It’s all in the mind–or rather, the mindset. If you’re competing in the digital marketing arena, you’ve had to think some about growth optimizing, and if you haven’t, it’s time to start. Digital marketing has entered a new phase that is more data-driven and adaptable than ever.
Here are the keys to understanding and adopting a new marketing mindset, one that leads beyond counting up clicks and likes to produce true, sustained growth.
What is Digital Growth Optimizing?
Built on openness to testing, experimenting and changing to adopt the tactic or strategy that works best, this marketing technique demands greater creativity and sensitivity to new methods and changing trends. As an example, rather than measure the response to one web page, create multiple pages and compare conversion rates to select the best. Then–here’s where the optimizing comes into play–analyze the results and reasons behind them, and reproduce the successful formula in other web pages.
Prepare to implement growth optimizing by:
- understanding your product
- devising a test strategy for marketing the product
- collecting the tools you need to measure the data your test delivers
Then, you’re in position to learn what works and improve on the tactic or repeat it. As you build up more tried and true tactics, you’ll find you have created a powerful marketing campaign that leads to more sales and growth across the business enterprise.
The Lean Startup Mindset
Working with limited budgets and time pressures, startups must create and test their models quickly. The Lean Startup is a mindset described in the book of the same name by Eric Reis, based on building a new software product quickly and testing it within a small market to get customer feedback early on, a process known as testing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
By measuring results such as signups, shopping cart abandonment and other key performance indicators (KPIs), you can learn what works–or not–with minimal investment. Put another way, you have the opportunity to fail quickly, fix things, and try again.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
If you’re used to thinking like a marketer, you may be thinking too narrowly, repeating old familiar tactics simply because they are familiar. Instead, think like an entrepreneur with a startup mentality. The challenge is to keep the bottom line in mind while creatively experimenting with new approaches and building on them until you reach a goal.
The best way to keep this process moving is to track as many data points as possible for each tactic, including site traffic, user retention, conversions and the all-important return on investment (ROI).
Through the Sales Funnel and Beyond
The conversion funnel, also known as a sales funnel, represents the pathway site visitors follow before finally buying your product or service. Your job is to lead them through the three stages of acquisition, conversion and retention. Once you identify which of these steps offers the biggest potential for growth, you’ll know where to focus your attention and can devise ways to improve user experience (UI) at that point. Apply your optimizing strategies to test and improve UI, with the goal of retaining more clients and building growth for the business.
Here are the essential keys to testing conversions at each stage in the marketing or sales funnel:
- Look for bottlenecks
- Decide on best practices and tactics
- Research companies that use optimization and take a lesson from them
- Accept that some growth tactics will work for you and some will not
Learn from every experiment and build on the data you track for each. Remember that growth optimizing is a mindset and it requires an ongoing process of change, adaptation and repetition in order to build company growth.
Overwhelmed? National Positions is a growth-obsessed digital marketing resource that can help you develop and implement creative marketing strategies for long-term success. Learn more in depth about the secrets to successful growth optimization by downloading our free eBook, Growth Optimizing–The New Marketing Mindset.