As the world of technology changes, one concept that has become popular is “growth marketing.” But what is growth marketing and does it truly matter for businesses wanting to expand? Let’s dive in and break it down to basics. The simple essence of growth marketing is finding creative and calculated ways to offer services that will result in attracting new clients and raising revenue.
In this blog, we will provide you with the definition of growth marketing alongside its relevance to business, as well as some helpful growth marketing tips and strategies. No complexity and no complex theories—just helpful ideas and strategies that you can immediately implement to improve your business in the online space. So, let’s get to find out the gems of growth marketing for businesses!
What is growth marketing?
Sustained and rapid business development is achieved through the application of innovation, creatively redefining established practices, and data marketing techniques, and this is known as growth marketing. Unlike traditional marketing that limits itself to setting targets that provide slow progress, growth marketing focuses on achieving plentiful, quantifiable results in a short period.
With this method, a number of techniques are used, such as A/B testing, customer journey mapping, and performance analytics, to continuously improve marketing and optimize marketing results.
Growth marketing focuses on customer-centric strategies. This means marketers create marketing strategies that are helpful and motivating based on how customers think and feel by anticipating their desires, behaviors, and habits. Through feedback loops and iterative processes, growth marketers can adapt their strategies in real time to guarantee usefulness and relevance.
Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing mainly focuses on the upper section of the marketing funnel, which includes awareness and acquisition. Strategies in this category are often stuck in yearly plans with no changes on results. Like most marketing teams, the goal here is the same: get new purchases, sign-ups, or leads.
On the other hand and as the name suggests, growth marketing takes a reverse approach by broadening the focus out to the customer experience. Marketing teams seek to capture and retain customers at all stages of the funnel. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing does not focus on a single goal like increased revenue from new customers. Instead, it aims for broader business objectives such as retention and loyalty and business growth.
Growth Marketing Strategies
1. Full-Funnel Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t a strategy for growth alone. It’s cited that 73% of B2B and 70% of B2C marketers create content as a central strategy to engage their audience. The difference between a standard content marketing campaign and one tailored for growth is an all-encompassing approach or holistic approach.
Instead of focusing on how to maximize your brand’s reach, you holistically analyze your customer’s value and experience both before and after they make a purchase. This makes you need to analyze your customer’s journey and create a corresponding level of content for each stage in the sales funnel.
One of the best examples comes from HubSpot. Given the amount of content marketing done by them, it is very likely that you will find a web page through Google for virtually any marketing term. HubSpot creates blogs for all of their customers, ranging from service experts to sales experts, but this is just one of the many content types that they explore.
Customers can learn how to better utilize the HubSpot tools they have purchased through free courses and certifications. Buyers can be convinced through case studies to consider buying HubSpot in the first place. And all of this supports the attention generation through blogs and eBooks.
2. Groundbreaking SEO Techniques
Content marketing and search engine optimizations mostly go together. Even in this era where search engine algorithms are constantly changing because generative AI technologies have been integrated into search engines, it remains fundamental to engage, attract leads, and capture their interest.
SEO stands out as an effective growth technique because it not only allows potential customers to easily search your products and services during the consideration stage, but also helps reach them on multiple occasions if done correctly. With proper SEO, connecting with your audience will be much easier over time.
By improving the rank of your website, you will notice an increase in the loyalty and retention of customers, which will positively improve your authority and trust as a seller. On the contrary, putting resources into SEO for modern marketing will require a shift in strategy from companies.
3. Community Building
Despite being an evolving aspect of the digital world, community building is not a new concept. Social media, along with growing interest in platforms like Reddit, has pushed organizations to put more focus on ways to engage and maintain contact with consumers, improving customer relations.
As the world becomes more advanced in technology with the introduction of AI , building community features has become a unique approach to improving a brand’s perception. The emotional bond that is formed will improve customer retention, reduce buyer churn, and create true advocates for the brand.
4. Referral Programs
To encourage interaction with new segments of the audience, referral programs are one of the most effective strategies available today. With ads and promotions, customers are becoming less responsive. They increasingly rely on their peers for information and opinions.
Interestingly, 92% of customers claim that they trust referrals made by acquaintances. This gives businesses an opportunity to benefit from the lasting impact of word-of-mouth promotion through referral marketing.
An interesting and oft-used instance of referral marketing is the case of Dropbox. The company did not reward its users with cash; instead, users were offered additional storage space when they referred others to the business.
For every friend referred, users got an additional 500MB of free storage, capped at 16GB. This is called the referral program and it drove a 3900% increase in 15 months. Dropbox’s referral program had an even bigger impact by including two-way rewards (for both users) and by adding referral pathways in the onboarding process.
5. Hyper-Personalization
Around 99% of marketers say that advanced personalization creates stronger bonds with customers. As always, the best growth marketing strategy will focus on customer acquisition and customer retention, which makes personalization vital for any executive.
With the numerous available data collection methods, implementing personalization in marketing strategies is now easier than ever. Emerging AI solutions are even able to tailor product suggestions and recommendations to individual customers.
Generative AI helps Netflix, Amazon, and Walmart recommend products to customers by intelligently analyzing previous purchases, browsing history, search terms, and other relevant data. A great example of this is with the music-sharing company, Spotify, which extensively utilizes data customers are willing to share regarding their listening habits.
With the help of machine learning models, Spotify transforms its platform into an endless “discovery” environment by offering tailored recommendations of new tracks based on users’ listening history. To further encourage active streaming, the company conducts “Spotify Wrapped” campaigns regularly to celebrate and showcase users’ listening habits.
Benefits of growth marketing strategy
Here are just some of the many advantages a business can leverage through the growth marketing mindset.
- Improved decision-making: Unlike traditional marketing, which relies on intuition, growth marketing relies on data, enhancing business decision-making by highlighting successful and unsuccessful strategies.
- Enhanced brand perception: With the adoption of this ideology, the brand attempts to improve its reputation by understanding customers’ expectations and experiences during their journey as well as establishing a personal bond with them.
- Elasticity: Unlike other marketing strategies, growth marketing is scalable. This means that they can increase or reduce their marketing activities in relation to their cash flow instead of pouring money into large campaigns blindly.
- Unification: Collaboration across functions is required for growth marketing. In this instance, the marketing team collaborates alongside the product, sales, customer support, and analytics teams.
- Achieve revenue targets: As with every other aspect of a business, growth marketing has the goal to sustain progress over a long period of time. Revenue-driving activities have to be time-bound to specific tactical objectives. Instead of aiming blindly, growth marketing seeks out promising targets and puts in strategic efforts to achieve them.
Let’s begin by delving into the upper reaches of the marketing funnel, thoroughly examining each step and the crucial metrics that accompany it.
Mastering the AARRR Framework
This framework, commonly called the Pirate Funnel, is one of the cornerstones of growth marketing. This model helps you systematically grasp and refine customer interactions. It can assist companies in honing in on the most vital aspects of their growth plan.
The acronym AARRR signifies:
- Acquisition: How Users Find Your Offering
- Activation: The User’s First Major Accomplishment
- Retention: Maintaining the attention of users over an extended period
- Referral: Helping to advertise and recommend the product or service
- Revenue: Earning revenue based on the actions of the users
The foundation components of a growth marketing strategy
Increasing engagement with users and improving customer acquisition engagement strategies such as the rate of new customers, the percentage of sales funnel conversion to customers, customer loyalty span, and the lifetime value of the user. This list does not end with what other growth marketers target when they try to engage customers, as all of these growth marketing tactics are also highly utilized in e-commerce, but could also be helpful to physical stores.
A/B testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, or even better, multivariate testing, belongs to the core practices of a strong growth marketing strategy. A/B testing and multivariate can use formats of social media marketing, email marketing, landing page ads, and so forth. The process involves running either an A/B test, or a series of tests to understand which version of content, through customization of graphics, copy, design, and various other features, does a better job at increasing audience engagement and improving conversion rates.
You can continue to refine marketing efforts based on that variation—building off of each success to improve on every test performance. Also remember that just as one audience segment responded to “B” as the most effective test, perhaps “C” might perform better with another audience: Don’t just send your A/B tests; tailor each one to specific segments for deeper understanding of what content works best for that audience group and continue to test further enhancements.
Cross-channel marketing
Cross-channel marketing integrates multiple channels such as email marketing, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, or any other means relevant to your target audience. While implementing a cross-channel marketing strategy within your growth marketing plan, paying attention to each user personally becomes vital in identifying their personal preferences and then strategizing your campaigns around those.
A/B testing is helpful if you want to learn that a specific user responds to push message offers 60% more than email marketing offers. That allows for future campaigns to be customized to offer to focus on push offers. It is equally important to design a comprehensive marketing strategy that uses multiple channels through which you will reach a user, enabling contextually tailored campaigns that leverage their previous experiences with different platforms.
Customer lifecycle
Customer lifecycle refers to the path uniquely taken by your customers when they discover, interact, purchase, and re-engage with your business. For simplicity’s sake, there are three overarching lifecycle phases that growth marketers focus on: activation, nurture, and reactivation. Each phase has its own function as an influencer of customer experience, and, as the name suggests, is often associated with particular marketing efforts.
This primary activation stage is the first step in the lifecycle where firms aim to trigger and capture consumer interest and attention. Growth marketers pursue customers with welcome, onboarding, trials, and other initial campaigns to gain trust and familiarity.
The nurture stage is where companies begin to develop and engage their consumers to deepen the relationship. This stage usually captures most of the cross-channel marketing customers receive from the brand: deals, sales, recent updates, newsletters, etc.
The last reactivation stage concentrates on re-engagement. This is the stage where companies work on customer engagement to strengthen retention and loyalty through post-purchase, abandonment, loyalty, and win-back campaigns.
There is no singular stage that outweighs another. In their order of importance, customers move through the lifecycle at their own pace, but fortuitously for us, growth marketers have an arsenal of specific need-driven campaigns that are put in place to meet these evolving demands.
Conclusion
In the world we live in today, with rapid-paced competition in business, it is evident that growth marketing strategies are the backbone for sustainable success. With the aid of analytics, experimentation, and a focus on the customer’s needs, there is now a scope for new opportunities throughout the customer life cycle. Growth marketing is not solely centered on acquiring new customers, rather on building and preserving a healthy relationship with them while enhancing their experience to drive customer advocacy.
Flexibility is a crucial aspect of growth marketing. Be it perfecting your SEO or setting up referral systems or even testing new forms of content, the end target is sustainable growth and measurable results. This enables businesses not just to live, but to flourish under constant changes in the market.
When striving to enhance your business, remember that growth marketing is a journey, not a quick fix. There is a need for optimal effort, creativity, and data-driven decision-making. Following these principles allows for a strong growth foundation that meets your goals and vision.
Strategically speaking, growth marketing isn’t limited to a single approach. It’s a mindset and a way of life, encouraging you to think outside the box, letting you push forward the boundaries of innovation at each stage of your business. So, prepare yourself, remain nimble, and let growth marketing take your business to greater heights!
