Content marketing, growth hacking…wha…?
Whatever you call it, there are no shortcuts to sustainable growth.
It started with an email invitation to attend a “Growth Marketing” event in San Francisco. There is a parade new "tactics" to optimize marketing efforts and drive sales. It's sometimes hard to get customers and prospects into dialogue - how can we get them to stop, pay attention to our value prop, and suspend disbelief long enough to hear our story?
You are focused on growing your company, so forget the distraction of the onslaught of creative semantics. You are working hard to drive revenue and sales and marketing are two tools at your disposal. (I argue those two should be one entity – the Office of Revenue – but that’s for another blog.)
Sales and marketing do not work optimally without smart strategy informed by Voice of the Customer - see our blog, "B2B Voice of the Customer: Improve Customer Experience & Drive Growth," 2018/3/6. Voice of the Customer is the one version of the truth, your true north, informing all you do.
“Growth Hacking” – I get it, and I like it. It’s about marketing in small, lab-like campaigns to fail quickly. That’s smart. "Content Marketing" is nothing more than validation of the Market Engagement Model we have been using for 25 years:
Growth Marketing; well, I didn't read the entire email, so not sure what it is. Someone thinks it's significant enough to meet for three days in San Francisco.
Generally, your top line is not growing because of some or all these circumstances:
1. Your value proposition does not move the dial enough for customers and prospects such that your offer is considered a superior competing alternative. Either very few want what you have to offer or you have not discovered underserved segments where you can have an unfair advantage. Maybe your offer is cheaper, but of less ‘value,’ has little differentiation, and/or there is no demonstrable value of your offer – you cannot prove the claims you make.
2. The value messaging: the words you use to describe your value prop do not reflect the voice of your customer and do not speak to improved outcomes of your offer. Your words are likely what you made up in an internal meeting or a ‘marketing’ agency amplified your biased self-perception.
3. You don’t know why you win or lose. You cannot articulate the competitive environment and how your offer compares to all competing alternatives, include ‘do noting’ and DIY. Akin to that is the lack of knowledge of your buyers’ decision process and how they rank the criteria necessary to make those decisions.
4. Your sales people do not know how to carry the value prop through the sales process. So, when they show up, it sounds something like, “do you want to buy some of our stuff?”
Securing Voice of the Customer - finding true north - is not complicated, but it takes work. It takes hard work and you learn a lot through the process. It's the most enlightening exercise you will ever do to point your go-to-market strategy in the right direction. Warning: get Voice of the Customer with an objective third-party so biases and assumptions do not mislead you.