4 Innovative Marketing Strategies to to Drive Platform Growth

4 Innovative Marketing Strategies to Drive Platform Growth

By Rachel Lambert

KEY TAKEAWAY

To stay successful, platform marketers must remain innovative and proactive to anticipate and adopt trends early on, enabling business growth and user adoption in such a crowded space. Smaller platforms can make a name for themselves in the increasingly competitive market and future-proof their business by implementing strategies and adopting technologies that improve efficiency and scalability.

Nearly every modern business is leveraging some kind of platform to enable successful business operations. As the digital era of marketing and business has evolved, platforms have taken off in popularity and become an integral part of every organization. While new platforms emerge every day to enable business success, seven well-known platforms — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent — represent the market share, collectively owning $6.3 trillion in market value in 2020. But what does this mean for new, emerging platforms, and how can they set themselves up for long-term success?

To stay successful, platform brand marketing teams must remain innovative and proactive, anticipating and adopting trends early to enable sustainable business growth and steady user adoption in such a crowded market. Smaller platforms can future-proof their business by implementing strategies, adopting technologies, and enabling integrations that allow for improved efficiency and scalability, and give them an edge over the competition. Here are four innovative marketing strategies to drive platform growth in the modern era.

Appeal to Pain Points With Personalization

Did you know? Seventy-three percent of consumers say they now only engage with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. Appealing to consumer pain points with a personal touch is key to serving a message that resonates. To do this, platform marketers must think back to the basics:

Why was your platform created in the first place?
What pain points does your platform help solve?
How can your platform ease the day-to-day stresses of the user?

Answering these questions will put marketers on the right path to developing powerful messaging that resonates and inspires action. Narrowing these answers into a simple statement to describe your competitive advantage is also key — because, ultimately, your platform will earn business when it is the BEST option over any competition.

“Successful platforms solve big problems. In doing so, they completely change the definition of a category or market. This means creating a real step-change: whether that’s 10x better experience, lowering costs by 10x, or increasing speed by 10x.” – Accenture

Leverage Social Media to Demonstrate Value

Recommendations and word of mouth have always been meaningful when it comes to deciding on a new platform or service. In today’s digital-centric world, why not take advantage of trending and successful social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or even LinkedIn, to share messaging about your innovative platform, its value, and what pain points it can help users solve? Influencers and global consumers take to social media to share reviews and recommend brands, platforms, and services they use and love, increasing brand popularity and credibility. The effect of social media messaging is strong, and there’s no better way to spread the word than via powerful visuals, relatable customer reviews, and tutorials for potential customers to see just how life-changing your platform can be.

Overall, customer engagement is the foundation of any lasting marketing strategy. Building a strong connection will often compel users to gravitate towards your brand and become loyal advocates for your platform. In this content-heavy digital world, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. Keeping the focus on building trust with users through valuable and personal social media interactions will prove to be successful when attempting to grow your platform’s user base.

Streamline Data Collection to Optimize Growth Trajectory

Future-proof your business for long-term growth and success by streamlining your data collection strategies of today in order to meet consumer demands of tomorrow. Establishing a real-time data and insights strategy is a must for maintaining agility. If you’re not tracking your metrics or zero-party and first-party data in real time across a wide variety of channels, you’re bound to lose ground to the competition — especially when it comes to acquiring and retaining customers.

“Growth teams are widely used to identify and drive key metrics that ensure the flywheel of a platform starts to move and continues to spin faster. Through growth teams, companies can be laser-focused on a specific metric needed for success – ensuring platform growth is sustained.” – Accenture

In addition, many teams are now leveraging customer data platforms (CDPs) to streamline their data collection and management across all data sources. New data aggregation solutions are becoming an integral part of enabling deeper personalization and customization to drive omnichannel customer engagement. By streamlining your data collection, you can analyze your marketing campaigns holistically and better capitalize on opportunities to grow your platform user base.

Increase Productivity With Automation

Marketing automation is quickly becoming an industry standard by reducing error rates, improving productivity, and increasing revenue across organizations of all sizes. Automation is not a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning it can be leveraged in a bevy of ways to suit your business needs, including future-proofed scalability. This is especially relevant to up-and-coming platform brands set on a fast-paced growth trajectory. Embracing automation implementation across your business processes will set you up for long-term success and accelerate the growth of your platform by improving overall operational efficiency.

“Digitization and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, and infrastructure services have not yet attained their full disruptive potential. More and more individual user and transactional data will become connected with different platform services and functions, with the potential to generate positive and negative outcomes.” – MIT Sloan Review

The underpinnings of automation that make its adoption a modern necessity are its ability to enable a reduction of manual time spend on repetitive tasks while increasing success rates. Automating campaign processes for operational efficiency and utilizing dynamic creative optimization (DCO) are two specific ways to ease the manual lift marketers must make when personalizing content and messaging.

Powered by a combination of dynamic, data-driven content and automated machine learning, DCO is quickly becoming one of the most effective strategies for delivering personalized campaigns that today’s online audiences demand. Rather than resist the introduction of automation into the creative process, today’s most successful marketing teams use it to increase their creative capacity, scale their content production, boost campaign ROI, and improve overall operational efficiency.

Conclusion

To position platforms for growth in today’s market, marketers need to remain agile and get ahead of the curve. You can achieve this through a multi-pronged strategy that includes:

Streamlining data collection
Implementing automation into your workflow
Adopting a social media marketing strategy
Personalizing omnichannel touchpoints

Anticipating the needs of your ideal platform-adopter is key to staying innovative and driving marketing messaging around the value of your platform. It will without a doubt help inspire adoption in the market today and well into the future.

Need help with your platform marketing strategy?

Working with a flexible, full-service marketing partner like Theorem is one of the best ways for businesses to future-proof their operations and ensure long-lasting success. If you need help
creating a marketing strategy that delivers real results, contact us today.

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