Hello all, this week I will be continuing the Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels review of CXL’s Growth Marketing course.
Link to the course: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/growth-marketing-training/
Link to CXL website: https://cxl.com/
Continuation of Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels…
Identifying, testing, and measuring growth channels
A company initially cannot be great in all marketing fields. So, one should always find out their niche and try to diligently follow the routine. Early startups are advised to focus on three to four channels to grow their audience.
The best strategy is to see where our audience is and then start focusing on those channels initially than randomly experimenting with the same. It is also beneficial to pick the least competitive channels after creating the hierarchy. The safe bet is SEO as it can be more beneficial to any startup. For example, LinkedIn can be a great channel if our target audience is people in the C-Suite like CFOs, CEOs, CTOs.
We need to judge the channel not based on popularity but based on the ROI. A channel must be given a good opportunity and time to mature to be judged. Thus, you need to keep looking at the data and be an agile marketer to find the best channels for your company’s growth.
Emerging Channels
We need to see what the giants in our industry are doing and then move fast and be agile in any channel growth. Sometimes it is also beneficial to focus on a new channel and capture audiences from there as they would be less competitive. If you have competitors, take a look at what they’re doing, take a look at what their keywords are, and take a look at the articles that they are writing, the blog post, the content marketing and take a look at those keywords, the leverage, the attraction that they’ve already built.
The channel that had worked in the past might not work the same right now or become more competitive where the players outbid you. So, it is important to be agile and keep experimenting with the channels that give value to the investment. Emerging channels are important for growth because again if you are a small startup and you’re in stealth mode, you want to be able to look at all the new channels that — and actually even if you’re a large company to be able to look and stay above the competition.
Mobile was a new channel a few years ago but now every campaign is created with mobile-first in mind. An emerging channel that is thought is up and coming is augmented reality. Games like Pokemon Go gave good chance for brands to advertise and promote. Another channel that is an emerging channel that I think is up and coming, is VR technology. Facebook realized this not too long ago and acquired Oculus to be able to create that immersive experience in social media. We also need to test emerging channels like AR and VR.
Myths about Social Media Marketing
There are a couple of common myths about social media marketing. The first is that social media marketing ROI is difficult to track and it’s hard to put a real dollar amount value to the value of social media. But in reality, Google Analytics now allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and what the users are doing on your site and including if visitors are coming from social media as well. You can track the response of different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversions. Now almost all major social media sites provide a platform analytic. So for example, Facebook, Twitter and just recently Pinterest and they’ll tell you how many users are clicking on your site and how many conversions your ads are generating.
Another common myth is that social media is just fluffy impressions and branding and that it’s not actually used for sales or conversions or acquisitions. This is not true as not only can it help you generate new leads, but it allows you to build and create and engage deeper relationships with your existing clients. Ecommerce businesses will use social media channels as one of their top drivers for growth, such as Facebook or Instagram, rather than the traditional channels because that’s where their users are.
In a maturing organization, social media marketing fits into the demand generation teams to bring in leads. The Likes and loves, shares, downloads, followers, those are not actual metrics that you can say let’s double down on a content piece like the same. The actual metrics are defined as what metrics are tied to your business objectives and should be a judge on how much revenue they bring.
So, for example, you can A/B split test a test on a single Facebook promo post let’s say for a different copy for different geographies, and monitor which performs better at increasing traffic to your site. And then you can do this on different days and monitor how many more sales you can make in the immediate aftermath, like an hour or so after your post goes live. So now you have essentially connected a social media post directly to sales and revenue and you can start to take action on this. So, now you have the data that shows you what you need to do to enhance your campaigns. So, once you have this data that connects social media to sales and revenue, this makes it exponentially easier for you to have the conversation with senior execs on doubling down or having the conversation on investment into your growth channels.
The executives would require clear insights on how the social game is improving the business. So, providing them the analytics of the same would help them to understand the value of social media marketing. So, a good social media marketing team is going focused, always trying to pursue what that true north goal is. So, whether it’s finding what converts best on which channel rather than thinking about tracking how many social media posts that you’re doing that day or taking a look at how many likes and shares for each post.
Social media is hugely popular but tends to carry the reputation of being all fluff, or just for vanity metrics. Contrary to popular misconception, social media tracking can definitely be approached quantitatively. Through this lesson, I learned how to effectively optimize an acquisition channel for conversion and sales, not just branding and impressions.
To be continued….
Next week, I will be continuing with the rest of the content in this module. Till then, Take care and Stay Safe!