While everyone is looking for growth hacks and AARRR!! metrics, the smart folks at roivenue have contrarian views: why not try incremental marketing growth?

A famous saying goes: “Slow and steady wins the race”.

What if this Aesop’s fable contained a precise perspective of your next potential marketing plan?

All brands need a powerful marketing strategy to grow, and no matter how great your product or service is, without a robust marketing plan, you might find your business waiting for growth that may never come.

It’s easy to stumble in a more reactive than proactive marketing plan. You may get stuck figuring your next massive promotion or sale while sinking in a short-term solution to fix your quarter’s revenue.

The truth is: CMOs should focus their efforts planning a solid and steady incremental growth rather than quick fixes.

Why are small gains better than big ones?

Everyone wants to score the goal or hit it out of the park on the first swing but reality usually gets in the way of our dreams. Marketing is not a perfect science but with the right data, you can continuously learn to win. These small wins over time add up and can be improved on continuously. That is the advantage of machine learning algorithms. They are able to take mass amounts of data and continuously analyze it. Each click, web visit and each conversion gets you closer to the utopia of optimum marketing ROI.

Take for example the timeline view of a local e-shop that started putting this mindset to practice 3 years ago. As you can see from the data they were continuously having an incremental improvement in their marketing campaigns. Each week they would gather as a team, analyze the results with the ROIVENUE consultants and optimize the campaign for the following week. As time went by the company culture went from a data-driven marketing company to a data-driven business. Constantly learning and constantly using marketing attribution software to optimize their marketing ROI.

Where to start your incremental marketing plan?

Marketing growth is a matter of optimizing your marketing funnel through a “Constant, continual improvement”. This powerful mindset has been developed by the Kaizen model, and it can be applied to your own business while developing an incremental growth.

A proper, constant and incremental optimization of your marketing funnel pass through marketing tools like ROIVENUE based on optimized cycles, structured to apply the Kaizen principles through a clear sequence: Plan, Do, Study, Act also known as PSDA:

•    Plan: all the changes to test and implement
•    Do: move on with testing and changes
•    Study: collect and measure data to get a full picture of what is the outcome of the  testing. Did they succeed? Would you rather apply other changes?
•    Act: plan the next cycle

PDSA grants you the opportunity to test changes on a small scale, collecting enough information to realize whether the new development will succeed or not, and coming up with brand new ideas.

What is incremental marketing growth?

Improvement is the keyword to pursuing and achieving marketing growth. However, improvements are not the immediate consequences of a marketing plan.

A deep consideration of methods and tools that help you undertake your marketing strategy along with a well-organized plan, may unveil the solution for a successful approach.

Incremental marketing growth requires to dismantle a long-term marketing plan into smaller segments. Each segment needs to be met before allocating further marketing funds. This is an essential element of an incremental marketing plan.

How can you achieve an optimized marketing strategy?

Having a managerial and very deep analytical overview of your marketing data in a tool like ROIVENUE creates a solid foundation for any marketer to optimize your channels or campaigns. Marketers need to be on the lookout for attribution data or path analysis data that can help them get small gains in conversions. By looking for the 1% increase per month, the overall marketing performance can increase by 12% by the end of the year. These small wins are more attainable and force you to look for deeper statistical insights.

What is the secret behind incremental marketing growth?

There is no excuse for marketers not to know exactly how the data behind their marketing strategy look like. Having at your disposal reliable data, allow you to analyze performance adapting your current strategy.

An incremental marketing growth develops along with a well-defined model, such as the PSDA, as well as a constant monitor and optimization of a few major tactics. Below are a few tools for your Martech stack which can help you find these incremental gains. Increasing each by just 1% monthly will give your organization cumulative gain that will be seen in increased traffic, and revenue.

•    Email Marketing CTR: with Mailchimp “you can promote your business across email, social, landing pages, postcards, and more”. Engaging with a better-quality content, personalized and mobile responsive email or videos help you achieve a better email click-through Rate.
•    Online PR: tools like Awario help you “find important discussions, join them in real time, and spread the word about your product, service, or content across social and the Web to reach new audiences and trigger word-of-mouth marketing ensure the right messages are seen by the right people in the right context”.
•    Ad performance: Accurate data attribution helps you track how much revenue can be attributed to a specific marketing campaign. You can track the incremental revenue from each ad network, campaign, or channel when you centralize all your cross-channel data in one place.
•    Increase acquisition channel: increasing buyers’ acquisition and retention are a great lead. “It is always great to have a new customer. But even better, these newcomers should be coming back...”.Take full advantage of your available data to understand who’s using your service or product. Use segmentation to tailor different styles for different customers.
•    Referral Program: “A referral program is a deliberate, systematic way of getting people to make referrals to your business” and Referralcandy offers decennary experience to help you increment your marketing growth based on a long-term and thriving referral program. Global industry average is 2.3% but Referral Candy has seen some programs garner over 30% referral rates. For more info on global industry marketing referral rates, we recommend this article by Referralcandy.com

Conclusion

Try to focus on incremental growth rather than big growth hacks that rarely work. Either way, accomplishing this goal requires continuous monitoring of your marketing data and constant hypothesis testing.

For this, you need to rely on the right marketing tech stack to connect your data to your actions and make sure you optimize everything within your organization. If you don’t understand how the changes you make are impacting your results, you’re just guessing.