Think growth marketing is just another buzzword? Growth marketing is an effective strategy — if you know how to use it well. Growth marketing tactics drive growth — that's it. There's no secret sauce or magic technique. However, most growth marketing tactics fail to target users at the right point in the right stage of the funnel. As a result, those growth marketing strategies fail.

To get a better idea, let us take a look at the average marketing funnel:

AIDA Funnel

The users at the top of the funnel don't have the same needs or want as those that are almost ready to convert.

For example, comparison guides are a fantastic growth marketing tool, but if you try to get a (Top of the Funnel User) TOFU user to sign up from an in-depth comparison guide, you're gonna have a hard time winning any clients with that approach.

To be effective, growth marketing strategies must meet prospects where they are in the funnel. We will look later at what strategies are suitable for different stages of the marketing funnel.

A marketing funnel (which specifically for our purposes we will call Growth Marketing Funnels since it describes our fundamental objective as marketers) is basically the set of stages that a potential customer goes through when making a purchase. These stages start with awareness and end with conversion, including either the purchase of your product/solution; or post-purchase activities.

Before we delve further into the basics of growth marketing funnels, why they are essential to your business, and what is needed in order to create one, let’s establish what growth marketing is and why growth marketing inherently requires understanding the process of your customer’s journey in order to create proper growth marketing funnels.

What is Growth Marketing?:

Growth marketing is the practice of combining customer data, market insights, and creativity to better understand your buyers and amplify every step of the customer journey for them.

The key tenet to understand from growth marketing is that generating massive revenue doesn’t just come from scaling the top of the funnel and acquiring new customers. It’s about acquiring the right customers, getting them to stick around, and using all available insights to drive more engaged customers.

Growth marketers spend an incredible amount of time understanding their buyers and customers, whether in formal customer interviews or listening in on dozens of sales calls each month. This enables them to develop powerful insights into where big pain points are and where they go for information. They then put all of those pieces together to test creative concepts on the channels most used by their buyers, from top-of-the-funnel interactions with blog posts to initiating free trial plans on the Chrome store.

Through testing and incremental improvement, growth marketers not only acquire new customers at an exponential rate, but also drive more cross-selling, upselling, and other revenue expansion opportunities, to both new and existing customers. In short, they use data drawn at all phases of the customer journey to deliver experiences that resonate throughout the entire customer lifecycle, thereby drawing not only additional possible revenue opportunities, but also the insights that can be tested elsewhere, improved on, and revised constantly.

Why a Growth Marketing Funnel Integral to Your Business’ Success

Now that we have established why growth marketing is inherently tied to the customer journey, let us now look at growth marketing funnels and why they are fundamental to creating massive business growth and success.

A growth marketing funnel breaks down the customer journey until the goal you set according to your business strategy is met. So, funnel architecture depends on your goals and the actions you want your visitors to take. Growth marketing funnels are the foundation of your growth marketing strategy and activities. Understanding the growth marketing funnel and what it entails allows you to understand the key points along the customer journey that need to be leveraged, and with what tactics.

When building out your growth marketing funnels, some key points need to be taken into consideration:

a- Each funnel should match a brand/product/solution: You may have an umbrella brand and sub-brands, or different solutions under an umbrella brand catering to different demands. Therefore, your funnels should be built separately for each brand/product or solution.

b- A funnel should be built based on your brand’s business model such as B2B, B2C, C2C, etc: For a B2B business model, your funnels will also differ if your solution caters to an established enterprise, a growing small business, or a startup.

c- Each funnel should match a persona: There might be more than one persona for each brand/product/solution and the reasons why they are interested in your brand will vary. For instance, a CEO’s pain points and objectives will be different than a CFO’s for a Fin-Tech brand.

d- Each funnel should be connected with one or more landing pages: You can create as many landing pages as you need for each funnel, positioning, and persona. Your landings might be for an event, a specific solution/service, or downloadable content such as an ebook, use-case (case study), etc.

How Different Stages of the Growth Marketing Funnel are Inherently Different:

Now that we have established some principles of what building a growth marketing funnel should entail, let us look at the different stages of the growth marketing funnel and the different tactics that should be in place.

Top of the Funnel:

Top: The top of the funnel refers to users still in the awareness or interest stage of the buying cycle. They have an issue, they're considering a solution, but they are still pretty wide open in terms of options.

Appropriate Tactics: Blog posts, webinars, SEO, Infographics, Videos, Podcast, eBooks, Whitepapers

Middle of the Funnel:

Middle: The middle of the funnel, which corresponds to both the interest and desire phases, is essentially, broadly speaking, the consideration phase of the buying funnel or journey. It is essentially where would drip-feed the bulk of your content that matches the needs and interests of your leads/potential customers. You’ll also be educating them a bit about your solutions and the way it addresses wants or pain points a potential customer may have.

There are so many types of potential content in this section it should really be based on your industry and customer interest.

Appropriate Tactics: SEM, paid social, case studies, downloads, email marketing

Bottom of the Funnel:

Bottom: The bottom of the funnel has your prospects making the final sales decisions. Bottom-of-the-funnel prospects are almost ready to convert. They know they have an issue, know your company, and are prepared to make a decision.

Which means it's time to pull out all the stops.

Appropriate Tactics: Demos, Free Trials, Sales sheets and collateral, Customer Testimonials, Product Reviews and Comparisons, Product Spec Sheets, Remarketing, Customer Testimonials, Case Studies

Now that we have established tactics that are appropriate at every level of the growth funnel, we can now examine the ways or leverage points needed to create a growth marketing funnel.

7 Points of Leverage for Creating a Growth Marketing Funnel:

1) Lead generation:  Lead generation is one of the biggest levers in the growth marketing funnel. Simply put, by increasing the number of people who enter the funnel as new prospects, we’re ultimately increasing the end number of customers who sign up as paying customers.

If we’re able to acquire a new lead for less money than we were spending before, then we’re able to spend more money to acquire more customers.

Every effective lead generation tactic has a channel that works best for it, but from a strategic standpoint, we’ve found what works best for us is A/B testing in order to determine the traction that different channels achieve (social media, paid ads, content marketing, webinars, etc.) and then doubling down on the growth marketing channel that shows more promise than any other ones.  The key metrics here involve CPA as well as conversion rates, both from a standpoint of website conversion rate as well as in the case of leads for SaaS and other businesses with long sales cycle services,  sales qualified leads.

2) Segmentation: Generating a new sign-up to your email list is great, but being able to segment that lead into one of 3-5 pre-defined segments is 10X better.

This way you can take that knowledge of which segment they fall into and shape your message and marketing to them in each communication you have in the future.

As an example, say you are a provider of Multivariate testing software.  A straight question you can ask is:

• I work for myself and need to build a multivariate test for my client(s)

• I’m an employee and need to build a series of A/B tests for my company’s lead generation efforts

• I’m a manager and need to train my employees so they can set up proper A/B tests

Once you have a better idea of what sort of needs they have, you can tailor the content you have for them (ex; case studies, testimonials, remarketing) to help improve sales. What makes this even more potent is that the greatest opportunity that businesses and organizations have within their growth marketing funnel is the emails, blog articles, and other forms of communications that you have as soon as they sign up to your list, become a lead or become a member of your community.   The trust you have at this point combined with a better understanding of who your customers are (via segmentation) allows you as an organization to market more effectively by catering directly to their needs or pain points.

3) Scarcity:  There’s a lot of flexibility with how you can use deadlines in your marketing – but the key benefit is that by introducing a deadline into your funnel you are taking advantage of the psychological principle of loss aversion, or put simply FOMO on a great offer.

A common misconception in some marketing circles is that scarcity and deadlines are unethical tactics. After all, what if you tell your audience there’s a deadline but then they can easily circumvent it and then lose faith in you because of that?  However, while it is possible to think that way, more often than not potential customers are so wrapped up in their own immediate concerns to even notice.  With that in mind, test different deadline lengths and lead times, and see which works best for your customer base.

4) Main Offer:  Everything you’ve done up until now builds up to your main offer.

This is the first time you’re asking your prospect to purchase from you, but it’s not the first time you’ve asked them for anything (because of the micro-commitments you’ve asked for already – their email address, and relevant segmentation questions).  So as a result you’ve built up a relationship that ultimately leads to an offer, and (hopefully) a decision of whether or not to purchase from you now or later.

The key here again is testing, be it different offers, higher or lower pricing, offer headlines, or landing page types (ex; long form vs short form), to see what works best.

5) If The Prospect Does Not Become a Client/Customer:   While disheartening, this is not by any means the end of the road.  Beyond just sending the same offer and hoping to catch them later, there are a few specific strategies to use if someone doesn’t buy to try to convert them into a customer:

• Second chance sequence – automatically send these prospects to a modified version of your original offer (with a slightly different/ discounted price, or without one of the original bonuses)

• Send a “Is there a problem?” email to find out why they didn’t buy

• Send a pivot email with 3-5 other related areas of interest that they can select, which will trigger a new sequence for them

6) If They Do Purchase and Become a Customer:  Once you have celebrated with an obligatory, champagne-filled party, the next step is to get them to become an ambassador for your business.  The key here is to provide superb onboarding and activation experiences, purchase experiences and support so that they don’t hesitate to refer you to those in their social circles, their contemporaries, their network, and others.  A key part of this is getting them to become experts in terms of using your product or service as it applies to their business/lives so that it becomes second nature to them.

Creating an Efficient Growth Marketing Funnel: An Ongoing Process

Being able to properly leverage a growth marketing funnel, is very much an ongoing and iterative process.  A key part of this is understanding your various customers and the journey they take to become customers, which can involve many different pathways and reasons for being interested in what you offer.

Regardless of the specific funnel, there are a number of leverage points that allow you to create a growth marketing funnel that you can consistently leverage.  The 6 specific points that are highlighted here are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities.

If you are looking for ways to create or better leverage a growth marketing funnel for your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a free growth marketing consultation.  Our expert growth marketing consultants would be happy to sit down with you to delve into what is possible.