Advertising plays a key role in growth marketing strategies. It's one of the main ways that most clients reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and ultimately drive user acquisition. So, it is usually pretty important, but there are always instances where a certain market is an exception.

Just remember that advertising is only one piece of the growth marketing puzzle. It works best when combined with other tactics like organic search optimization, social media engagement, and high-quality content.

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all answer to how much you should pay for advertising. It all depends on your industry, the stage of your growth, your marketing goals, and the channels we're using. When we're first getting started, budgets usually begin with a more conservative number and then grow. However, it's also important to ensure that you're investing enough to get meaningful value of our work.

The numbers don't lie! But to understand what's working and what's not, you need to track the right metrics. Depending on what you’ve established as your key performance indicators (KPIs), we may be looking at website traffic, user acquisition, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, or engagement.

Also, our Brand / Strategy Director will be eager to point out that you can’t forget about quantitative and qualitative feedback! Customer surveys and reviews can offer valuable insights into brand perception, customer satisfaction, and user experience. This feedback helps us refine your growth strategy to better meet your target audience's needs.

Targeting is an ongoing process. As we gather data and learn more about your audience, we’ll refine our approach to serve you better. Many clients already know exactly who their ideal customer is, which allows us to use advanced targeting options on the various platforms we use to engage them based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and even their purchasing history.

If you don’t yet know who your target audience is, we can do our best with the tools at hand. However, a better solution is to step back and consider performing initial brand research. 33% of startups actually fail because they haven’t conducted the proper research. By conducting surveys, market research, and competitor analyses, we can identify patterns that will help you refine your brand strategy.

First, it's unusual to address this question in an FAQ section on an agency site, but it's an important topic.

If you're building an in-house marketing team, it's crucial to hire an expert-level leader who can recruit the necessary support to drive departmental success. Without this, you risk having a team that needs extensive nurturing from someone in their area of expertise to improve. If you're not an expert in their field, providing the needed direction for their work to excel won’t be possible.

Key takeaway: Unless you're prepared to invest significantly in top salaries, your investment might not yield the results you imagine. However, a hybrid approach could be a solution. Partnering with an agency that complements your in-house team can enhance the areas where you're currently lacking.

When choosing an agency partner, ensure they're a good cultural fit, capable of supporting your goals, and value your business as much as their other clients. This can be challenging, but the right partnership will provide immediate access to seasoned expertise. You’ll have a dream team fully installed from day one, and access to a company of specialists that already excel in the services you need.

Growth marketing strategies can definitely hit snags. The most common pitfalls are ignoring your audience, focusing on vanity metrics, moving too fast (or slow), underestimating the importance of written content, and having a team that isn’t working together.

Oh, and (obviously) ignoring the data. The data is the defining component here. Growth marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. If you aren’t focused on a data-driven approach, then you’re not going to enjoy the benefits that a growth marketing strategy agency can provide.

Nope! We love collaborating with other agencies and we see this situation as a win-win. We get a new client and meet a potential new partner for more work later on down the line.

Before it was acceptable to work with other agencies in New England, 36 was already forming friendships, vetting partners, and building a network of reliable geniuses that we can rely on to support us in the areas that we don’t hold expertise on in-house. We owe a lot of our success to teamwork and we’re happy to make new friends.