Growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey and marketing funnel, not just its constituent parts, and uses data to fuel understanding and strategies to drive customer adoption and revenue growth. It is a wide-ranging marketing role and therefore, needs to lean upon several growth marketing services to quickly scale.
Viewpoint Analysis provides a number of growth marketing services to support teams to deliver exceptional performance. This blog outlines some of the critical growth marketing services that can change the game - giving the marketing and sales team an opportunity to develop customer intimacy and understanding at every stage.
What are Growth Marketing Services?
Growth Marketing Services are a range of services that help growth marketing practitioners to understand more about their prospective and existing customers, and to deliver content at each stage of the marketing funnel. It is also about using data - and therefore finding the data points, to change the game.
Example Growth Marketing Services
There is a range of services that help teams improve their growth marketing capabilities and drive pipeline and sales performance.
Sector, Account, and Deal Research
One of the most time-consuming and difficult parts of a marketer's role is understanding the customer accounts. More often than not, the knowledge of the account sits in the heads of the broader account team. In order to market to existing customers and upsell to them, or to market to the closest peer group of their most important customers, they have to invest time and energy to research multiple areas.
Viewpoint Analysis has worked with multiple technology businesses - including the likes of Informatica, Nexthink, Pluralsight, Lineview and many more, to conduct research across a number of different growth marketing areas. These include sector research, account research (for strategic or account-based marketing), and deal-based account research:
Sector Research
Understanding an entire industry sector is a significant piece of work and an investment of time difficult to justify to internal teams. It is also challenging to find the right internal resources with sufficient capability. The best teams to be involved in the activity are the senior account managers or new business leaders, but they are focused on selling and getting them to invest time in research can be problematic.
Sector research or territory research as it is also commonly known, involves looking at areas like:
Sector Statistics - e.g. size, value, number of accounts, etc.
Account Structures - how many companies are in the sector and how do they divide across the SMB, Mid-market, and Key Accounts areas?
Key Accounts - what are the most important potential customers in the sector?
Themes - what issues or interesting aspects are impacting the sector today?
Competitors - who do we know is active in the sector?
Messaging - what messaging would we suggest would be useful for the sales and marketing team to lead with?
Influencers or Partners - which partners or influential figures might be useful to work with?
Learn more about territory research here.
Account Research
Account research is usually conducted for Account-Based Marketing or similar activities, where there is a focus on gaining a deep understanding of a customer or target company so that messaging can be differentiated and a relationship-style approach can be constructed. Like the sector research, it can take a significant amount of time to investigate accounts - particularly large ones.
Viewpoint Analysis runs ABM and Strategic Account Research to take the pressure off the internal marketing and sales teams. There are three stages to the research project:
1) An initial chat with the sales and marketing team focused on the account so that the investigation team knows the key challenge and current state of account knowledge.
2) Two or three days of 'outside-in' account research - culminating in an in-depth report that can be shared with all internal stakeholders.
3) A presentation of the key findings to the extended team - such that everyone is on the same page and can work from a standard understanding of the account.
Further details about the ABM and Strategic Account Research
Deal-Based Account Research
An increasingly important area for growth marketing teams is to ensure that they have an unequal chance to win the key deals when the target customer profile comes to market. This is where Deal-Based Marketing or Deal-Based Account Research comes in. With deal-based research, the challenge is to quickly investigate a pipeline customer so that the sales and marketing team can start to market to them quickly and influence the sales cycle while they have the time to do so.
Further details about Deal Based Marketing can be found here.
On-Demand Marketing Content
Understanding the customer, market, or deal is critical; the next step is to make sure that the marketing content is quick to build and issue. In many cases, growth marketing teams will use templated content so that they can quickly issue these to the right contacts in the right accounts.
Viewpoint Analysis offers an 'On-Demand Marketing Content' service where we produce content that can be quickly used for a given customer need. The important aspect is that the content is 'third-party' and written by and branded Viewpoint Analysis.
Product or Service Explainers
Typical requirements are product or service explainers - using a third-party brand like Viewpoint Analysis can be useful in these cases as it gives a different perspective to an internal assessment by the brand itself.
Pricing Explainers
Pricing explainers or license explainers can be really helpful to convey the commercial aspects of the product or service.
Industry Expertise
Usually requested by the sales team who have a sector-specific account list, content relating to industry expertise can be helpful to break open or expand across new industry sectors.
Opinion Pieces
Perhaps based on new stories or common misconceptions, opinion pieces can be a great way to help the growth marketing team's narrative.
Other Growth Marketing Services
Outside of research and content, there is a range of other services that can be really useful for the growth marketing function. These include:
Win Loss Analysis
A great way to learn how to improve marketing (as well as sales) is to interview won and lost deals. Win Loss Analysis uncovers a number of facets that can improve go-to-market messaging or ensure that the team can learn for future bids.
Disqualified Leads Audit
Looking at where the sales team rejected leads - and what can be done to improve the situation is a great way to learn from mistakes or find areas where the pipeline is malfunctioning. Our Disqualified Leads service quickly uncovers the issues and can lead to some deals being reawakened.
Market Perception Analysis
Do you really know what your market thinks of your product, service, or brand. Companies usually make assumptions about their market situation. Running a 360-degree market perception analysis can be a game-changer and ensure that for the first time, the marketing team can start to take actions when and where they are really needed - not where they think they are needed.
Summary
Growth marketing is a complex area and covers a lot of ground. These growth-marketing services can offer a way to improve performance by understanding every facet of the pipeline and customer contact strategy - and improving throughout.
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