5 Strategies to Turn Your Marketing into a Growth Engine

Why Marketing Can Feel Like a Cost Centre

Historically, the business world has viewed the marketing department as a necessary evil. A cost centre with high expenses and unclear results. 

In the Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey 2024, it outlined how 47% of chief marketing officers still regard marketing as a cost centre. Here are some common reasons why marketing can feel like a resource drain:

• Difficulty measuring ROI
  Imagine investing thousands into marketing and all you have to show for it are a couple of social media likes and a vague sense of “brand awareness”. Where this can be an indicator of interest from your audience, the real focus must be conversions and the revenue growth tied to your activity. For many businesses, marketing spend has been seen as a black hole in their overall budget, made especially worse when you cannot justify it. 
  
  This mindset is still common in companies within sectors where traditional digital marketing strategies are the norm for example. print advertising, radio and events. However, this vague sense of ROI can be detrimental to business growth. 
• Inconsistency & misalignment with sales
  Ever feel like marketing and sales sometimes are playing different games? Misalignment with sales can often resultin underperforming campaigns and rapidly depleting budgets. When campaigns fail due to poor execution and fail to deliver on their promises, it reinforces the belief that marketing is a cash bonfire, not a vehicle for massive growth.

Marketing as a Growth Driver

With advanced and rigorous analytics, marketing has become a highly measurable and impactful growth engine. Digital marketing, such as paid search and social media advertisements, allows comprehensive reporting. 
When partnered with powerful analytical tools such as SEMrush and Google Analytics, your campaign becomes unstoppable. Ready to improve your revenue and marketing growth strategy? Here’s how.

Top Insight - McKinsey & co. found CEOs who place marketing at the core of their business growth strategy are twice as likely to report greater than 5% annual revenue growth. 

5 Strategies: From Cost Centre to Growth Driver

• Embrace a Data-Driven Marketing Approach
  A data-driven marketing strategy is a true superpower for businesses. Tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, SEMrush and Google Search Console are highly effective, revealing exactly what is working and what is not. 
  
  For example, are your PPC ads actually driving clicks? Is your blog bringing any traffic to your site? With these programmes, these questions can be answered conclusively by tracking KPIs such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV) and return on ad spend (ROAS). 
  
  A 2024 report from Invoca outlined how businesses using data-driven strategies drive five to eight times as much ROI as businesses that don’t. By analysing data such as conversion rates, click rates, etc., the budget can be better allocated for waste reduction and optimal efficiency.
• Get started with data-driven marketing - Set up campaign tracking & A/B testing for optimal campaign reporting. Use SEMrush, Google Analytics and Google Search Console to begin tracking, refining and filtering out poor-performing strategies. Litmus’ 2024 report suggests effective A/B testing can increase ROI by up to 82%.

Focus on High-ROI Channels

To ensure the marketing budget is used optimally, the ROI of a marketing campaign must be maximised as much as possible. There are a number of notable channels that consistently provide excellent return on investment. These channels include:

• Social Media Marketing - Amplify your brand without spending a fortune. Social media marketing, particularly user-generated content, should be your favourite tool, such as customer reviews, unboxing videos or community postings. This content builds brand authenticity and trust like no other.
  
  Typical paid advertising on social media is still highly effective, producing roughly £2.5 per £1 spent (GBP). However, when combined with UGC, it's unstoppable. 
  
  To leverage UGC, focus on encouraging community content creation with giveaways and rewards and engaging with those posts, followed by insight tracking to measure CTR, conversions and ROI.

Example - One Australian marketing agency introduced UGC into their clients’ social media ads. The result? 161% increase in conversions, 300% higher click through rate. All at 50% of the cost.

• Email Marketing: Offering exceptional ROI, reports suggest, on average companies achieve a £30 return on every £1 spent, with 18% of companies achieving an ROI of £55 per £1 spent. Email lets you directly connect with your customers, driving conversions while spending minimally. 
• Paid Search: Unlike organic strategies, paid search gets your website featured at the top of Google in an instant, immediately gaining clicks. To maximise your ROI, a/b test your ad copy and focus on high-intent keywords. Research conducted by UpCity shows that paid search ads often generate £3.5 per £1 spent if executed with precision.
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): By ranking higher on Google, organic search traffic is increased without any ad spend needed. A highly SEO-optimised website can drive traffic and leads for years. 

It requires significant initial investment in time and resources. However, in the long term, SEO provides excellent value. Typically for every £1 spent, SEO produces between a £2 -£7 return on investment. For more information on how you can elevate your SEO, explore our SEO services expertise.

Align with business goals

Exceptional marketing must begin with a clear vision. Overly simple and vague KPIs such as “increase brand awareness” are simply redundant. Setting SMART targets (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound) ensures campaigns drive measurable outcomes and their success can be clearly tracked. 

For example, “increase sales from paid search ads by 10% by 1st December 2025”. This keeps the marketing team focused on a clear, well-defined goal, fostering a concrete growth mindset. According to CoSchedule (2022)’s state of marketing strategy report, marketers who set clear, documented goals were 377% more likely to report success.

Use Marketing Automation

Automation can be an incredibly powerful tool alongside manual processes in marketing. For example, retargeting and customer journey automated emails are highly effective for increasing conversions. Omnisend 2024 found that automated emails account for only 2% of email traffic, yet contribute up to 37% of all email-motivated conversions, indicating their superior efficiency at driving sales for minimal cost.

With the rise of AI programmes such as chat-based models and tools like Zapier, businesses can now create sophisticated automated workflows with minimal effort. This opens the door for endless automation possibilities. For example, AI-powered sequences that engage potential leads based on their activity on your website.

Collaborate Across Teams

Aligning closely with sales can be highly beneficial, particularly encouraging close collaboration and sharing of data. The best way to promote this culture is regular meetings and close contact. Without this approach, marketing can quickly become isolated and/or disillusioned from the realities of their industry. 

Once this coordination is maximised, marketing will be able to conduct campaigns at optimal efficiency to generate leads and prime for conversion. Making marketing central to company growth and sales, while avoiding the perception of a redundant expense.
To transform your marketing into a growth engine, it takes coordination, an abundance of data and alignment across departments. This shift ultimately increases the efficiency of every pound spent in a marketing budget, allowing for reduced waste and maximum profit. 

At Livewire Marketing, we understand the importance of data in marketing. That is why we consider ourselves a data-driven agency that carefully considers facts and data to formulate the next steps in your marketing strategy.