Consistent growth is what enables a company to move from a startup to a top market competitor operating on a global scale. In order to achieve consistent growth, businesses must find a way to drive scalability and avoid the organizational roadblocks of underperformance and market interruptions.
That’s where the growth engine comes in.
When we talk about “driving growth,” we mean setting in motion a collection of cooperative, adaptive components that contribute to an organization’s expansion and advancement. In other words, a growth engine in business means leveraging your teams’ unique competencies to set (and reach) both departmental and collaborative goals. This will ensure your company continues to move forward.
Today’s top tech companies engage in three distinct types of pre-existing growth engine models. These include:
A sticky engine. This model focuses on user retention and aims to generate increased customer engagement while reducing churn. Growth hacker Jordan Schlip recommends this model for 9/10ths of new startups as a way to build their user base.
A viral engine. Like its micro-biotic namesake, a viral engine model thrives in groups and aims to spread as far as possible throughout its demographic. Viral engine models not only work through communities but also build communities around their product or service. The major social media platforms represent excellent examples of a successful viral engine.
A paid engine. Organizations with an established revenue cycle and a little cash in their back pocket can choose to purchase their leads with directly funded advertising to stimulate growth and advancement. This model easily becomes counterproductive, however, if your expenditure outweighs customer value, and must be conducted extremely carefully. Done right, the pay-off can be monumental: retail giant Amazon employs the paid engine type to its advantage.
Growth marketing to propel a growth engine
Organizations can start to build their growth model through strategic marketing. As your first line of client contact, this is where startups will begin to build their customer base, and established organizations to maintain acceleration and advancement.
Marketing oriented towards driving growth essentially becomes a turbocharged type of traditional marketing, or hypergrowth marketing. It maintains a familiar methodology but incorporates information and influence gained from client analytics, market data, and extensive testing, and makes new use of data-driven content such as SEO blog posts, email marketing, and personalized copy. In addition to data, it requires a high degree of creativity and a willingness to push the boundaries of marketing technology.
Growth mindset in marketing
Cultivating a growth mindset amongst your marketing team means building upon and encouraging three things:
1. Out-of-the-box thinking
The goal of growth marketing is to get ahead of the competition, or at least be the loudest, most visible object in the crowd. Your team should think about how to stand out; where the road-less-traveled is; a destination no one else has thought to aim for; two disparate mediums which may create marketing super fuel when combined.
2. Utilizing traditional, contemporary, and unprecedented marketing tactics
Don’t abandon traditional methods just because they’re old. If something works and works well, keep it, and update where needed to bring it into the digital age. Make sure you’re leveraging technological methodologies to your advantage, but also ask, how could we take it to the next level?
3. Leveraging your current customer base for continued expansion
Client referrals are the best way to build your base. Think about how you can expand your community of users through your community of users. Current pools are an excellent source of data that will help you get to know your ideal customer better, as well as your strongest marketing tool.
Downsides of a Growth Engine
You need to build it, first.
Growth engines can’t be constructed overnight, and you may need to go through a long period of trial and error (testing out different fuels, makes, components, etc.) before you get it right. This can be expensive and come with a multitude of setbacks. Employing a growth engine model may mean sacrificing other areas of innovation and expansion. But once established, it will allow you to take your organization and even your industry to new heights.
Building a growth engine for your business
So let’s talk about what it takes to create a data-driven growth engine.
- Understand your sector. Data-driven marketing is itself driven by quality information collection. Client retention begins with a clear understanding of what it is they need so that you may then create personalized marketing content to show them how your organization meets those needs.
- Attract the right leads. To drive growth, you need clients who are going to stick around, buy your product, keep buying your product, and tell their colleagues about it. So your marketing efforts should focus on those leads that are the most likely to do so. Learn more about finding the right leads for your company in our other insight: What is lead qualification?
- Hack your marketing channel. Growth hackers need to know every possible avenue for marketing success. They have to be able to take client data and market research and convert it into personalized, cutting content expertly placed for maximum visibility and interaction. This is how you will leverage your client base for business acceleration.
- Build your competitive advantage with a quality product. Your marketers need to be product evangelists, and should know how to convert leads into the same. It is crucial always to back up your marketing materials with a product that delivers on its promises.
- Tell a great story. Understand your client’s use case for your product, and tell them how it meets that use case. But also let your clients know how it goes beyond that use case to feed other aspects of their goals and business. Your marketers need to be able to take the quantitative data and spin it into a compelling narrative.
HG Insights’ role in building your growth engine
HG Insights gives you unparalleled insights into your most profitable prospects with spend intelligence, forecasting, and other critical data that allows you to build personalized marketing campaigns and reel in your best leads to ultimately support long-term growth. HG Insights equips your growth engine with a data engine to funnel business intelligence directly into your marketing plan to make business acceleration that much easier.
