Is there a proven formula that can help you grow your business? Well, the answer to this question can be rather complex.
The truth is that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to impressive (and sustainable) business growth. The best tactics for you hugely depend on your goals and brand identity. Moreover, it's essential to adapt your digital marketing tactics to align with your target audience's behaviours and preferences.
Nevertheless, using the right marketing strategies can make or break your efforts.
Content, design, and social media all hold tremendous potential for allowing you to reach your ideal customers. Furthermore, if you know what you're doing, you can increase your chances of engaging and converting new prospects by presenting them with relevant and personalized value.
So, how do you use digital marketing tactics to drive growth? This blog will give you an overview of everything you need to know to use content, design, and social media to take your business to new heights.
Tell Detailed, Relatable Customer Success Stories
Social proof is an exceptional growth tool. However, you need to know how to use it to reach your goals.
According to consumer behaviour research, most people—99.75%, to be precise—consult reviews and ratings when doing pre-purchase research. Customer feedback hugely impacts brand perception, especially regarding trust and credibility. It's worth noting that shoppers consider user-generated content far more authentic than its branded counterparts.
Although reviews and ratings can help you reach your conversion goals, they may not always be enough to convince your more meticulous prospects. To impress them, you'll have to go above and beyond with social proof.
Telling detailed, relatable customer success stories through case studies is a great way to emphasize your brand's credibility and authority.
Primarily, these content formats allow you to go into plenty of relevant detail. But even more importantly, they're a great way to present prospects with measurable success metrics.
This digital growth tactic is a marvellous method to highlight your value propositions and back up your claims. Moreover, it helps demonstrate your complete grasp of your target audience's pain points and priorities, communicating that you have the know-how to solve their needs.
Mailchimp's customer stories are an excellent example of how to use this format to grow your brand. They cover a variety of customer pain points, provide unique and valuable insights, and offer just the right amount of measurable data to maximize credibility.
Source: mailchimp.com
Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to the article format. Using videos—similar to the Destination Certification student testimonials—can elevate engagement rates, boost accessibility, and add a personal touch to your content, which can be particularly helpful when targeting B2C buyers.
Source: destcert.com
Showcase Product Functionality Alongside Marketing Messaging
Converting new customers is key to growing your brand. However, one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of encouraging conversions is that it necessitates a complete and absolute product understanding.
If your target audience doesn't comprehend the value you offer, they probably won't even consider your solutions as an option. That's why it's important to find ways to elevate product understanding. Undoubtedly, one of the most effective methods is allowing your target audience to try out and experience your product instead of just telling them what it does.
By showcasing product functionality with interactive content or demos, you can put your leads at the centre of the conversation and provide them with a first-hand experience of your product's value.
StudyX implements this strategy beautifully through its web applets. On the surface, these interactive product demonstrations show potential customers what the brand's software does. But there's more to the story than pure demonstration. By allowing web visitors to test out the product's multiple applications, StudyX shows the power and versatility of its AI solution. The ease of use elevates the product above alternative solutions. Finally, the well-placed "Add to Chrome" CTA encourages future engagement, making it easier for the brand to gain an irreplaceable role in its target audience's workflow.
Source: studyx.ai
Get Local With Your Landing Pages
Local SEO is one of the most effective methods of making your brand easily discoverable by your target audience.
Since it's so effective at boosting brand visibility in local and high-intent searches, it's a tried-and-tested strategy for attracting qualified leads and converting them into customers (all the while shortening the sales cycle).
However, the most common way of implementing this geographic growth strategy relies on implementing it in blog content.
For instance, look at brands like ServiceMaster Restore. You'll see that they regularly publish posts with a strong geographical focus, which helps them position their brands as competent and trustworthy options in their area.
Source: servicemasteroflakeshore.com
So, how do you do more with local SEO when aiming to drive business growth?
By implementing local SEO on landing, product, or service pages, you can effectively elevate brand and product awareness among a specific audience segment and show how your offer resolves their unique needs.
For instance, Eden Emerald Buyers Agent understands that its prospects usually want to purchase property in specific locations. So, to make its services more attractive, this brand creates dedicated landing pages for each target location.
This approach allows the brand to adapt its marketing messaging in a way that will ensure its relevance to a highly targeted audience. It's also a great method of creating clarity regarding what the brand does (or doesn't) offer. Lastly, it is a solid tactic for managing future clients' expectations of what they can expect to get.
Source: eebuyersagent.com.au
Include Your Funnel's Entry Point in Your Site Header
One of the biggest growth mistakes brands make is disregarding the buyers' journey when designing their websites.
Yes, your online presence is your brand's digital calling card and the best tool for you to establish your credibility. But it's also a digital space where most consumers come to resolve a pain point.
So, when looking to boost conversions, don't forget that the majority of your web visitors aren't that interested in reading about your company's history. Instead, comprehend that they want to remove a pain point or frustration—even if they haven't consciously entered the sales cycle yet.
So, how do you use your web presence to grow your business and boost conversions?
Well, one excellent digital tactic you can use is to create web copy that resonates with your prospects on an emotional level. This will help demonstrate your understanding of your target audience's needs. More importantly, it may also help you trigger more instantaneous emotional purchases (which make up about 95% of all buying decisions).
For example, check out how CodaPet implements this strategy. This brand uses emotionally charged language in its site header, stating that pets are family and deserve "a peaceful passing at home." The copy instantly aligns with the brand's audience's values. More importantly, it's highly motivational. It inspires web visitors to get started with their local vet research, which the brand facilitates with an interactive search function.
Source: codapet.com
However, you don't necessarily have to hit the emotional angle. If your target audience consists primarily of rational (or B2B) buyers, you could take inspiration from RapidDirect. This brand knows that cost is a huge purchase-influencing factor for its target audience.
So, to quickly draw web visitors into the sales cycle, it presents them with the option to request an instant (but highly detailed) prototyping quote. This effectively captures them as leads and allows the brand to present them with a personalized offer, then gradually nurture them into customers.
Source: rapiddirect.com
Understand and Address First-Time Buyers' Conversion Obstacles
Growing your brand without establishing yourself as a trustworthy industry entity is practically impossible. After all, 88% of consumers have to trust a brand to even consider buying from it.
So, when exploring digital growth tactics, consider the way first-time buyers (who probably make up a large segment of your target audience) perceive your brand. Then, see if you can convince them that it's safe to put their faith in your business.
By understanding and addressing your future customers' conversion obstacles—which often include shipping, returns, warranty, payment security, etc.—you can give them some much-needed peace of mind and help them make the decision to take a chance on your business.
For example, the JetSet 4G page on SpyGuy does all of these things beautifully. It uses visual design tactics to visually highlight a content section that addresses its buyers' primary concerns, elevating brand trust and nudging them closer to a conversion.
Source: spyguy.com
Leverage User-Generated Content to Build Trust
We already mentioned that UGC outperforms branded content in terms of trustworthiness and authenticity.
But while most businesses leverage this type of content on their websites, it's important to remember that there are multiple other touchpoints where you might have to prove your dependability.
For example, consumer behaviour research shows that 67% of people turn to social media (instead of search engines) to do brand and product research.
With this in mind, it's essential that your digital growth strategy incorporates a variety of user-generated formats across all your platforms. Collect reviews, testimonials, and user-submitted images or videos that show your products in an authentic way. Then, curate and showcase these resources across your site, blog, and social profiles.
In most cases, it can be as easy as reposting your customers' stories, like Crumbl Cookies did in the example below.
Source: instagram.com
Generate High-Quality Leads with Interactive Content
Finally, if you want to grow your business with digital content, don't forget that the best way to impress potential customers is to present them with hyper-relevant, personalized content.
But while it's easy to say that you need to invest in personalized content to drive conversions, making it happen can be a bit more challenging—especially if you don't have sufficient customer data.
One method to overcome this obstacle is to invest in interactive content that will act as a mechanism to generate information about your leads.
By creating something similar to the Depreciation Calculator by RE Cost Seg, you can collect valuable data about new leads. Then, you can create segmentation in your CRM and slot these leads into highly personalized email campaigns or targeted ad campaigns that will resonate much better than a generalized marketing strategy.
Source: recostseg.com
Final Thoughts
While there's plenty that you can do to effectively grow your business, it's safe to say that basing your digital growth tactics on customer insights pays off the most.
The strategies outlined in this guide are all excellent ways to reach your business goals. However, to guarantee they're giving you the most benefits (and a high ROI), make sure to adapt them in a way that aligns with your brand's identity. Also, optimize them to match your ideal customers' wants and needs.
That way, you won't just have a higher chance of reaching new potential clients. You'll also have a much easier time engaging them and convincing them to convert into customers.
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