having a wider reach, increasing your brand awareness, and having cost-efficient ads, lead to increased conversions and boosted revenue.

Improved ROI

Your return on investment (ROI) is the money your marketing campaign generated divided by its cost. With increased revenues and lower advertising costs in digital marketing, your return on investment is likely to be higher.

Additionally, ROI is a metric used to determine if your marketing strategies are working or need tweaking.

Step one: Build your digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing is becoming increasingly competitive as marketing channels grow. Building a solid digital marketing strategy with the best growth tactics is critical to business success.

Set goals that make sense

What do you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategies?

Answer this question before implementing any growth strategy. Without clear, well-defined, and realistic goals, your marketing campaign will flounder, leading to your business operating less effectively.

You need a point of focus to drive your business forwards and upwards. Choose reasonable, achievable goals to boost growth rapidly:

Increase brand awareness

Brand awareness is about showing potential customers that your brand is credible, authentic, and valuable to them.

Use content marketing to create a lasting impression by presenting your personality and brand value instead of just promotional marketing messages.

Generate leads and sales

Being proactive is vital to generating leads and sales to increase your conversion rate.

For example, adding your product catalog to Instagram’s social media shop, promoting new products with TikTok videos, or sending discounts via email marketing, boosts leads and sales. Consider the tactics your business can capitalize on to improve your ecommerce marketing strategies.

Grow brand audience

Growing your audience involves discovering who they are and understanding their interests. It’s one of the benefits of statistical analysis.

With digital marketing you have pools of data to analyze, allowing you to find the places and conversations that interest your potential customers, enabling you to expand your customer base.

Community engagement

On social media, people engage with interesting content. They don’t want to appear dull, so they don’t share lackluster posts.

Providing fun and creative ways to engage with your customers creates a lasting impression of your brand. It could be a question, poll, or online challenge to guess what your new product is.

Your customers will readily share your content and promote your brand if you put in the effort to engage with them.

Drive traffic to your site

Increased site traffic leads to more product views on your ecommerce store and increased sales.

One method is to post links on your social media or profile. Another is using SEO and link-building strategies to benefit from search algorithms. This improves your ecommerce site search results ranking, boosting website traffic.

Don’t choose too many goals. It can muddy your campaign and confuse your team. Instead, pick vital aims to create simple, clear, marketing objectives to focus your marketing efforts.

Research your target audience

Understanding your target audience’s needs, interests, and where they spend their time allows you to build a marketing strategy to attract and influence them to buy your products. Consider the following research aspects:

Different platforms attract different audiences

Where does your target audience hang out? Is it LinkedIn? Twitter?

Developing a strategy to target every marketing channel is costly, time-consuming, and inefficient. Like TV or newspaper ads, you’re hoping your target audience will catch a glimpse of your product.

Researching the specific platforms your customers use lets you optimize your strategy.

For example, TikTok is popular among younger audiences, like Millennials and Gen Z. If this is your target audience, you can optimize your digital marketing strategies for video-related content.

Research which platforms are best for your target audiences to achieve your growth goals without overspending or wasting time.

Do your homework on your existing social media audience

With the analytics tools social media offers today, you can discover in-depth demographics of your real-world followers and customers.

Additionally, you can see the platforms you have the most impact on, ensuring you spend your marketing money in the right place and create marketing messages to target potential customers better.

Establish metrics and KPIs

Constant testing and evaluation are needed to determine if you’re achieving your goals and how you can improve in the future.

Tracking and measuring the right metrics and KPIs will help you find the best social media marketing strategies to grow your digital presence and business. It can be tricky to manage unstructured data from several marketing channels in one place. Using tools, like Affise BI can help you do this.

As well as allowing you to gather insights from key metrics, it gives your team easy access to data on one dashboard, allowing them to identify future trends, giving you an edge in the digital marketplace.

We go through the metrics that should matter to you in the following sections.

Reach

Reach is the number of users viewing your posts, and tracking it measures your social media audience, post shares, and social influence. Consider making your content more exciting and shareable to improve your reach and social standing.

Clicks

Clicks are the number of people clicking on your content or account. It shows users engaging with your content.

Tracking clicks shows what your potential customers are interested in when they’re interested in it, and what platform they use most. Measuring this tells you what encourages users to buy, enabling you to tailor your content marketing.

Engagement

Engagement is your total social media interactions divided by impressions. It’s similar to a conversation rate. People who engage with you are buyers in the first stages of the customer journey. The ones that see your post and scroll on are the prospective customers you’re losing.

Measuring engagement helps find ways to drive your interactions upwards and increase conversions, like using online competitions.

Hashtag performance

Hashtags help people find things they’re interested in, and tracking its performance will assist you in optimizing content.

Research your popular hashtags. See which ones increase engagement and those that don’t to decide how to grow your reach.

Organic and paid likes

Tracking likes from organic audiences and paid ads separately allows you to test different types of content, see which method is better for growth, and establish two content marketing strategies with specific budget allocations.

It provides you with increased data to improve your decision-making for your business growth strategy and goals.

Sentiment

What do users think about your online presence?

For example, companies like dbrand, have garnered an online reputation for using witty social content to sell new products. While this might not work for Apple or Amazon, it’s something dbrand’s followers expect and contributes heavily to their positive reputation.

Dig into your keywords, comments, and hashtags. Track what people like and dislike, to improve your social media performance and digital marketing.

Create engaging social content

Fun, immersive, and engaging content should be at the heart of your digital marketing strategy as people share what interests them and provides social influence. It’s like virtual backgrounds for videoconferencing. People choose them to appear professional and also because they make presentations or webinars more visually appealing.

With your research, you’ll know your target audience demographics, the platforms they use, and their interests. Now you can create desirable and interactive content.

The importance of sticking to content themes

A consistent brand voice is vital for social media. If dbrand altered their unconventional persona, they could lose engagement and followers.

In the same way, using consistent content themes and formats help you hone in on content marketing that works. The right content will depend on your users and platform, whether it’s Instagram reels, TikTok videos, memes, or product photos.

For example, your followers might primarily share memes and short videos, which you can use to create fun and immersive content.

Content ideas

Here are a few popular social media content marketing trends to give you ideas on creating the right type of content:

Stories and time-sensitive posts

Stories are interactive, short, and unmissable. You can use them to poll customers.

Using stories for event promotion or behind-the-scenes content can engage your customers and keep you fresh in their minds.

Short-form video

Social video is becoming increasingly popular with the rise of TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. Short-form videos are easy to digest, fun, and engaging.

The best part is that they’re easy to create. A smartphone camera and a laptop can film viral videos to expand your reach.

Posts that show off your human side

Letting your personality loose on social media builds the human side of your brand, strengthening your bond with customers.

Consider using informal language or first-person video to remind your customers of the human element behind your posts.

Step two: Supplement your marketing strategy with these tactics

Talk to your customers

Customer feedback tells you what you’re doing right, what you need to improve, and what your customers want in the coming years. By communicating with your customers, you can use data to drive your growth in the right way, retain existing customers, and grow your customer base.

Consider questionnaires or online polls to see if new products or business directions have customer approval. Look at where your customers hang out and build networks or focus groups for assessing different strategies.

Set short-term sales strategies

Startups use growth marketing because it focuses on achieving short-term, rapid growth. You can apply the same tactic to your digital marketing strategies.

Creating strategies to boost sales in a few months achieves immediate success to carry you through 2022. Use your sales and marketing teams to discover business growth tactics and create reasonable sales milestones for rapid short-term growth.

Get real about your website

Your website is available worldwide, and it’s a vital touchpoint in the customer journey. Customers use websites to buy products, search for solutions, and get customer support. So, your website needs to be responsive, interactive, and available 24/7 without disruptions.

Carry out a website audit, checking customer-centricity, intuitiveness, and visibility. Consider using SEO services to improve your search engine results ranking or beta testing your optimized site.

Leverage performance marketing

Performance-based marketing is a cost-effective way to drive growth, as your partners earn a commission when a specific action occurs, like a sale. For example, an affiliate receives a commission for referrals that lead to sales.

Additionally, it incentivizes your partners to promote your products. The types of performance marketing include partner marketing, PPC ads, and influencer marketing.

Commend people in your marketing

64% of people prefer buying from companies that treat their employees well. Take advantage of this in your marketing strategy by showing appreciation for your employees.

For example, you could promote top-performing employees on social media or during a webinar. Additionally, you could create short-form videos, podcasts, or let employees talk about their work-life experiences on a company blog.

Showing employee appreciation reveals your human side. It makes you stand out, build trust with new customers and drive your recruitment efforts.

Be sensible about marketing technology

Don’t rush into buying a marketing tech stack to boost your growth without analyzing your business needs and marketing requirements. When deciding on your solutions, consider the following:

Campaign execution

You need to deliver campaigns across multiple channels and provide customers with personalized experiences. So, automating campaigns and communications for organic and paid posts is a crucial aspect of your strategy.

Audience management

Segmenting customers based on the data you collect and the profiles you build assists you in providing a personalized experience and managing your audience.

Data analytics and performance

Collecting data is crucial to building customer profiles and tracking campaign performance. By measuring and analyzing key metrics, you can determine the tactics that are working and the ones that need improvement — making this an essential element to your marketing technologies.

You may want to use an option like Affise Analytics and Business Intelligence Tools. Solutions like this allow you to measure marketing performance, forecast risks, and find growth areas. Additionally, integration with other analytics tools and smart dashboards makes it easy to create visually appealing reports.

Be responsible with first-party data management

First-party data is information gathered directly from your customers. Ensuring strong data security and being transparent about data collection is critical to building trust with customers.

Furthermore, with your partnership marketing platforms, you’ll want solid data transfer to quickly and securely transfer offers without delay, and allow you to work with thousands of partners. Look for a tool that lets you do this, like Affise’s CPAPI.

Additionally, CPAPI automatically transfers and synchronizes data, and analyzes campaign results, allowing you to easily scale up your partnership opportunities.

Become agile

Marketing and technology teams need to work together to meet KPIs, optimize the customer journey, and carry out your digital marketing strategy.

Balance spend allocation

Deciding where to allocate your marketing budget is crucial to increase your ROI and eliminate wasteful spending.

Start by creating a customer profile or persona, using target demographics and user behavior. Look at your research and identify the best channels for your personalized messaging, using an omnichannel approach to tie the customer journey together.

Finally, build your campaign to target your customer profiles and allocate your spending accordingly.

Boost your business growth with Affise

When it comes to boosting your business growth, performance-based marketing is an effective strategy to reach short-term and long-term goals.

Affise’s innovative partnership marketing platform was built for brands and advertisers to connect with agencies to automate and scale partner relations. It can help you connect with partners on all available marketing channels and obtain a return on your investment.

Additionally, with Affise, you have a secure and established platform that you can manage, analyze, optimize, and customize the way you want. It includes features such as:

Multi-currencies and flexible payouts
Smart targeting and smart caps
50+ data breakdowns
Anti-fraud protection
AI smart links
Third-party integrations
Automatic transfer of offers
Plus many more

With several case studies available to show Affise’s proven record, you can rest assured that it’s a platform to meet your business needs.

Conclusion

Your online presence is essential to your business growth, with the right digital marketing strategy providing a wider reach, better revenues, and an improved ROI. However, finding the best marketing strategy doesn’t need to be difficult, costly, or time-consuming.

Setting achievable goals, conducting research, and creating engaging, high-quality content will set you up to succeed. Supplementing this initial strategy with tactics to achieve short-term growth can supercharge your marketing efforts and allow you to move your business upwards.

Strategies such as partnership marketing are vital to your digital efforts. Investing in platforms, like Affise Reach, can provide you with a vast array of features to automate and scale your partner relations to boost sales and revenue.

The future is always uncertain, but by continually evaluating your digital marketing strategies, you can stay ahead of the pack and stand out to potential customers, giving your business the best opportunity to flourish.

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Written by

Patty Yan

Patty is the EMEA Product Marketing Manager for RingCentral Office, the leader in cloud communications solutions. Patty is passionate about creating value and differentiation, ensuring a better experience for customers and partners. She gained a wealth of international product marketing, product management, GTM and market development experience, across a range of high-tech SaaS in a fast-paced, hyper-growth environment that assumes both strategic and tactical execution. She is not new to UC, starting in Tandberg, then Cisco, driving the launch of video collaboration and services, and Enghouse with global responsibilities for hosted CCaaS.