Growth is an integral element of business success. Stagnation on any level doesn’t just mean standing still. It means losing ground to your competitors. There can be no resting on laurels in competitive markets. Growth must be an ongoing goal that requires constant attention.

If you’re looking for ways to sustain growth for your business, you’ll want to explore some new marketing strategies. Here are five that, when done well, can propel your company’s success.

Work Down the Growth Funnel

Too often, companies focus their marketing efforts on the top of the growth funnel: creating awareness and acquiring new customers. Some will continue to go lower and take measures designed to retain them. But that’s still not pushing down far enough to grab the best growth potential.

If growing your business is your goal, try by investing in growth marketing. Growth marketing involves testing different methods, channels, and messaging to effectively engage with your customers. Instead of just going with your gut, you’ll have data that shows what does and doesn’t work to help guide you throughout the growth funnel.

Tell Great Stories

Everyone loves a great story. More importantly, everyone remembers a great story, and that’s not by accident. A person’s ability to retain information from the arc of a tale comes down to neuroscience.

You can throw statistics, facts, and great deals at customers all day long. But what they recall, and what prompts them to buy from you, are stories that connect them with your brand. To do that, you need to know what makes your customers tick, what they’re interested in, and what they’re passionate about.

Today’s digital and social media platforms make distribution easy and eye-catching. Well-told narratives cleverly wrap a sales pitch in creativity that engages as many senses as possible. It’s your brand story that will draw customers away from your competitors, especially if you make those customers the heroes of your tale.

Be Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Not many people get all their information from a single source these days, like network television or a daily newspaper. Consumers are everywhere — on websites, social media platforms, and streaming services and in brick-and-mortar stores. If you aren’t using an omnichannel strategy to go where they are, you’re missing out.

This strategy does require a change of perspective. Instead of pushing content to just your company’s social media accounts and website, aim to surround the customer. Once you put them at the center, make your content consistent, relevant, and accessible across all channels.

Amplify your content by making sure it’s optimized for each and every channel, even when it’s delivering the same message. No matter where your customers turn or what device they use, you’ll be there, conveying information they’re interested in. Indeed, you can be everywhere, all the time.

Leverage Reviews

Not leveraging great customer reviews is like putting a bucket over a plant in the garden. Without water, air, and sunlight, it’s not going to grow. That’s a problem when a whopping 93% of consumers have used an online review to make a purchasing decision.

Of course, honesty and transparency dictate that you take the bad reviews with the good. Respond to negative reviews with corrective actions and share your responses with everyone. That evidence of great customer service, combined with favorable reviews, builds trust in your brand. And that’s what will help you retain current customers and attract new ones.

Today’s customers are savvy. They do their homework before buying, taking a deep dive into reviews and related content to get it done. By leveraging reviews strategically, you can pass the test with flying colors, no matter what grades your reviewers give your brand.

Gather Your Data While You May

These days, every company — from the smallest to the most mammoth — can generate phenomenal amounts of data. That’s the beauty of digital. But data is nothing if you aren’t gathering it and analyzing it in meaningful ways.

Elevating the importance of data may require a change in your corporate culture, from the very top down to the rank and file. Everyone should have easy access to it, and the culture should encourage them to use it routinely. Findings should be the stuff of meetings from marketing to shipping to customer service.

In the marketing space, keyword rankings, website traffic, bounce rates, and engagement time are four critical performance indicators to monitor. Platforms like Google Analytics, Semrush, and HubSpot can help you decode all this data, turning it into intel to drive your decision-making. You’re generating data constantly, so use it to your competitive advantage.

Get Growing

Technology is continually transforming the marketing landscape. There’s not just more of it available, but it’s also getting increasingly easy for anyone to use. That means technology-forward marketing strategies are no longer the purview of only large corporations.

How brands define success may vary, but one part of that definition is a constant. A company needs to always be on a growth trajectory. These five strategies will put you well on your way down that path. Enjoy the journey.