Identifying and amplifying growth channels — Review

N°3

Foreword

During the first two weeks at CXL Institute, I was covering the growth mindset and its foundations together with the User-Centric marketing. Both introducing courses gave insights as preparation for the third part, identifying and amplifying growth channels. This course is taught by Sophia Eng, CXL instructor and VP of Growth Marketing at Clearbit. The third blog for week 3 at CXL is the final part of the foundations of Growth Marketing.

Intro

If you are a start-up, small or large company, it is important to identify and understand your customers for the right market fit. This rational starts by choosing the right channels. The review will cover the five main channels to secure sustainable growth for your business. Advice, tips and drawbacks will give insights too which channel is the right fit for you.

Here below you can find an overview of the five major growth channels:

The five major growth channels:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Advertising (PPC marketing).

2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Display.

4. Email Marketing.

5. Content Marketing.

Which channel to start first with?

Before starting selecting your channel, a good analysis of your target audience should be formulated together by having an idea about the segmentation. The main reason by identifying your channels is to avoid mismatches for your objectives.

Process steps to identifying growth channels:

1. Study your audience

2. Choose a channel

3. Once identified, test it out

4. Measure the results

Questions to consider:

• Where are your customers, where are they active?
• What are they doing?
• How is their behaviour?
• Where is the target audience engaging on those channels?

Some advice regarding growth tactics:

• Approach these channels quantitatively,
• Track the Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
• Utilise particular channel-specific strategy; map this out.

Tip for Start-ups

Explore the under-utilized channels of large companies; try out other approaches that can be unique and give an opportunity

Know your competitors, know their keywords, blog posts, content marketing. Try to find out the keywords they are using to leverage the attraction they’ve already built.

Opportunities, consider Mobile integration, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most common and most qualified channels. SEO provides a process-wise improvement for your websites ranking on the search engine. Keep in mind, if your website is on the second page of the search engine, you can latterly forget it. To give you some facts, according to CXL research:

• 30% of click-through rates went to the first position on the result page.
• 12% of the click-through rates went to the second, or third position.
• 1–2% for the lower position at the bottom of the page.

As mentioned, SEO is the main driver of qualified traffic. For this reason, it is important to focus on first ranking priorities by using keywords -and long-tail keywords strategies. The last one, long-tail keywords have higher search volumes because it is more engaging and influential. Recent trends are indicating that searches are not essentially focused on keywords but rated question-based approach. Good websites facilitate a dynamic FAQ that answers the questions of the client criteria. As a result, Google qualifies this as unique and qualitative content, which reward your website automatically in their algorithm. Strategically, finding the right questions and keywords is a matter of doing the right due diligence of your competitors keywords match.

Advice:

Do not focus on SEO because Google Crawls automatically your website information.

Tip:

Google will crawl your site faster if:

1. Domain authority: how your site compares to peers.

2. Page authority: how well your site is set up for success

3. Content schedule: the frequency at which you publish new content.

4. Popularity: A combination of site traffic, CTR, and time on site.

KPIs and goals for SEO

The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and goals for SEO are to capture who are asking the questions you have answers on or should have. As a result, SEO encompasses technical and creative elements such as improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in the search engines.

How to develop KPIs?

Each business has his differentiation towards the development of KPIs. It depends on the following success metrics you want to focus on:

• Awareness: build an audience by prioritising and targeting who your community is.
• Engagement: Drive activity with SEO
• Conversion: Drive sales and leads, following by engagement.

Tip:

Follow-up and monitor the bounce rate of your website which is the maint rigger for Google SEO Rewards through their algorithm.

Keyword Research & content gap analysis

Tips for Keyword research.

• Assess your competitors.
• Determine High search volume terms.
• Prioritize your content accordingly.

Content Gap Analysis

= finding opportunities as follow:

• Compare competitors’ strategies
• Assess your current approach
• Build a roadmap to reach your goals

Recommended tools:

• Google Adwords keyword tool
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Ahrefs
• Bridght Edge

Link building

Link building is very useful to adapt to your SEO strategy. However, it is essential to refer to qualified hyperlinks to your web pages. So, focus on quality rather than quantitative links building strategy.

PPC

What is PCC?

Pay-per-click is a part also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is paying a fee each time someone clicks on your ads, measured by click-through rate (CTR). Prices are determined on a bidding system provided by the search engine. Although, keep in mind the market share of the search engines which is strongly dominated by Google who owns 60%. A secondary search engine is Bing which can be surprisingly cheaper. It is evidence that popular keywords are getting high prices. As a result, be creative by choosing the right keyword strategy in your advertisement. The goal of a good PPC campaign is to have high CTR and conversion. In contrast with low Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and Cost-Per-Lead (CPL).

Tips:

Focus on optimising your page conversion in contrast with your competitors. This helps in lowering the costs.

The search engine places the PPC the best depending on the Search engine results pages (SERP). Referring to what is earlier mentioned, the use of unique keywords and good question strategy drives your customers directly to your website. In other words, you correspond and speak directly to your customer’s pain points. As a result, the best practice strategy to do is to ensure that your keyword and your language messaging in your ad words, is tied to the keywords and language on your landing page.

• Think out of the box
• Be creative
• Find opportunities.

Drawbacks

• Expensive

PPC Channels

• Google Adwords
• Bing
• Display
• Facebook
• Remarketing

Social Media

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an increasing medium to communicate with your audience. The main drawbacks are it is hard to track your ROI and it’s not quantifiable. However, some platforms make use from statistical analysis such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. The main objective of SMM is to correspond to your audience following by lead generation. Well-known strategies are Growth Hacking to streamline your lead generation across channels. Another objective is to connect, create and engage deeper with your customers which generate sustainability.

Tips

• Be coherent by message strategies by doing SMM
• Be organised, use social media planning tools.

Generally speaking, based on the two tips mentioned above, a good testing strategy is recommended. To give you some tips about this.

• Monitor and analyse the timing of messages.
• Identify when your audience is the most active.
• Test different types of content + track the conversion and analyse the results. To give yous some examples: texts, video, gifs, photo’s sliders, photo’s vines, sliders, etc…
• Segment your type of content. This is from personal experience, and I don’t recommend to only focus on sharing content about yourself. Try to focus on originality, creativity to differentiate your content from existing ones. An example is, I know people in my industry that constantly sharing the headlines of the newspaper’s industry. You know, If you are in this industry, you already know this, as a result, it is more annoying than enjoyable.

E-mail Marketing

For e-mail marketing, I will keep It briefly because I consider that this is common knowledge as the oldest channel for growth. However, do not underestimate the effectiveness of this channel. Good conversion is rewarded by adapting personalised messaging.

Content marketing

Content marketing ties everything together from SSM, OR, SEO and PPC. However, be aware that your audience doesn’t respond well.

Essential to incorporate in your business strategy is to focus on building sustainable relationships with your audience for the long-term. This helps through well-written articles, blog posts, press releases, news updates and other creatives ways to announce qualitative content. According to Sophia Eng, 70% of the customers like to know your brand by well-formulated content. Important is to create synergies through all promotional channels which strength the cross-referencing content. By doing so, your audience connects to your brand on a sentimental way which stimulates engagements by giving them the information they need before they consider buying from you. As a result, the main advantage of investing in relevant content marketing results in becoming an influencer of your company.

I listed up the guidelines here below:

1. Know your Target Market
2. Understand Topics, Keywords and SEO;
3. Write simply at a Grade-5 level where everyone in your target market can understand. It should be simple, straight-forward and helpful.
4. Publish in different formats and channels.
5. Collaborate with influencers in the same niche.