As the leader of a successful website marketing company, it is probably not wise to share the tactics we use to help our clients reach their digital marketing goals⸺it may cost us money.
But we believe that good growth marketing strategies can be deployed by every company with a digital presence. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a unicorn tech startup or a family-owned business, our experience tells us that well-informed clients are the best clients, in both results and relationships.
When it comes to being a great growth marketer, there’s no complicated formula (even though many agencies and “thought leaders” would like you to believe otherwise). Great digital marketing has far more to do with who you are and how you think than any other attribute.
Here are four ways of thinking that drive success at Fiddlehead.
4 Mindsets TO INCORPORATE
1. Have empathy for your customers. Love them. Listen to them.
Understand them, dig in to their problems and feel their pain, their hopes, and their dreams. If you're in b2b, make your customers heroes at their jobs (that's one of Fiddlehead's great pleasures). If you're in b2c, understanding your customers' pain and desires makes it much easier to make their lives happier, easier, or safer.
2. Hone your communication inside the company as much as you do outside it.
For your clients, you're at the intersection of their company and the market. It’s your job to wrangle engineer-speak, business-speak, sales-speak, and design-speak into a message, a strategy, and a way to COMMUNICATE with your company's customers.
But you also have to own communication INSIDE your own company, because brands are only established through consistent communications to keep everyone—sales, product, exec staff, and customer support—aligned in their connections with customers. On top of that, good communication creates more effective teams. When people feel heard, a more authentic workplace emerges, where everyone is empowered to work together and fix problems faster.
3. Measure Your Work.
If we're not driving business results, why are we here? CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-Suite, in part because it’s very hard to associate their hard work to tangible business results.
Longevity in your marketing career is directly tied to your ability to both get results and to communicate those wins—to convince your peers and CEO that you (and your team’s) efforts were actually a driving force behind the business’s wins.
Keeping track of results, good or bad, is how you keep yourself and your team motivated and helps you communicate your team’s progress within your organization, so you can get the budgets and staffing you need. (Read more about measuring performance in “Three Ways to Track a Marketing Campaign’s Success.”)
4. Get Stuff Done, Every Day.
Ideas aren't the problem in marketing. The reality is that 80% of effective marketing is the discipline of daily, weekly, and monthly efforts, measured over quarters and years. Just like everyone wants to be a novelist, but few can sit in the chair every day for a year, so it is with marketing. Take SEO services, for example. Search Engine Optimization done right takes consistency, keeping up with algorithm changes, and watching performance patiently. Producing consistent results requires discipline.
It may seem overly simple, but these principles are harder to live by than they look. In fact, you should be suspicious of programs that promise the world and complicate everything. The physicist Richard Feynman was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain a complicated scientific principle, and responded, "I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But a few days later he returned and said, "You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it." So don’t be blinded by hype, fancy degrees, and confusing, jargon-filled posts. When it comes to execution, then yes, experience and technical knowledge can save you time and money. But until then, whether you’re an aspiring CMO, a marketer engaging an agency, or an entrepreneur looking to hire a marketer, implement these four principles to grow and find success.