How to Select a Growth Marketing Agency/Consultant
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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) spent marketing these businesses.
As businesses expand their operations and constantly strive for improved growth, there are indeed times when companies need to scale their business beyond their internal team's abilities. They may need expert help in orchestrating their sales, marketing, and customer service efforts to reach new customers, launch new products, or expand into new markets.
In such a crowded environment, it can be incredibly challenging for businesses to stand out.
In order to break through the clutter, it’s become increasingly important to have a marketing strategy that is creative, iterative, and compelling. A process that not only helps with customer acquisition, but also is sustainable due to virality, word of mouth, and organic growth.
This new and powerful way of building a loyal user base has a name: growth marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
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.
Growth marketing, on the other hand, is all about frequent testing, experimentation, and optimization. Through testing 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 is the sum of user-focused, tactical activities that are both experimental and constantly evolving. Growth marketing takes a traditional marketing approach and the tactics that go along with it, and adds multiple valuable layers such as A/B testing, SEO, data-driven campaigns, engaging blog content, etc. The focus of growth marketing is on maximizing all growth opportunities for the business throughout the entire funnel.
Growth marketing is about optimizing for whatever a business deems the key metrics in its funnel. The goal of growth marketing is relatively simple: improved engagement and conversion metrics throughout the marketing funnel. So in essence, growth marketing is about acquiring users from the top of the funnel all the way to retaining those users.
This inherently holistic process is geared towards ensuring maximum scale by working to ensure all aspects of business, from sales to marketing to product development, and customer retention is considered in order to find as many leverage points as possible to push growth quickly and efficiently.
At such a stage, a growth marketing expert of some sort can be a valuable addition for organizations looking to efficiently but lack both the time and even more importantly, the dedicated internal human resources to focus on the entire business cycle in a concerted way.
On the one hand, you could opt for an individual growth marketing consultant. There are inherent cost advantages to this, especially for startups and businesses that are trying to scale in a cost-effective manner.
Solo growth consultants, regardless of their experience, skills, and overall competency, are going to be limited by their own knowledge and experience. They also have to rely on your internal team or outsourced talent for the execution of the strategies they recommend and often will have talent gaps that influence their recommendations.
Growth Marketing Agencies, on the other hand won’t be limited by talent gaps since they are often positioned to fill in those gaps with their own specialists.
However, beyond the fact that their costs are higher due to the presence of overhead of having a greater number of employees to pay (along with rent, benefits, etc.), there is the inherent issue with some agencies that they may sell you what they do best (ex; paid ads, content creation, photoshoots, etc.) instead of what your business truly requires.
In an ideal scenario, your business can combine the independence and the flexibility of the consultant, with the ability to access a wide range of expertise and the ability to execute a wide array of growth marketing tactics present within agencies
Before we go on to explain what you ought to consider before bringing growth marketing expertise into your organization, it is important to understand some key differences between growth marketing and traditional digital marketing.
Traditional Marketing vs Growth Marketing
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.
Traditional marketing is more campaign-focused. It tends to be a blast of content and creativity or an increased ad spend in a short period of time that helps to create a quick and impressive spike of activity. While it may generate an impressive amount of leads at the beginning of the sales funnel, there is a downside. Leads don’t necessarily result in sales, and the activity spike will likely dip right back down unless any additional efforts and investments, and more importantly any additional analysis of other parts of the funnel are done.
Growth marketing 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. Beyond this, growth marketing is all about frequent testing, experimentation, and optimization. Through testing 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.
On account of this, there needs to be an emphasis away from traditional campaign-focused marketing agencies and towards a firm that is holistic and growth-oriented, before one even begins the process of identifying factors of differentiation amongst specific growth marketing agencies.
A little context however before we look into various factors to take into account when considering bringing on a growth marketing agency.
Of course, as mentioned previously, you certainly need to look at your own employees in terms of assessing their overall skills and competencies before bringing on an agency in terms of resources. This way, you know what areas to focus on when you evaluate a growth marketing agency’s potential fit for your business.
Beyond this, 3 overriding criteria in terms of determining the goodness of fit for the growth marketing agency or consultant in question include:
Stage: If you are a startup founder, you will definitely be looking for someone who has considerable experience scaling a company from more or less the ground up, including identifying key markets for a business trying to get traction. That being said, if you are a more established business, you may want to work with someone who has a track record of squeezing out incremental revenue.
Focus: Important to understand which acquisition channels a particular growth marketing agency or consultant might have worked with. If you are a B2C startup, you would prefer someone who has strength in Google Shopping or Pinterest, rather than a partner strong in Linkedin Ads.
Vertical: Similarly, ideally you would prefer a growth marketer who understands your business space or has dealt with businesses that are similar to yours. After all, the approach is much more direct when it comes to an eCommerce-oriented business compared to a SaaS business where the focus is on trying to generate free trials or demos because the financial commitment is inherently higher.
Now that a firm context has been established in terms of when a growth marketing agency might be worth considering, let’s turn our attention to the various factors to consider when looking to bring on a growth marketing agency.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Growth Marketing Agency or Consultant
All Around Skill Set: Typically, growth marketing agencies provide a variety of growth marketing services, like SEO, paid search (Google Adwords), content creation, and more—which is perfect if you need a variety of tactics in order to stand out in your particular business vertical. But if you’re looking for one or two services, make sure they shine in the service you’re looking for.
Industry-Specific Experience: Obviously, as a business, you are more likely to be comfortable working with a growth marketing agency or growth marketing consultant that has experience with industries like or similar to yours. This way, they are more likely to understand your pain points, how your process works, what would be involved in scaling your business, and what goals to set in order to do so.
Easy to Work With: How do you identify a growth marketing agency that might be easy to work with? Well, one way would be to inquire about their specific process. Some things you might want to focus on include how accessible they are, how often they provide reporting or provide regular updates as to new initiatives, do they consult you as a client before they decide to implement an initiative, as well as trying to ascertain if they have any hesitation to point out something that is not working.
Custom/Innovative Strategy: Your business is like you as a person, unique. So the approach to achieving growth should also be unique. Given that, any agency that tries to sell you a generic package of predetermined services is one that you should intrinsically be cautious of. As part of their process, any true growth marketing agency should conduct a personalized discovery process about your business, goals, customer base, etc in order to determine and justify the strategy they propose. If not, then they’re not a growth marketing agency…it is just that simple.
Data-Driven & Hyper-Specific in Terms of Objectives: It’s really straightforward. Any growth marketing agency should be able to not only tell you what tactics they recommend but also break down just what you as the client can expect to achieve from every tactic, in terms of key metrics such as visits, interactions (ex; clicks), leads, sales, products purchased, conversion rate, average order value or potential deal value, etc. and what sort of a time frame to expect this in. Whether you use a SMART goal framework or just simply like to break things down in a specific, and detailed way, this level of specificity is needed to provide the validation you should expect from the agency you work with
Range of Client Experience: The versatility of experience that a growth marketing agency has is important for 2 reasons. First, it shows their ability to grasp the nuances and specifics of your business. Secondly, it allows not only for a greater variety of tactics to choose from but also a perspective that just having experience in your particular industry would allow and to see a greater number of possibilities and parallels to draw from.
Ability to Execute: Obviously with growth marketing, the key is to be able to not only implement an agreed-upon strategy but to engage in experiments at the speed of execution. Of course, the plan that a growth marketing agency provides will give you an idea as to when you can expect items to be delivered, but it would definitely be worth it to inquire as to the staff and the additional resources that any growth marketing consulting firm might have access to in order to ensure that any impromptu ideas or growth tests that arise can be implemented quickly.
Price/Value Considerations: The cost of hiring an agency can vary and can escalate quite quickly depending on add-ons and upsells. Look for transparency in terms of pricing, but also in terms of what the agency offers. Things to consider include not just fees, but also experience, areas of specialization, transferable skills, and perspectives in terms of being able to relate to your business and come up as a result with innovative solutions and strategies to help grow your revenues.
Can Scale on Demand: Given the focus on growth that is inherent within what growth marketing agencies offer, the ability to scale or accelerate growth within short order is crucial. As mentioned previously, part of demonstrating this is having a clear plan on how to execute this is key. Another part is having the right tools, such as marketing automation software, that allows the agency to not rely on the time of internal employees (and allow them to focus on their core competencies) In addition, having such resources allows you as the client to save on hiring additional internal resources in order to deal with the demands that arise when accelerating the growth of your business.
Flexibility in Terms of How They Work: Related somewhat to the earlier point about being easy to work with. Certainly, part of this involves being reachable, which can entail a number of options including having: hours that are compatible with yours, the ability to meet in person either at their on-site location or at the growth-marketing agency offices, responsiveness to communication, or whether they use technologies such as Slack in order to enable quicker, project-specific responses.
Consider the Full Growth Marketing Funnel:
Of course, this goes to the heart of being growth marketing focused. A growth-marketing mindset entails going above and beyond campaign-specific objectives, as well as considering only top-level data such as clicks, visits, impressions, etc. It also entails considering things like email subscribers, the number of free trials or demos requested, the rate at which membership is churning, and many other under-the-radar metrics that may not immediately impact top-line revenue, but when ignored go a long way in terms of not providing much-needed fuel for your business when marketing campaigns stagnate or just simply slow down due to seasonal variation. Beware of growth-marketing agencies that do not consider beyond top-level funnel metrics because they not only are not taking the time to get to know your business, but they are not leveraging all opportunities your business has for growth.
In short, whether your business is just starting or moving forward into a new phase of profitability, you want quality marketing support along your growth path. With growth marketing, timely growth marketing expertise that delivers powerful results can be the difference between stagnation and fulfilling amazing potential.
Choosing a growth marketing consultant or agency to work with isn’t an easy decision. That’s because your time, budget, and resources are on the line, and the wrong choice can cost you thousands of wasted marketing dollars. No wonder this decision can have executives pulling their hair out.
However, now that you have these above-mentioned 12 factors to consider, you at least know where and how to start looking. Once you have shortlisted a certain number of growth marketing agencies based on these factors, we recommend that you schedule a one-on-one call to see what they would offer in terms of growing your business.
We at eMS are your growth marketing partners across many verticals and within many different applications. With years of experience under our belts, we would love to speak to you to discuss how we can help grow your business. Book a Free Growth Marketing Consultation Call Today!