How do Successful Brands Choose the Right Growth Marketing Agency?
There are times when brands need to scale their business beyond their internal team's abilities. They may need expert help in orchestrating their sales, marketing, and customer service efforts to reach new customers, launch new products or expand into new markets. In these cases, a growth marketing agency can be a valuable resource and achieve time and resource efficiencies for their clients.
A growth agency is a company that simply specializes in helping achieve data-driven growth, and is not keen on softer targets like brand recognition, the share of voice, impressions, etc. They marry sales and marketing strategies to create a business strategy that'll deliver overall growth. Their north star metric is Growth, and nothing else.
Growth marketing is a data-driven holistic marketing approach to increase growth that focuses on lead generation, customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. In simpler terms, find new customers efficiently, keep the ones you've got and make them happy.
Growth marketing agencies often provide both Strategy and Execution, as well as a variety of digital marketing services such as SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and more. A growth marketing agency develops a deep understanding of the business model, business challenges, and the customer lifecycle of a brand they work with.
They employ high-caliber growth marketers that understand their client's business challenges and translate these into an overall growth marketing strategy and tasks for the agency's internal growth team.
When choosing a growth marketing agency, brands consider a few things. First, they make sure the agency has experience in the areas where they need help. Second, they want to see if the agency has a track record of success. And finally, they want to make sure the agency is a good fit for their culture and team.
With so many growth agencies to choose from, it can be difficult for brands to know which is the right one for them. Here's a five-step approach used by many brands:
Define the needs. Why work with a growth marketing agency?
Look For a Growth Agency That Specializes in Your Industry or market
Ask for and talk to references
Prioritize culture fit above anything else
Manage the growth agency
1- Define the needs. Why work with a growth agency?
This is the first and most important step. Without a clear understanding of why you need a growth agency, it will be difficult to find the right one. Maybe you're launching a new product and need help with marketing. Or maybe you're expanding into a new market and need sales enablement. Whatever the reason, make sure you have a clear understanding of your needs before moving on to the next step.
Once you've defined your need, make sure you map out where your existing marketing team fits into the picture. It'll be very hard to get effective results from your growth agency without the buy-in of your in-house team.
You need to utilize your premium marketing talent effectively and in sync with the growth marketing agency you're working with. Agree firsthand on what parts of your digital marketing delivery will stay in-house and what parts will be outsourced to the growth marketing agency. you might find the growth agency might choose not to take on web development, influencer marketing, or PR, but would love to control all aspects of your inbound marketing, like the content strategy, marketing automation, and performance data.
Creating growth is not easy. Make sure you don't create additional complexity while appointing a growth marketing agency.
2- Look For a Growth Agency That Specializes in Your Industry or market
When it comes to appointing a growth agency, a simple B2B, B2C, B2B2C type operational focus just won't cut it. You'll need to get so much more granular than that.
If you're in a niche industry, it's important to find an agency that has a strong background in your industry or market. They'll be familiar with the unique challenges and opportunities you face, and know the ins and outs of your industry and perhaps even market. They'll also have a network of contacts that can help you accelerate your business goals.
If you're in a more general industry, look for an agency that has experience working with companies like yours. They should understand your business model and have a track record of success in helping similar brands grow. We don't only mean similarity of product, or routes to market, but also company maturity.
If you're a corporate, look for growth agencies with more bandwidth, if you're a startup, go for a smaller younger crew who can maneuver quickly as your company grows.
Small businesses generally resort to growth hackers to lead their performance marketing efforts. This is a good start, but you can miss out on other growth opportunities that might require so much more than more digital marketing, content marketing, and website traffic, a quick digital strategy, or in-depth data analysis that might lead to paralysis.
Here's a good place to start looking for agencies.
📌 Lead Generation - Lee Goff
3- Ask for and talk to references
Once you've narrowed down your list of potential growth agencies, it's time to start talking to references. Ask each agency for a list of references from past and current clients. Then take the time to call each one and ask about their experience working with the agency. You want to work with a partner that leaves a good impression.
Here are some questions you can ask references:
How easy is it to work with the agency?
Do they respond quickly to requests?
Are they proactive in offering growth advice and ideas?
Do they deliver on their promises?
Would you recommend them to others?
If an agency can't provide any references, or the references they do provide are unhappy, move on to the next one.
4- Prioritize culture fit above anything else
The growth agency (or any other partner for that matter) you choose should be a good fit for your company's culture. They should understand and share your values and be compatible with your team. If there's not a good cultural fit, it will be difficult to work together and achieve success. And if there is a good cultural fit, everything will flow naturally.
This being said, you should not aim for a perfect fit either. First, it'll be an impossible exercise, and second, you want external help after all, not a repeat of what you've already got. So it's ok to tolerate some creative tension while teams get used to each other.
The best way to assess culture fit is by meeting with the growth agency in person. Seeing how they interact with you and your team will give you a good idea of whether or not there's a good cultural fit.
Still got questions? Here's a great article on Culture Fit and Strategy
5- Manage the growth agency
Once you've chosen a growth agency, it's important to manage them effectively. Make sure you set clear goals and objectives at the start of the relationship. And establish regular communication channels so you can provide feedback and direction along the way.
A growth marketing agency should feel like an extension of your team, albeit being a separate entity. By working closely together, you can maximize the chances of success and achieve your growth goals.
Here are some tips for managing your growth agency well:
Set clear goals, objectives, and KPIs from the start
Communicate regularly (at least weekly)
Setup a reporting format and structure, or even better ask for a dashboard
Plan the delivery in growth sprints
Provide open feedback and direction
Do not interfere too much!
Celebrate successes together
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a data-driven growth marketing approach to increase growth that focuses on customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. It's often used by startups and growth-stage companies to achieve rapid growth. Growth marketing agencies help brands with a variety of digital marketing services such as SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and more.
What is the difference between growth marketing and growth hacking?
This is a big debate. Growth marketing agencies do not like to be called a growth hacking marketing agency or a growth hacking consulting agency. To them, growth hacking agencies do not unlock a company's true growth potential but focus on short-term results.
For more on this, you can listen to NBT's Growth Marketing Hub Director Ezgi Ada here.
(The Growth Marketing Hub is one of the more user friendly gorwth marketing tools for marketers)
The main difference between growth marketing and growth hacking is that growth marketing is a more holistic approach to marketing that focuses on customer acquisition, engagement, and retention to achieve rapid and sustainable growth.
A growth marketing agency would work with scale-ups to deliver a data-driven approach and a growth strategy.
Growth hacking is a more tactical digital marketing approach that focuses on identifying and implementing quick-fire growth hacks. These hacks can be anything from improving website SEO to A&B testing for increasing email marketing open rates, or initiatives like shortening your sales funnel or spending more on paid advertising. They are the right things to do and will have a one-off correction, but might not be part of a long-term marketing strategy.
A growth hacking agency often helps early-stage startups and growth-stage companies to achieve rapid growth.
One thing to note here is that terms like growth hacking and growth marketing are still used interchangeably by many businesses and agencies alike. So make sure you understand the subtle differences between growth hacking & growth hackers and growth marketing & growth marketers.
What can a Growth Agency do that my team can't?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to grow companies. (perhaps a few data scientists would help)
A growth marketing agency can do many things that a company's team can't but perhaps the most important competitive advantage of a growth agency will be the speed of delivery.
A growth agency can very quickly enter a rapid experimentation stage and fully understand where (both in terms of channel and persona) the highest conversion for your business lies and laser focus on it. The growth experiments and marketing tactics utilized in this stage are also highly specialized and at times proprietary to the agency.
They would have the resources to add a growth marketer or more to the team as needed and keep delivery unaffected in times of rapid growth. They can structure their teams around growth sprints and give you a (planned) boost.
As their north star metric is business growth, you'll find they won't spend time on anything else. Don't expect any agency fluff, you're looking for kickass growth, well above industry average, aiming outside the bell curve.
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