How Authentic Growth, Not Traffic, Drives Your Business

This is part two in our four part series on creating a B2C2B content strategy for your business. If you missed part one, Why Experimentation is Necessary in Marketing, start there and join us back here for part two, where you’ll learn how to seek excellence through authentic growth.

Defining The Metric That Truly Matters

Do you have great web traffic numbers? If the answer is yes, then that’s a fantastic place to start. But dig deeper — are those meaningful visits and engagements or are your numbers inflated with traffic that does nothing to further your brand, messaging, or conversion?

For years, marketing teams looked at pure website and/or landing page traffic numbers to judge the effectiveness of a campaign. But that thinking has shifted, so much so that the emphasis is much more on quality rather than sheer quantity. Not all traffic is good, at least not in the growth sense; instead, the focus should be on authentic growth. That’s the case stated in Anum Hussain’s Four Principles for B2C2B Content Strategy. Hussain is a Senior Growth Marketer at HubSpot, and this article states her case for authentic growth:

“For far too long, list building has purely been about that one *shiny* number of list size. From where we stand, list engagement out powers list size. In fact, we even routinely churn our list of inactive subscribers to focus on engaging loyal subscribers who play a part in our long-term success and growth.

From where we stand, looking purely at “views” can fog our vision while ensuring active engagement allows us to assess our content’s true effectiveness…It’s far too easy to get caught up in vanity metrics – push you or your team to pursue meaningful metrics for authentic growth.”

What is Meaningless Website Traffic

Meaningless traffic as defined by Brian Balfour is traffic that offers inflated numbers but lack conversions. Authentic growth focuses on the areas that truly convert. To find your authentic growth, dive deeper into long-term metrics and see what drives and sustains active engagement.

But first, you must define your idea of active engagement. Thus, the most important question is this: what builds brand loyalty for you?

This could mean many different things depending on what your business does. For a B2B company, it could mean having people read blog posts and download ebooks — things that establish you as a subject matter expert. For a B2C company, it could mean converting on social media promotions that deliver coupons. For a brick-and-mortar company, it could mean contests based on leaving social proof feedback.

Every business is different. You’ll need to experiment to see which avenues connect with your audiences best. Once you get those numbers, you’ll need to filter out the numbers that are just noise and define the ones that tangibly correlate to revenue. This process takes time to gain data over appropriate sample sizes, along with effort to identify the most important factors for authentic growth.

What Is Your Authentic Growth Metric?

If you have questions regarding HOW you define authentic growth for your business — either from a macro view or as specific as sorting out data — get in touch with me and the Forward Push team. We’re happy to help point you in the right direction or even provide more in-depth services if you need some hired help in that area.

Continue to part three: Toyota’s 5 Why Approach to Problem Solving