Growth marketing is an iterative, data-driven approach to increasing customer acquisition, retention, and revenue. A defining characteristic of growth marketing is the focus on experimentation: growth marketers will launch a series of tests throughout the funnel (e.g. personalizing landing pages, A/B testing email subject lines) to better understand user interest, intent, and product-market fit – using these insights to continuously adjust campaigns.
The ultimate goal of growth marketing is to grow the business, by maximizing the value of campaigns, or better engaging customers to ensure long-lasting (and more profitable) relationships.
In contrast, growth marketers use growth hacking techniques to experiment with different channels and strategies frequently, optimizing their tests incrementally to determine how to best optimize their marketing spend. Growth hackers were keen to use a range of innovative experiments and constant analysis to increase their user base at lower costs as quickly as possible. The term itself was coined by entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010, when he was seeking an employee for a new marketing role. He wasn’t looking for a traditional marketer who would be concerned with factors such as cost-per-acquisition; his main focus was, how can I grow my user base as quickly as possible? This question was a central concern for SaaS startups, which needed to outpace their competitors or die.
What Makes Growth Marketing Different?
Traditional marketing involves strategies that burn through a set budget and hope for the best. Think Google Adwords and display campaigns with some basic ad copy. These strategies can be a great way to build traffic to the top of your sales funnel, aiding to increase a company’s awareness and user acquisition, but that’s where the value dwindles.
Growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel. When done right, it adds value all the way through the marketing funnel by attracting users, engaging them, retaining them, and finally turning them into champions for your brand.
Growth focuses on the full funnel — while marketing usually focuses on top of funnel.
Core components of a growth marketing strategy
A growth marketing strategy can be based around metrics including customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, customer retention rates, and customer lifetime value. Here are some of the leading tactics that today’s growth marketers use to attract, convert, create, and retain engaged customers.
A/B testing
A/B testing is one of the core practices of a growth marketing strategy. A/B testing and multivariate can be used in a number of formats, including email marketing, landing pages, social media ads, and others. This involves deploying either an “A” and a “B” test, or a series of multiple tests, to understand which variation of your content (with customizations around graphics, copy, design, and other features) does a better job of engaging your audience and increasing your conversion rate.
Cross-channel marketing
Cross-channel marketing focuses on building a strategic channel plan to reach your customers, and can include email marketing, SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, and other channels, based on your audience’s preferences. When incorporating a cross-channel marketing plan into your growth marketing strategy, you need to focus on the individual user to understand their communication preferences, and then build your campaigns accordingly.
Customer lifecycle
A customer lifecycle is the journey your customers embark on as they learn about, interact with, buy or convert, and re-engage with your company. For simplification, there are three critical lifecycle stages that growth marketers focus on: activation, nurture, and reactivation. Each stage plays a specific role as a contributing factor to customer experience and is often marked by specific campaigns.
Conclusion
Growth marketing takes the traditional marketing model and adds layers such as A/B testing, value-additive blog posts, data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, creative ad copy, and technical analysis of every aspect of a user’s experience. The insights gained from these strategies are quickly implemented in order to achieve robust and sustainable growth.
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