The Desire to Grow
Once you begin finding success with your marketing, an obvious next step is to build on it. Whether you want to attract more customers, generate more sales, or strengthen your position in your market, you're faced with the same question: What should you do next?
There are some straightforward ways to expand your marketing efforts. Increasing your advertising budget, creating more advertisements, or developing stronger messaging can all help you build on what you're already doing. But is doing more of the same always the best way to grow?
Perhaps your advertisements are already reaching much of the available demand within their targeted audience. Maybe you're successfully attracting potential customers but losing them somewhere between their initial interest and making a purchase. Or there may be entire groups of potential customers your marketing has yet to reach.
These situations present different opportunities, and understanding them involves more than looking for ways to increase spending or activity.
There's also no universal approach that works for every business. While marketing strategies may share many of the same principles, their application depends on what you offer, who your customers are, the market you're operating in, and what you're trying to accomplish.
So, how do you determine where your marketing has room to grow, which opportunities are worth pursuing, and how to approach them?
Understanding Your Existing Marketing Performance
Any decision about growing your marketing should be informed by data. Knowing your website traffic, advertising clicks, cost per conversion, social media engagement, and other performance measurements is useful, but having the data and understanding what it tells you are two very different things.
Individual measurements rarely provide enough information to understand your performance on their own.
Suppose your website traffic has increased significantly over a period of time. That's encouraging, but when you examine your conversions, you find they haven't increased proportionally with your traffic. There's a discrepancy worth investigating. Where do you begin?
You might examine where your traffic is coming from, particularly the sources responsible for the increase. What pages are those visitors engaging with? How are they moving through your website? How much time are they spending there? At what points are they disengaging from the process of becoming a customer?
Examining those details can help narrow down where the discrepancy originates. Perhaps the additional traffic is coming from searches that aren't particularly relevant to your offering. Maybe visitors are interested in what they find but encounter difficulties somewhere in your conversion funnel.
There are several possibilities, and the data needs to be examined carefully before drawing conclusions.
Consider finding that a large portion of your new visitors leave your website from a particular page. Your first instinct might be to change that page, assuming something about it is driving potential customers away. But what if those visitors are still researching possible solutions? They may have found exactly the information they were looking for and simply aren't ready to make a purchase or submit an inquiry. In that case, the page could be serving its intended purpose. Changing it based solely on the number of visitors leaving might actually harm its effectiveness.
This is a hypothetical example, but it illustrates an important distinction: what your data shows isn't necessarily the same as what you can reasonably conclude from it.
The same care applies when examining relationships between measurements. Two metrics increasing together doesn't establish that one caused the other. Changes in demand, customer behavior, or other marketing activities may influence the results you're observing.
There's value in examining performance at every level, from individual interactions and the most granular measurements to the results of your marketing efforts as a whole. Looking closely can reveal details hidden within broader performance figures, while examining the larger picture helps establish how significant those details actually are.
And even the way you interpret performance depends on your business and its objectives. The value of an inquiry, the importance of a particular conversion, and the measurements that deserve the most attention will differ depending on what you're offering and what you're trying to accomplish.
Good analysis involves examining what your information represents, understanding the conclusions you can reasonably draw from it, and recognizing where further investigation is needed. That understanding forms the basis for identifying limitations in your existing marketing and recognizing opportunities for growth.
Understanding Your Customers and Market Opportunities
Understanding your marketing also means understanding the people you're trying to reach.
Your potential customers aren't necessarily one uniform group. They may have different needs, reasons for purchasing, levels of interest, and expectations of what you provide. Some may be actively searching for your offering and ready to make a decision. Others may be researching possible solutions, comparing alternatives, or only beginning to recognize a need for something you provide.
These differences matter because the same marketing message won't necessarily resonate with everyone, even when they're interested in the same product or service.
Beyond purchasing intent, there are differences between customer segments and the audiences within them. You may already be reaching a particular type of customer successfully, but only reaching a portion of that group. There could be additional audiences within the same customer segment that your existing marketing hasn't reached, whether because of geography, advertising channels, or how those customers search for what you offer.
Alternatively, there may be entirely different customer segments with a need for your offering. Those customers might be interested in different aspects of your products or services, approach their purchasing decisions differently, or be looking for something that your current marketing doesn't emphasize.
In some cases, the opportunity isn't even a different product, service, or audience. It may simply be a different perspective on what you already offer. For example, a feature you consider secondary might be one of the primary reasons a particular group of customers would choose your offering. If your marketing rarely addresses that feature, you may be overlooking an important source of customer interest.
Recognizing these distinctions can reveal opportunities, but identifying a potential audience is only part of understanding its value.
You also need to consider the demand within that audience. How many people genuinely need or want what you offer? How frequently does that need arise? How do those customers research and make purchasing decisions? Are they already looking for businesses like yours, or would reaching them require introducing them to your offering?
The size of an audience alone doesn't establish the opportunity it represents. A relatively small customer segment with clear demand may be more valuable than a substantially larger audience with little purchasing interest.
There are also limitations to how precisely different audiences can be reached. A group of potential customers may share a particular need or motivation without there being a reliable way to target that group directly through an advertising platform. Reaching them may require a different combination of channels, messaging, and presentation.
Understanding these distinctions helps you see your market beyond the customers your current marketing is already reaching.
It also helps establish how your offering should be communicated to different groups of people, how their varying levels of interest can be addressed, and where additional demand may exist.
Strategy, Analysis, and Refinement
Understanding your existing performance and your potential customers provides a foundation for deciding how to grow. What comes next is an ongoing process of developing your strategy, evaluating the results, and refining your efforts.
The opportunities you've identified won't all offer the same potential, nor will they require the same approach. You might find room to reach more customers within an existing market, identify demand in a customer segment you've largely overlooked, or discover that your current marketing is losing potential customers before they convert.
Each finding points toward a different area of your marketing, and each needs to be evaluated within the context of your business.
The process also requires distinguishing between opportunities that appear promising and those that are worth the investment required to pursue them. Existing demand, competition, expected returns, the resources available to you, and your ability to serve additional customers all influence that decision.
Once you've determined what to pursue, your strategy guides how you approach it. But that strategy shouldn't be treated as fixed. As your marketing produces results, those results provide new information. You can examine how customers respond, whether the adjustments are accomplishing what you intended, and what the findings reveal about your original assumptions.
This is where testing and experimentation become valuable.
A/B testing, for example, allows you to compare variations of an advertisement, webpage, or other marketing element to examine how a particular change affects performance. The important part isn't simply determining which version produces a higher number. It's understanding what was changed, how the results differ, and whether those differences are meaningful.
If you change your targeting, messaging, and creative all at once, you may see an improvement without knowing which change contributed to it. Similarly, an advertisement that produces more clicks isn't necessarily an improvement if those clicks aren't resulting in the outcomes you're trying to generate.
These distinctions matter because the results of your experiments inform the decisions you make afterward.
Refinement doesn't always require formal testing, either. Changes in inquiry quality, customer purchasing behavior, conversion rates, or the performance of individual marketing channels can all provide information worth examining.
The relationship between strategy and analysis is continuous. Your strategy informs what you do, the results provide information about how well it's working, and your analysis informs what you change.
Approaching refinement deliberately also makes it easier to understand the effects of your adjustments. Rather than making several unrelated changes and hoping for an improvement, you can evaluate specific decisions, examine their results, and develop your efforts with a clearer understanding of what is and isn't working.
This doesn't eliminate uncertainty or guarantee that every adjustment will be beneficial. It provides a more informed way to respond when results differ from expectations. And those expectations themselves may change. Market demand fluctuates, competitors change their approaches, customer behavior evolves, and your own business may introduce new offerings or expand its capabilities. What worked previously may not remain the most productive approach as those conditions develop.
Your marketing strategy should reflect what you're learning about your customers, your performance, and the opportunities available to you. Analysis and refinement are how that understanding continues to develop.
Understanding and Pursuing Growth
Growing your marketing effectively involves understanding what your existing efforts are accomplishing, who you're reaching, and where opportunities for growth exist.
It also means using that understanding to develop a strategy, examine its results, and continually refine your efforts. Sometimes growth may come from expanding what you're already doing. Other times, it may require improving existing performance, reaching different customers, or reconsidering how you communicate what you offer. There's no single approach that applies equally to every business. But understanding your performance, your customers, and the opportunities available to you provides a much stronger foundation for determining how your marketing should grow.
It's not always as simple as doing more or spending more. There's a great deal worth considering before deciding what comes next.
