How a Growth Agency can help your business
A Growth Agency helps businesses achieve their revenue growth objectives by following a core strategy that encompasses marketing, sales enablement, technology, and scientific experimentation.
Unlike a traditional digital marketing agency, growth agencies influence more than marketing KPIs, and can even influence the development of a product or service offering. They leverage hard data in making important decisions, so there is a significant push toward bridging ROI analysis' gaps before a single piece of marketing collateral is published.
If you're familiar with (and happen to enjoy) lean startup principles, this may be music to your eyeballs.
Other Aliases:
- Revenue growth agency
- Business growth agency
- Growth marketing agency
- Digital growth agency
Whatever you call it, growth is about growth, not KPIs.
Comparing and Contrasting Agencies that Specialize in Marketing, Sales, Technology, and Growth
The easiest way to define a "growth agency" is to compare them to more commonly known service providers, such as marketing, sales, and technology firms. Through this comparison, you'll see how growth agencies consolidate a highly fragmented industry through partnerships and centralized leadership.
While inbound lead generation may be a useful tool for scaling your business (it's certainly what we're most famous for, and why people knock on our door), it may not be the right foot forward today.
A growth agency will help you make decisions that attack your growth objectives in a more holistic fashion, so you can build on your successes, and isolate and remove problems along the way.
Marketing:
The new marketing buzzword "Growth Marketing" isn't a fad; it's a movement.
Marketing agencies are going to pitch a whole bunch of different ideas for helping you grow your business, but they're going to focus on marketing KPIs.... understandbably so--this is the digital marketing thought process: generate KPIs attributed to their deliverable, and you'll keep them on retainer--it does not matter if deals close if they prove it wasn't their fault.
Sure, they want you to succeed... but they don't have the influence to get you there.
Digital marketing's influence:
- Website traffic & other website-related stats, like bounce rate from SEO marketing
- Likes, followers, shares from social media
- Leads generated from website conversions
Traditional marketing's influence:
- Branding
- Video ads
- Print materials
It's not hard to see the value of those things, but it's certainly difficult to calculate it... and even more difficult to DERIVE it.
Sales:
Sales agencies are going to offer similar KPIs, only geared more toward sales. More involved sales agencies address direct KPIs:
- Calls made
- Appointments set
- Opportunities generated
Leadership agencies, help enable success with your existing teams and systems:
- Sales coaching
- Sales enablement
- Sales & marketing alignment
Technology:
Technology agencies help businesses operate at maximum efficiency. In my personal experience, they are the most overlooked aspect of businesses looking to grow and scale, but typically the most desperately needed.
They implement, update, and modernize the customer management system. Their goal is to automate as much as possible, and they will want to influence:
- CRM - sales management software (Salesforce, Zoho, SAP, etc)
- Marketing - automation and analytics (Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, etc)
- Service - record-keeping & customer service (SAP, Oracle, etc)
- Accounting - billing automation and bookkeeping (QB, Xero, etc)
To many, this feels like a "big company" solution, not things you'd necessarily worry about at they level they are today. But if your goal is to scale your business, there is no better starting point in my opinion. This is how you'll determine where your money is best spent, and when to walk away from bad investments.
Growth:
Growth agencies combine these different but complementary concepts together. They're staffed with data-driven growth marketers who see the big picture and experiment towards a single metric or outcome (commonly referred to as the "north star metric").
What defines a competent growth agency is their flexibility to do a lot and scale quickly, and show no bias in the growth plans they develop for you. Meaning, they're not trying to back into a singular concept, like SEO, social media marketing, or inbound lead generation.
They're data-driven. Therefore, they rely on objective outcomes (did this move us toward the north star metric?).
Services provided:
- Sales Infrastructure Implementations
- Sales Enablement
- Sales-driven Website Development
- Inbound Lead Generation
- Sales & Marketing Alignment
- Growth Hacking
When they have the talent on their bench that you need, but the core services offered aren't necessary, they should also be able to provide consultants to carry out specialized work.
NOTE: Growth is not an add-on. It's a strategic initiative that takes center stage. It affects tactical delivery and critically important--CULTURE. If you do not have the appetite for culture change, it will not work.
CONCLUSION:
Growth marketing agencies consolidate marketing, sales, and technology services to organize and manage a single vision through centralized leadership. They are unbiased, and address the problems present with your business today, while building the road to tomorrow.
Learn more by checking out what Orange Pegs has to offer! We're growing tech startups, staffing agencies, accounting firms, consulting firms, and B2B all over the US:
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