8 Situations Where Your Business Could Use a Growth Marketing Consulting Firm
Over 500,000 new businesses start in the US every year, and over 200 billion dollars is collectively spent on marketing each year. In Canada, a country roughly 10 times smaller, an estimated 95,000 businesses are launched yearly with nearly 11 billion dollars (CAN) being spent.
In such a crowded environment, it can be incredibly challenging for businesses to stand out. If your business has reached that particular point, it might be wise to step back, assess your organizational resources, and decide whether it might benefit you to bring in external resources to help out your marketing efforts. This is where growth marketing consulting might be worth considering.
Growth marketing consultants bring a fresh perspective as well as a wealth of experience to the table. They can help you understand your market better, optimize your marketing strategies, and ultimately boost your bottom line. So how do you know just when to call on the assistance of a growth marketing consultant?
In this article, we will explore 8 situations where your business requires the services of a growth marketing consulting firm. Recognizing them early on can make a significant difference in your company’s trajectory.
In addition, we will examine in some depth what growth marketing entails, some of the key benefits of growth marketing, and how growth marketing consulting differs from traditional marketing agencies and marketing consulting services.
So, whether you’re a startup finding your footing, a small business looking to scale, or an established company aiming or struggling to stay competitive, this article will be invaluable in helping you recognize just when it might be the right time to seek out the help of a growth marketing consultant.
What Is Growth Marketing?
In the simplest terms, growth marketing is everything that your business does to drive sales, improve customer retention, and improve overall customer value. It’s all about building strong customer relationships by constantly evolving your understanding of how to serve them better.
Growth marketing is the sum of all of your sales, marketing, and customer experience processes—a full, long-term view of your goals and milestones, guided by data-driven and actionable metrics. It’s supported by the effective use of data and agile processes to optimize campaigns and customer touchpoints, empowering all interconnected departments within companies, including sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and product development, among others.
Essentially, growth marketing is an overarching, holistic, and better-connected approach to digital marketing and sales enablement. It essentially entails a long-term lens, which means conducting due diligence on your business to identify key selling propositions, understand replicable strategies by the competition and industry, and recommend marketing automation platforms, campaigns, and a roadmap to achieving your goals. With these upgrades to your marketing and sales toolbox, you can build a strong pipeline.
The key thing to take away is that growth marketing is an iterative, data-driven approach to increasing customer acquisition, retention, and revenue. A defining characteristic of growth marketing is the focus on experimentation: growth marketers will launch a series of tests throughout the entire sales and marketing funnel (e.g. personalizing landing pages, A/B testing email subject lines) to better understand user interest, intent, and product-market fit – using these insights to continuously adjust campaigns and messaging and customer deliverables to improve conversion rates, retention rates, ROAS and ultimately, revenues..
What are Some Ways You Could Benefit From Integrating Outside Growth Marketing Consulting Into Your Business
From igniting innovation to attracting top talent, growth marketing consulting can enhance your organization’s potential in so many ways. Here are 4 key benefits that growth marketing consulting offers businesses of all sizes, regardless of what phase or stage you are in with your business, or whatever challenges your organization is currently facing.
1. By Gaining Access To Expertise And Experience
One of the significant benefits of growth consulting is that in addition to bringing fresh external expertise, your organization would benefit from the diverse array of experiences that a growth marketing consultant would bring. Most worked across multiple industries, gaining valuable insights into what is likely to work (and what isn't likely to) for different businesses. Leveraging their knowledge can help your company overcome challenges and identify growth opportunities to capitalize on, which they can then draw upon their experience, perspective, and insights to craft strategies that are customized for your business.
2. It Gives Your Organization More Opportunities To Stay Innovative
To stay competitive in any industry, companies must continuously challenge themselves to develop new products, services, and processes, as well as improve on those that already exist. Growth marketing consultants not only bring fresh thinking to your organization, but the fact that they touch on all aspects of your business beyond marketing also can help intrinsically in cultivating an innovation-friendly environment. Partnering with a growth marketing consultant helps your business to remain agile and adaptive to new market trends and opportunities.
3. It Allows For Improved Organizational Efficiency
Operational efficiency is crucial in driving business growth. By helping you streamline your workflows and optimize your resources, growth consultants can ensure your organization is well-suited to meet its objectives. From reassessing your company’s procedures to introducing new technologies and systems, growth marketing consulting services aim to reduce bottlenecks and minimize waste. In turn, this can result in cost savings, improved productivity, and a competitive advantage in the market.
4. It Helps To Attract and Retain Talent
The success of any business lies in the hands of its employees. Attracting and retaining top talent is critical for companies seeking sustainable growth. Growth marketing consultants, by being intrinsically more in tune with the broader picture that concerns your business, can help you develop and implement robust talent management strategies, from recruitment and onboarding to employee development and retention. More specifically to marketing, they can help your organization's marketing leadership make sure that the bigger picture is considered in hiring decisions. If your organization does not currently have marketing personnel in place, they can help bring in and onboard that crucial 1st marketing hire and ensure that they are fully prepared to take the leadership reins and run relatively independently in rather short order (with the growth marketing consultant being available on retainer as needed).
How Does Growth Marketing Consulting Differ From Marketing Agencies or Other Types of Marketing Consultants
Traditional marketing and growth marketing both operate with the basic goal of bringing more attention to you from your customer base. Where they differ, however, is in the process as well as the overall scope with which they operate within the consultant/client dynamic.
Traditional marketing consulting is more campaign-focused. It tends to focus on quick bursts of content and creative deliverables, along with an increased ad over a relatively short and concentrated period. What often results is a noticeable uptick in results. While traditional marketing consulting can often result in an impressive amount of leads at the beginning of the sales funnel, there is a downside. Leads won’t necessarily turn into revenue in a sufficiently efficient manner. Moreover, any spike in attention can dip right back down unless any additional efforts and investments are undertaken. More importantly, since traditional marketing consulting is only concerned with the marketing tactic(s) that are inherent in their service offering, analysis of the other parts of the sales and marketing funnel is generally neglected, along with the impact on other areas of your business operations.
Growth marketing consulting involves developing and implementing marketing strategies that focus on driving revenue and increasing market share. It goes beyond traditional marketing tactics and takes a more strategic approach to achieve long-term business growth. This approach involves a deep understanding of the target market, competition, and industry trends.
Moreover, growth marketing consulting has a strong emphasis on data and metrics. As a result of capturing raw data and analyzing various factors, growth marketing firms can better grasp which strategies are working and which strategies need adjustments. They are also better able to go beyond clicks and views and determine if those figures translate into conversions. Through frequent testing of hypotheses and rigorous tracking, growth marketers can identify what’s attracting your audience and generating the biggest returns. They will then iterate on their strategy to incorporate these learnings.
Growth marketing involves developing and implementing marketing strategies that focus on driving revenue and increasing market share. It goes beyond traditional marketing tactics and takes a more strategic approach to achieve long-term business growth. This approach involves a deep understanding of the target market, competition, and industry trends.
Growth marketing consultants are well-versed in various marketing techniques such as digital marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. They leverage these various tactics simultaneously to create brand awareness and generate leads, which ultimately become customers that stay loyal and ideally become an entrenched part of a business’s revenue base.
In fairly sharp contrast, traditional marketing agencies tend to focus on a few specific marketing tactics that they may be called upon by businesses to help out with.
A marketing agency is responsible for fulfilling its contractual obligations, which often focus on achieving the client’s goals. These contractual obligations can take the form of developing campaign messaging, building creative assets, reporting performance, and ultimately repeating as often as it remains profitable.
A marketing agency is essentially a service provider that helps businesses use marketing to reach, nurture, and convert users on an iterative, and possibly ongoing basis. These marketing agencies vary widely in size, areas of specialty, and services. For many businesses, these marketing agencies or consultants are their secret to getting more marketing done in less time.
Marketing agencies vary depending on their areas and range of specialty.
A traditional marketing agency might offer services such as.
Print advertising
Public relations
TV advertising
Branding
Trade shows
Direct mail
A digital marketing agency, by contrast, will offer an array of services such as.
Facebook ads
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Content marketing
Influencer Marketing
Social media marketing
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Web design
These traditional marketing agencies encompass several different types, including:
Traditional, which focuses on offline channels, like print, television, and radio.
Digital, which focuses on online channels, like search, paid, social media, and email.
Hybrid, which focuses on offline and online channels, like search, radio, and paid.
Full-service, which provides turn-key marketing solutions to manage campaigns fully.
Boutique, which provides specialized marketing solutions to support campaigns.
It is worth noting that typically, full-service agencies offer the most advantages because they can meet (and adapt to) your company’s needs, whether you’re looking for consulting, support, or management. In comparison, boutique agencies have more limitations in how they can help your business. However, when it comes to what they specialize in, they have expertise here, which for those that need their services, they provide tremendous value.
Ultimately, the difference between growth marketing consulting and traditional marketing consulting in all of its many forms boils down to a couple of main points.
First, traditional marketing consulting essentially brings with it a service element, given that its mandate extends not just to the range of services that it offers, but the objectives or campaigns mandated by the company. As such, the mandate of traditional marketing consulting agencies is inherently tactical, and not strategically oriented. Growth marketing consulting firms by contrast not only are involved in the day-to-day tactical execution but are also involved more strategically and on a wider scope within the business. Traditional marketing agencies do not focus on the other aspects of the business that are inherently often linked with its efforts, such as customer acquisition, customer retention and service, sales, operations, organizational development, employee coaching mentoring, and development, the way that growth marketing consulting companies or firms often are.
Another key point to mention is that a large preponderance of full-service marketing agencies still view the agency or consultant/client relationship in the traditional sense of the client setting the strategy and the overall mandate and narrative, with the marketing consultant/agency being the one to deliver tactics and creative that are to the client’s ultimate approval.
These days, clients expect more. Clients are demanding an urgent and extensive rethink of the agency model, and what the deliverables ultimately should be. They are demanding more of a strategic focus from external marketing resources. Specifically, they expect that the consultant(s) consider the overarching positioning of the company in what they deliver to the client, but also that the consultant/consulting firm be able to understand how their marketing efforts are increasingly integrated into the other areas of the client’s business.
The underlying rationale for this is that businesses are realizing that they need to uncover and develop deep, meaningful insights from data to not just deliver leads and sales, but also deliver product and service improvements that lead to greater customer experiences that serve to further reinforce and entrench any sales improvements.
For this to take effect, ideas must get in front of the client clients early and often, in a lather, rinse, and repeat fashion. This is where the agility of a growth marketing consulting firm can be particularly impactful. Growth marketing consultants that have this end-to-end focus can merge their ideation process with rapid prototyping and testing. Moreover, they have the unique capability of fine-tuning ideas in short cycles, until their messaging not only resonates with existing customers and prospects but also reflects in key metrics for marketing, sales, customer retention, operational efficiency, etc.
8 Situations Where Your Business Needs The Services of a Growth Marketing Consulting Firm
Now that we have established what growth marketing entails, what benefits growth marketing consulting entails, and some of the key differences between traditional marketing consulting firms and agencies and growth marketing consulting firms, let’s look into 8 situations where your business absolutely needs the expertise of a growth marketing consultant. Any of these signs honestly should trigger the consideration of the benefits of growth marketing, what your organization’s resources currently are, and whether your existing resources are best positioned to address any of these occurrences we will discuss below.
Lack of A Documented Marketing Strategy:
According to Palladium, 64 % of successful companies build their budget based on strategy. Now this is something that one would normally expect from time-pressed startups that are operating with little resources. But the startling thing is that in a recent 2023 Outbound Engine survey of 2000 small and medium-sized businesses in the United States and Canada, 50% reported operating without a true strategic plan. This is especially problematic, given that the marketing landscape is constantly evolving. If your company does not have a documented marketing strategy or feels like it is operating in a completely day-to-day sort of way with no direction, this can be especially taxing for your business in many ways. From overloading the company founder or CEO to straining cross-departmental coordination efforts, to poor resource allocation, not having a strategic direction causes all sorts of problems. Bringing in an outside growth marketing consultant allows you to get someone who can see the organization as a whole from a completely unbiased lens, evaluate your previous and ongoing marketing efforts, and examine your industry as a whole including your competitors. They can then use the experience he or she has accumulated to truly assess your business as a whole, and come to the proper conclusion as to the optimal strategy to implement.
Lack of Dedicated Internal Marketing Resources:
It happens quite frequently within startup businesses that sales, support, and operations positions are prioritized as the business starts to expand. This again, stems from the previous point, that businesses often don't operate with a strategic plan through much of the life of the business. So as the business grows, the need to expand sales, customer support, and operations only gets added. In such an environment, marketing becomes almost an afterthought. Given the inherent lack of strategic orientation within many businesses, the realization of the need for marketing often comes after the business has been operating for many years. When the realization hits, management often has no idea what to look for in terms of hiring marketing personnel for its business. Furthermore, because its focus has been day-to-day operations for so long, it needs a strategic bent which is lacking. In such an environment, rather than go ahead and hire someone internally for a marketing role and have them thrust into a role with no inherent strategic focus, bringing on a growth marketing consultant would be in the company’s best interest. Doing so would allow the business to bring in someone with experience who could not only help with execution but also bring the expertise from previous mandates to consider options that might apply to the new business. In addition, a growth marketing consultant would provide a fresh look at your marketing efforts and help you develop a strategic brand identity. Moreover, if a decision comes about to make that all-important 1st marketing hire, this growth marketing consultant is there to properly onboard the person hired.
Not Seeing A Significant ROI On Your Campaigns:
If your campaigns aren’t delivering the expected ROI, a marketing consulting agency can help you identify the issues and improve your execution. Whether it is organizing your Google Ad Groups, finding evergreen themes for content marketing, or organizing a newsjacking campaign to help generate earned media that improves overall awareness of your business, bringing on a growth marketing consultant will help your business get more out of your day-to-day marketing campaign management.
4) Stagnant Growth or Declining Sales
The most obvious sign that you need growth strategy consulting is when your business experiences stagnant growth or worse, a decline in sales. This could be due to increased competition, market changes, or lack of innovation in your company’s products or services. A growth consulting partner will work closely with you to help regain upward financial momentum. They might, for instance, identify specific areas that are hindering growth and develop strategies to strengthen the core aspects of your business or explore possible avenues for diversification.
5) Inability to Scale Your Business
As your organization expands, there comes a point where opportunities to capitalize on potential avenues for growth cannot be met with existing resources or practices. You might find that your management structure or operational procedures lack the efficiency and automation necessary to support your desired level of growth. A growth marketing consultant can help you analyze your current systems, highlight areas where you can optimize, and propose a strategic plan to help your business scale more effectively.
6) Rapid Expansion and Growing Pains
Similarly, a rapid increase in sales and customer demand(s) presents its own set of challenges to your sales team. Handling expansion without overextending your resources or losing focus on quality or other bigger-picture considerations is often actually easier said than done. Growth marketing consultants can help with market assessment, strategy consulting, management consulting, growth management, and other aspects that are entailed in the development of a coherent and sustainable growth plan. Doing so can help your company to capitalize on its successes without becoming overwhelmed or losing focus in the present, with an eye towards the future.
7) Market Saturation or External Threats
Sometimes, external factors are what cause revenue growth to slow down. This can be due to competitor activity, shifts in consumer behavior, market saturation, or other factors. Navigating this landscape requires deep knowledge of market trends and competitor analysis, which can be a daunting task. Growth marketing consultants can help use their industry insight and experience to help you devise a strong, flexible business plan that can adapt to changing market conditions and maintain (or increase) market share in the face of adversity.
8) Preparing for a Significant Transition
When a business is in the process of undergoing significant change, such as a merger or an acquisition, a leadership change, or entering a new market, this can be unsettling to all involved. you should consider engaging a growth strategy consultant. Securing the guidance of an expert(s) with a deep understanding of the broader market, or the cultures inherent within an organization (s) can help to ensure a smoother process, increase the likelihood of success, and ensure that your business’s growth trajectory is not interrupted
Growth Marketing Consulting: Why Your Proactively Inclined Business Cannot Afford to Go Without It Anymore in 2024
Growth marketing is incredibly invaluable for businesses that are ready to take their next steps and reach the heights they strive for. By bringing outside expertise into your organization, your business stands to gain insight into new and improved ways to manage its operations more efficiently. This is something that will help your business excel beyond industry standards and reach its full potential.
Our expert growth marketing consultants will assess your current position, your past marketing efforts, as well as your organization as a whole, with the idea of uncovering data-driven strategies that focus on elevating your organizational processes, the way you work, and ultimately, help you to increase profits along the way.
In addition to the wide array of digital marketing services that we offer ranging from SEM to SEO, earned media, email marketing, influencer marketing, and much more, our expertise spans multiple disciplines and provides valuable advice on key matters such as marketing automation, product positioning, product management, customer engagement, and sales optimization.
That being said, we believe in rapid testing and experimentation to ensure that our approaches are efficient and effective. Whether it’s strategizing for customer acquisition, increasing customer lifetime value, or optimizing processes, we have the expertise to help your business reach new heights of success.
By leveraging data-driven strategic insights, we can assist you in creating a holistic action plan to achieve sustained growth over time. We understand that every business has unique challenges and goals, so we tailor our services to your needs.
With all that we can offer to your organization, why not reach out to our expert growth marketers today for a free consultation to learn more?