Growth Marketing’s True Goal?
The current framework for marketing agencies is broken.
By incentivizing the never ending wheel of paid advertising on digital platforms, brands get addicted to precise ad returns measurements and forget that growth is a multi-faceted challenge.
At Chowder, our framework prioritizes growth in a full-funnel way, ensuring the longevity of customer retention alongside top funnel awareness and lead generation.
But first, we ought to agree on what the goal of marketing in this decade is for most brands across both B2B and B2C.
First, let’s take a look at Philip Kotler’s definition: “Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and building profitable relationships with them.”.
At Chowder, we simplify the modern father of marketing’s statement to arrive at our own definition: Modern marketing’s goal is to drive inbound traffic, convert customers, and retain revenues that demonstrably grow a business.
We first find a North Star metric, eliminate the low hanging fruit, tunnel our focus on the hardest problems and never stop testing tactics amidst the mountain of data we have access to.
The Chowder Framework
1. The North Star
The North Star, or Polaris, consists of the most desirable marketing outcome in the given timeframe.
This goal is unshakeable, and requires the effort of the entire marketing team in order to accomplish.
In a B2B services company, an example would be to improve lead-to-conversion rates by 1.5% across three months.
If a metric as such is set, then the marketing team ought to move full steam ahead with conversion rate optimization tweaks like improving landing pages, or an in-depth UX audit to see where leads fail to convert.
In essence, without a North Star, a marketing team cannot perform at its maximum potential and will result in the dreaded marketing malaise that afflicts many entrenched teams.
2. Low-Hanging Fruit
In the second aspect of our framework, we aim to eliminate the low-hanging fruit as swiftly as possible in order to generate quick marketing wins that give a team momentum.
When a marketing team starts a new campaign or project, the North Star often feels so far away, and it’s hard to generate momentum that reaches this goal.
For a B2C client of ours in the FinTech space, a quick win was to re-ignite customer engagement with repurposed content made three quarters ago.
Implemented in less than three days, long-form video content was spliced into short-form that filled content gaps which provided value to customers.
Engagement rates spiked, and validated the premise that more content was the way forward for the company.
To get to our North Star, we need validation and momentum, and that’s why eliminating low-hanging fruit in the early stages is crucial.
What about marketing strategy and tactics?
3. Focused Velocity
In the third part of our framework, we harness the power of focused velocity to solve the hardest problems that unlocks growth.
The hardest problem is often a multi-faceted one, and one single solution is often unable to solve it all. That’s when strategy and tactics come into play.
Here’s a scenario startups often face when they want to go to market. They were recently seed funded, have a working product, and some capital to start customer acquisition.
Next, they wish to sell into enterprises as quickly as they do small businesses. But right now, they have little name recognition, lack of content, and most troubling, a working engine of customer acquisition.
When you look at the tactics required to solve these challenges, you’ll get a long laundry list.
This includes, cold email lead generation, paid advertising on social media, organic short-form content, long-form podcasts, landing page optimization, community building, just to name a few.
Overwhelmed? Well thankfully, this go to market challenge is easier than it seems with focused velocity.
Time segmentation here is key, and when a marketing team understands this key tactic, the path forward is clear.
Organic content on average takes both a longer time to produce and see results in. Hence, it is immediate priority to create as much content, both written and video as soon as possible.
Focus on making organic content for social media, blogs and podcasts. And as the content engine is firing, focus on the short-term wins together next. Thereafter, buy paid social, splash out on in-person events, and community building.
This might sound counterintuitive, why start with long lead time organic content when I can get immediate paid wins?
But remember, by building a wealth of informational content about your product online, you differentiate yourself into an extremely favourable position.
Moreover, your customers aren’t dumb, and they will want to self-educate and compare your product against your competitors.
Focused velocity might seem glaringly obvious, yet it is sorely missed by overwhelmed marketing teams chasing tails that lead nowhere.
Are you a student of marketing?
Then, a lifelong endeavour of renewal, learning and optimization is the path for you.
What worked a mere five years ago, when every cent of a company’s revenues were reinvested into paid advertising as it was less competitive, could not work today.
TikTok became notably popular around 2019-2020, and with that came a boom of organic social reach never once possible.
The TikTok algorithm rewarded good content, and cared little for your follower count, which was antithetical to the approach at Instagram and Facebook.
4. Revise & Renew
At the bottom of our framework, we focus on the need for constant revision and renewal of skills needed in marketing.
No one has all the answers in this skill, and even if one did, that advantage would be competed away in a matter of mere months.
Hence, marketing teams need to understand that in order to reach their North Star, they will need to learn from campaigns past, but not for a second think that what worked then would work equally well today.
Tactics will have to be adapted, and new opportunities will have to be seized.
For example, static images were the rage of Meta advertising for the past half a decade. However, as the cost of video generation has continued to drop especially with the rise of AI video generation products, the majority of Meta advertising will be video-led.
This means that advertisers have to get comfortable with native video metrics. What constitutes a cost-per-view (CPV), and what is the cost-per-mille (CPM) of a video-led awareness campaign, will be the gateway to the future of advertising.
The Takeaway
The Chowder framework starts with the North Star, quickly builds momentum with the low-hanging fruit, focuses marketing energies to solve the greatest challenges and never stops improving.
With growth at the heart of our company’s ethos, we believe that as the future of marketing constantly evolves, we too will evolve with it. As spoken by Brutus in Julius Caesar by Shakespeare:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
So, ride the wave.
