AMA: Spotify Associate Director, Growth Marketing, Joann Guo on Growth Marketing Strategy

Depending on your objectives and target audience, you have the flexibility to deploy various strategies. When focusing on B2B efforts, we found virtual events like webinars are often effective in reaching a broader audience, particularly SMBs. Moreover, virtual events are much easier to track and measure, as we can collect more data compared to live events. However, if your objective is to foster client networking and create immersive experiences, live events may be more appropriate. Ultimately, selecting the optimal approach depends on your goals, target audience, budget considerations, and the desired outcomes you aim to achieve.

This depends on your product stage and goals. If your product is relatively new and has yet to achieve product-market fit, it is crucial to invest heavily in building awareness and generating demand. Paid channels (if budget allows), such as paid search and social, are often faster to scale and can have more direct impact in generating lower funnel conversions. For B2B, it is essential to prioritize lead quality alongside quantity. Monitoring metrics like LTV:CAC (customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost) is often a solid indicator to measure the efficiency of your paid marketing efforts. In addition to paid, it’s important to strike a balance by simultaneously developing owned channels, such content marketing and SEO, while continuously doing AB testing to optimize the full user journey will help boost conversions. On the other hand, if you already have sufficient demand, directing investment towards engagement and retention becomes crucial. Tactics such as personalized email journeys, upsell and cross-sell campaigns to increase repeat purchases and improve customer loyalty become more crucial for long term business growth. Again, growth marketing is an iterative and agile process which require continuous testing and learning.

Always maintain a sense of curiosity and diligently monitor key metrics throughout your business, including customer growth in different markets, segments, and verticals. Pay close attention to funnel conversion metrics to identify where customers may be dropping off. Understanding the various factors influencing each metric is crucial for uncovering potential opportunities for growth. For example, we have observed a significant influx of mobile traffic that is negatively impacting our activation rate. Upon further investigation, we discovered that these visitors show a genuine interest in converting. However, certain features are unavailable on desktop which prevents them from activating. This situation presents an opportunity for us to create a more mobile-friendly approach that redirects this traffic to a personalized landing page, offering concise education and incentives to encourage them to switch to desktop for activation. Additionally, it opens up the opportunity to collaborating with the product team internally to prioritize the development of a mobile web experience that will enhance user satisfaction and provide a seamless journey for these individuals.

Let's start by setting clear and specific goals that align with the broader objectives of your business. Think about what you want to achieve, whether it's reaching a certain number of new customers or generating a specific amount of revenue. Once you have these goals in place, it's time to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you keep track of how each area is performing. For example, you can use the return on ad spend (ROAS) or LTV:CAC metrics to see how well your paid investments are paying off. It will show you the return you're getting in relation to the money you're spending on advertising. Website conversion rate is another metric to monitor which tells you the percentage of visitors who are actually taking action, like making a purchase or filling out a form. When it comes to your email campaigns, keeping an eye on the click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open-rate (CTOR) will give you insights into how relevant your email contents are and how many people are clicking on the links you provide. And of course, don't forget about your social media presence. Tracking the growth of your followers and analyzing social listening across different platforms will help gauge brand awareness and may provide valuable insights to improve the product. By setting these specific KPIs for each area, you'll be able to measure and evaluate how well your marketing initiatives are performing. This way, you can make informed decisions and fine-tune your growth strategy to achieve the best results for your business.

It's really important to understand what's behind your specific performance numbers and figure out if there's an opportunity to pinpoint and improve those factors directly. If your website is indeed one of the key drivers, it's worth investigating why it's not converting. Is there something off in your messaging or is there something on the page itself that's creating friction and stopping users from converting? We can tackle these issues by making it easier for users to find relevant content and by improving the user experience. It's also totally normal to see a majority of your traffic drop off, especially in the B2B world. As a growth marketer, your goal is to strike a balance between bringing in a good quantity of traffic and ensuring its quality.