The old-school digital marketing players, like SEO, PPC, display, retargeting and email marketing are still important, but they've become increasingly crowded and it's hard to stand out. As time goes on, not only does it become more and more competitive, but you will notice a decreasing ROI. This is where growth marketing can help.

Developing a growth marketing mindset and strategy gives you an integrated approach to boosting your business and optimising your organisation. It involves a mix of marketing, sales, customer success, support, and any other division or operation within your organisation. The idea behind growth marketing is that, by identifying new opportunities, you will be able to build a highly engaged audience.

The process involves managing a lot more people, pieces of information and integration between different departments, but when you pull that all together you'll be on to a winner.

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So, how do you develop this mindset?

In order to develop your growth marketing mindset, there are 3 key elements you will need realise:

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1 - Understand Your Marketing Funnel

As in the buyer's journey, the marketing funnel is divided up in to three stages. The top of the funnel (awareness), the middle of the funnel (consideration), and the bottom of the funnel (devision/conversion stage). These stages of you funnel will vary dependent on your company or market so it's crucial to know what implications that has for you.

Once you have your marketing funnel nailed down, you should start putting metrics next to each stage that are going to be beneficial to look out for. These could be things such as traffic, qualified leads, conversion rates etc. An example of this could be tracking the conversion rate between traffic and an email opt-in. Just make sure that tracking these metrics is going to be useful to you, and that you understand what the data/numbers truly mean.

After quantifying the metrics you have chosen to track, start looking for potential flaws or pain points in your funnel. They could stem from other parts of your company, but for now you just you just need to know where they are in your funnel.

Usually there are 2 weaknesses that are most commonly found in marketing funnels

• Top of the funnel - there simply isn't enough traffic coming to the website to make any type of conversion. That's not just a sales conversion, but any type of conversion like an email opt-in or downloading a content offer.
• Conversion rate (or lack of) - people might be visiting your site but they aren't clicking around, trialling, downloading, filling out forms or opting in.

After identifying weaknesses, you need to find your marketing funnel strengths and decide which channels are your business' top revenue producers.

2 - Identify a framework that you'll be using to properly operate and improve your marketing funnel

After identifying your strengths and weaknesses of the marketing funnel, it's time to move on to identify a framework to properly operate and improve the funnel. We do this using the Bullseye Framework - a three-step approach to gaining traction.

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Once you've identified your channels, you should start running tests. Zapier wrote a brilliant article on this, detailing 19 separate traction channel test ideas. Each test should be geared towards uncovering how much it'll cost to acquire a customer through this channel, how many customers are available through this channel, and are the customers in the channel who we want.

Now, start with ideation of how to use this channel for traction. For example, if you were to attend a conference, which conference would it be? Or if you were to generate a partnership with an influencer, whom would that be with? Brainstorming can really help here. Try to get at least one idea per channel and then use a program such a Google Sheets to help organise your ideas.

It's important to note that not all ideas will work. In fact, most can fail, but each test that proves or disproves your hypothesis will give you real answers that will help your marketing funnel for the future.

Once you have a list of ideas, leave it. Let it sit over the weekend. You want the right side of your brain (ideas and creativity center) to shut off so that your left side of the brain can kick into gear and focus on planning and implementation. This way, you can look at it from a different perspective and start thinking about implementation next steps, resources needed, and so on. If the tests go the way you had hoped, you'll know where to start focusing your efforts.  

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3 - Instil a growth mindset with the rest of your company

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The last part of developing a growth marketing mindset, and the most important, is getting the rest of your organisation on board. You need to get them addicted and excited about the idea of growth.

While each department is just as important as the next, there are three departments that you should focus on first.

• Customer Service - These guys are on the front line with your customers after the transaction is made. They know the struggles and pain points of your customers and they should always be searching for the customers' problems and identifying how their experience could be improved.
  
  There needs to be an open communication channel for this group to engage with customers. Whether it's social media, email or phone, make it easy for customers to understand how to engage with them.  Once you know the problems of your customers, you can create content that solves their needs and then scale it, rather than reinventing the wheel for each new problem that arises.
  
  Remember, while customers may love your product or service, they're going to really love the content you produce if it's helpful to them.
  
• Sales Team - The sales team are actively talking to prospects before they become customers. Because your sales team is engaging with prospect frequently, they have a good idea of why prospects do or don't convert into customers. Valuable information like this allows you to better target and customise the content experiences for your customers and prospects. It's never a one-size-fits-all approach.
  
  
• Product and Service Team - Get buy-in from the members who are in charge of your products and services. It’s important to use logic and respect when doing this, explaining why it’s important. The best place to start is with the leader of the group.
  
  When explaining why this is important, use feedback from the customer service, support, and success team to influence what your organisation’s customers want more of. This way, your organisation can focus on growing based off what your customers want, not just what you think they want.

Once you instill this mindset into your organisation, it can become a regular routine, like eating breakfast.
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To recap, you need to know your marketing funnel, you need to have a framework to properly operate and improve your funnel, and you need to get buy-in on instilling a growth mindset within your organisation.