When it comes to identifying best practices, marketing can often be unpredictable. With the pace of rapidly emerging trends, frequently shifting priorities, and the demands of an ever-evolving user landscape, brands are being challenged to keep up. This leads to experimentation with various tactics to understand what sticks and generates sales.

Adopting a growth mindset is essential for brands looking to elevate their marketing performance. A growth-focused stand enables teams to plan at the highest logical level before implementing any tactical operations. This is why we’ve seen such an increase in growth-specific marketing roles at leading companies. More than ever, the link between marketing and company growth is clear, and organizations worldwide are investing in experts who can lead the change.

Here are four ways to implement leading growth marketing strategies into your business.

1. Implement bottom-funnel attribution early

So, you’ve just launched a product with a waitlist and are collecting future customers into your pipeline. They’re rearing and ready to go: they’ve joined your email list, are following your updates on social media, and are sharing with friends and family to join as well. Or are they?

Too often, early-stage companies leave potential customers to sit and stew, missing the critical period between sign-up and conversion. This is the stage where founders may be looking at views, impressions, and clicks as a reflection of their marketing performance, when they should be assessing the quality of leads and converting them as quickly as possible.

To achieve this result, focus on the lower-funnel metrics and attribute them as an indicator of marketing performance. Bottom-of-the-funnel metrics could include incomplete account sign-ups, new users, webinar registrations, frequency of logins, or looking at users who create accounts but don’t purchase products (or whatever your desired next step is).

To help drive the growth of these types of high-intent users in a budget-friendly way, your brand may consider using a channel like affiliate marketing. Affiliates and influencers often have earned trust and credibility with your target customers, and understand their needs and the problems they wish to solve. Affiliate marketing can be applied to virtually any channel used by publishers and influencers, including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and websites, and using tracking codes make bottom-funnel attribution simple.

2. Focus on quality as well as quantity

Suppose you’ve raised a pre-seed, seed, or Series A round. In that case, you may feel pressured to emphasize the exact number of users you’ve acquired in your investor reports, as this specific metric is often associated with growth. However, as you shift to a growth mindset, consider showcasing the quality of your user-base rather than focusing on the quantity.

For example, if your model has both a freemium and paid structure, take a look at how your paid user activation rates compare to free users. Is the activation of free users outpacing paid users? If not, ask yourself why then put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You may find it could be a fragmented user experience on your app or users’ perception of your product value, among others. No matter the cause, a quality base of paying users is an essential signal for growth: customers that drive recurring revenue are more likely to satisfy investors.

In tandem, start to think about your user retention. It’s well-known that the cost to acquire a new customer is higher than to retain or upsell an existing one. A growth mindset will combine a healthy new-user acquisition strategy with purposeful retention and upsell initiatives, ultimately nurturing your existing user base into brand evangelists. To achieve this, try implementing real-time customer feedback mechanisms: they’ll enable your product innovation and create stickiness with your users, both free and paid.

Partnering with affiliates and influencers can ultimately help you scale customer referrals at exponential levels. The right partnerships can enable you to hone your message, expand your reach, and improve scale in a cost-effective, sustainable way.

3. Capitalize on referral at scale

“Refer your friends and family!” Do you remember hearing that from your local store? What if you could do that on a massive scale and grow your business at an unprecedented rate? Good news! You can.

Affiliate marketing can provide the same brand evangelism that a local store owner would get from their neighborhood customers. For affiliates, influencers, and publishers, their “friends and family” are their followers -at a much larger, more trackable, and sustainable scale. It can put your company at the forefront of your industry through credible partners and adds ‘unseen’ bonuses such as customer research, brand growth, and positioning.

Partnering with affiliates and influencers can help you scale customer referrals at exponential levels. Facilitating 1:1 word-of-mouth referrals is powerful in driving the correct type of growth activity. With the right partnerships in place, you can hone your message, expand your reach, and improve scale cost-effectively, sustainably.

To ensure your partnerships give you a competitive edge, arm your partner with a unique offer tailored to their audiences—for example, a product, service, or discount that is only accessible via that relationship. Additionally, look for partners with strong influence, such as extensive social media reach. Also, analyze their following against engagement; compare email lists relative to monthly page views, monthly unique visitors, and open and click-through rates.

Once your partner’s content is published, consider using paid ads for retargeting users that interact with the partner’s content. This initial interaction can signal a level of intent with your product or offer, and it may be worthwhile to allocate a budget towards re-engaging them as they’re more likely to convert.

Finally, sharing these insights and performance with your partners can create cyclical insights that are mutually beneficial. With a growth mindset, you can use tactics like these to take advantage of the referral opportunities presented to grow your business and partner relationships.

4. Choose purposeful technologies that match your business needs

Mastering the growth mindset means uncovering opportunities and anticipating and clearing out roadblocks. When you have visibility into the friction points impeding your growth, you can tackle them head-on – especially if technology can solve them.

Knowing where your challenges lie allows you to choose and implement purposeful technologies that not only suit your business needs, they’ll make your life easier. For selecting technology partners or solutions that meet your needs in the long term, here are some essential must-haves to consider that will help you maximize your growth:

• Workflow tools to facilitate a smooth customer journey

• Flexible solutions that can adapt to evolving regulatory requirements (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and other regulations)

• Analytics capabilities that fit your criteria for monitoring customer experience

• Seamless API integrations with other best-of-breed tools

Conclusion

Mastering a growth mindset can take you from a start-up to a stand-out, and you don’t have to be an expert marketer. When you’re focused on the right metrics, like attribution and quality of users, combined with referrals at scale and impactful technology usage, you can grow your business from the inside out.

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