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Business growth + customer experience = a match made in heaven
YES we were greedy for this A-Z blog – because why have one letter of the alphabet when you can have two?
Joking aside, these letters stand for two important marketing elements that are inextricably linked, so it made perfect sense to combine them. Full-funnel and growth marketing both focus on a united, long-term strategy that builds your brand’s resilience and puts your customers at the heart of your business.
That feels like the holy grail for most people doesn’t it? So how do they work together?
Full-funnel marketing combines brand building and performance marketing in a holistic way. It’s structured around a non-linear customer journey with multiple touchpoints. Because this journey is so gloriously squiggly, it will touch different teams, systems and KPIs – from awareness through to post-sale support.
This form of marketing needs to be fluid, because the bottom of the funnel benefits from the top, while increasing conversion rates, pricing power and customer advocacy. It’s vital to apply consistent and sustained investment to all stages, to make sure customers receive the same focus – no matter where on the journey they are. Otherwise they could drop out of the funnel completely – and no-one wants that.
And growth marketing?
Sustainability is a buzzword and with good reason. Quick wins have their place, but relying on them can be the business equivalent of fast food – giving you an energy kick that soon drops off. Growth marketing is about making your business expansion sustainable, by making the whole customer lifecycle work hard.
If our last blog, E is for Engagement and Analytics, talks about the importance of measuring and reviewing all your key metrics, growth marketing hones in on one in particular – your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Any business looking to grow (and keep growing) needs to pay attention to this. It’s the total income your business generates from a customer during their time with your brand – essentially every order they’ve made.
Your CLV gives you an overall picture of your business and its financial health. A high rating means your product or service fits the market you’re operating in, you have a strong brand loyalty and you’re getting regular revenue from your customers. So if you’re looking for ways to grow your business, building a good CLV is kind of a big deal.
Building your Customer Lifetime Value takes, well, a lifetime.
Certainly months and years rather than weeks. So, while it’s one hell of a business benefit, it takes a long time to build up. Surely we’ve all heard of this anecdote?
Two people get into an Aston Martin. The owner says, “I saw an ad for Aston Martin and bought this car.”
Her friend says, “but Aston Martin hasn’t advertised for years. How is that possible?”
It was possible because the first person had seen the ad when she was 13 years old and she’d never forgotten it.
What this fantastical story about people splurging on expensive cars means, is that the best campaigns drive sales over the longest periods of time by building a powerful customer experience, one that becomes so well embedded that they can influence buying decisions years later.
Full-funnel marketing builds your Customer Lifetime Value.
Ah, hello global recession, haven’t you got a lot to answer for? As businesses clamp down on their marketing budgets, there’s an inherent expectation to do more with less. Less money, less resource, less time.
Because of this pressure, many in marketing are focusing on short-term lead generation goals – research shows that 70% of B2B leaders are spending almost three quarters of their budget on demand generation activity*. So while there’s the acknowledgement that full-funnel marketing and long-term growth are fundamental to business success, this isn’t translating into how marketing departments are operating. They’re too busy trying to prove they’re needed in the business.
Those quick lead-gen wins show that a business is attracting customers. But the short-term gains are short-lived ones. They won’t ensure long-term, viable growth, because sooner or later (read: sooner) those customers are going to feel less valued and drop out of the funnel – which will in turn cause your CLV to drop.
Ironically, long-term relationship building is what helps businesses stay resilient in an economic downturn. It’s the trust customers have in a brand and the value they place in it that keeps them using that brand when the hard times roll round.
Why does short-term seem better?
Long-term results are more difficult to measure across the entire funnel. We can wax lyrical about the benefits of brand building, but they’re far less tangible than your impressions and click-throughs. Unless performance and brand building come together, marketers will keep slipping into the habit of focusing on short-term gains at the expense of business growth.
To demonstrate the value of a long-term strategy, there needs to be a change in mindset throughout the company, particularly at board level. If the C-suite are championing full-funnel marketing over short-term boosts, that will filter through the company.
Proving full-funnel marketing works.
By showing the seamless connection between brand, demand and revenue growth, as well as how full-funnel marketing ties them together, you’re stepping back and looking at the full picture, not a snapshot in time. When setting your KPIs against brand building, make sure they align with that particular type of marketing communication, so you can prove investments made at the top of the funnel are having an impact later down the line.
Choose marketing tools (psssst…we hear HubSpot’s pretty good) and techniques that evidence full-funnel’s worth and prove the relationship between brand, demand and pipeline. Tools that can track data across all touchpoints of a customer journey are vital – from sentiment analysis and brand awareness, to the traditional conversion KPIs we all know and love.
Finally, to make this work, you need to integrate and align, not just across technology, but also across teams, tools and tactics. Your programmes and initiatives should unite across every team and touchpoint of your business – then the benefits can be felt by everyone.
