Marketing Growth Strategy: How to Invest for Success
by Heather Timmerman Moller
Marketing growth is a complicated subject these days. Specifically, how does marketing contribute to growth as buying cycles become more complex and economic conditions waver?
Solving this riddle holds the key to business success in a competitive and uncertain landscape. When marketers gain confidence that their strategies are working, and can communicate the “why and how” clearly across the organization, they earn the continued investment to drive growth and weather any storms.
The right marketing strategy depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, and it doesn’t always have to be just one. (In fact, a balance of short- and long-term approaches to growth is usually recommended.) No matter which direction you choose, there are LinkedIn Marketing Partners that can help elevate your growth strategy.
Which Marketing Growth Strategy Suits Your Business?
Which plan is best for your business will depend on your current product offering, current audience, and market focus. There are three types of growth that are the most common areas where marketing can have the most direct impact on growth.
Market penetration
This strategy entails growing by finding more customers in your existing target audiences. For marketers, pursuing this strategy means creating more relevant messaging and more compelling calls to action.
While converting customers you’re already targeting is obviously important to driving revenue, it’s important to note that generally speaking, only 5% of that audience is in-market and actively looking to buy at any given time, which is why it’s so important to complement with expanding into the other 95 percent.
Tools for market penetration
LinkedIn has trusted marketing partners that can help you better reach and convert your existing audience:
• Oracle Eloqua routes new leads into different workflow streams within seconds and includes sales notification, nurture campaigns or retargeting.
• Zapier saves time by automatically collecting and sending rich lead data to your CRM for safekeeping, leading to better, more productive sales calls.
• Adobe Marketo Engage enhances demand management and nurturing within both lead-based marketing and account-based marketing strategies.
Market expansion
LinkedIn marketing is especially useful for this strategy, which involves finding new audiences for your offering. Expanding your market holds the true key to growth because it introduces new pools of opportunities to convert, and remains productive even when purchasing activity is down.
In today’s environment, marketers are doubling down on brand building to fortify sustainable growth. The top reason B2B marketers say they are investing in this area is because “having a strong brand supports long-term sales.”
Brand-driven campaigns help support market expansion by growing share of voice. “If your marketing only targets existing customers then it won’t translate effectively into SOV, since you’re not investing in reaching new customers.”
Expansion-focused branding campaigns are most effective when they hit the sweet spot of audience size and relevance. LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences can help you build lookalike audiences around important characteristics from your existing audiences. Partner solutions can further enhance this strategy.
Tools for market expansion
Market expansion is all about raising awareness and building credibility. These LinkedIn marketing partners can help:
• 6sense helps identify accounts that match your most valued customer profile, then uses artificial intelligence to orchestrate account-based marketing tactics at scale.
• LiveRamp can turn your offline customer data into audience profiles, which it can deliver to LinkedIn to build Matched Audiences.
• HG Insights uses data science to determine what technologies businesses are currently using, providing insight that can help discover new markets.
Account-based expansion
Account-based expansion is essentially a blend of the above two strategies, bringing together the focused and orchestrated pursuit of high-value accounts with an expansion mindset. Account-based marketing is driven by this strategy.
Successfully executing account-based expansion is challenging, but you can do so with strong internal alignment (sales, marketing, finance, product, customer success) and purpose-built ABM tools.
Tools for account-based expansion
LinkedIn is the home of ABM — our first-party, proprietary data makes it easier to identify and reach target accounts that are ideally suited for what you offer. These tools can help:
• RollWorks offers a one-stop shop for identifying new accounts, delivering targeted messaging, and measuring results.
• Madison Logic enables marketers to reach and engage accounts across LinkedIn, ABM Display Advertising, and ABM Content Syndication at every stage of the sales cycle.
• Terminus creates intelligent targeting segments to reach the buying committee.
Measuring Your Growth Strategy
Measurement is at the core of any modernized marketing strategy. Whether you’re looking to convert or expand your base of prospective customers, making the right investment is paramount. That means gaining the buy-in of financial stakeholders through a shared understanding of where value is created.
As you market to the CFO, equip yourself with insights from LinkedIn’s robust analytics suite. Marketing partner integrations and services can bring even more clarity and insight to your measurement strategy.
Tools for measurement and reporting
Embracing a long-term approach to measurement with the assistance of a LinkedIn marketing partner sets up your marketing growth strategy for success.
• Dreamdata compares performance across all your ad networks, analyzes the impact of your campaigns at different stages of your pipeline, and helps marketers make decisions that drive revenue.
• Supermetrics streamlines the delivery of data from LinkedIn to spreadsheets and data visualization tools like Google Data Studio and Microsoft BI.
• Adverity is an end-to-end analytics program that can help break down data silos, aggregate data, and mine it for insights.
However your business chooses to grow, marketing will be at the forefront of the effort and LinkedIn is committed to providing the tools you need to succeed. See our full list of LinkedIn Marketing Partners and start a conversation today.