Every year, the role of marketing technologies and solutions increases for businesses of all sizes. If you don’t follow trends and stats and don’t use data for reaching your marketing goals, someone else is doing it and attracting your potential customers. That’s why companies adopt growth marketing, a modern, technology-driven approach to promoting their products and acquiring customers.
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What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is a set of techniques for scaling customer acquisition through repeatable, scalable, and cost-effective online channels. It’s the process of acquiring new users, retaining existing ones, and increasing their lifetime value. Growth marketing’s main goal is to help companies increase their revenue and customer base, while also reducing costs.
It’s not just about getting more customers; it’s about getting the right customers. It’s about creating products that people love and then figuring out how to tell the world about them in a way that makes sense for your business.
Growth marketers are always analyzing data and feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. After all, the digital product marketing world is one of seemingly constant change. Strategies that work one day may be less effective the next. They are replaced with new tools, new applications, and new users. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all this flux, but there’s another way to think about it.
Growth marketers are attempting to understand what benefits users and keep them coming back. Growth marketing transforms the traditional “make a product, then market it” into “make, then market, then analyze, then remake, then remarket.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the growth marketing strategy keep reading.
Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking
In the most simple term possible: growth hacking is fast, and growth marketing is slow.
Growth hacking aims to get quick results and rapid growth, while growth marketing is all about focusing on deeper research, utilized over a longer time period in order to aim for sustainable growth.
So, if you’re starting up a, well, start-up, it makes sense for you to add a little bit of growth-hacking spice to your campaigns. But if you’re an established business, but are looking to make your foundations more solid, it’s worth looking into growth marketing.
The strategy is different too. Growth hacking is all about using data-driven experimentation to grow a company, by any means necessary. Growth marketing uses a systematic process with multiple strategies to build brands, acquire customers, and encourage them to tell others about a product.
Growth hacking tends to be about growth by any means necessary, which means they may lose focus on the brand. However, growth marketing is about building the brand, and it’s hard to put data on tactics related to brand marketing.
Growth hacking tends to be done very quickly, so the long-term aspects of the growth plans often lose focus. As growth marketing is more focused on the far-away and long-term, every action becomes targeted toward a primary goal.
Sometimes growth hacks, though ingenious, can not work as well the second or third time when other companies start to catch on. Growth marketing, on the other hand, breeds and requires consistency.
But growth hacking can also benefit your business in the following ways, as it allows for:
- Flexibility
- The discovery of new business models, or product ideas
- The generation of qualified leads
- Building brand reputation and identity
- Cost-effectiveness and improved ROI
- Scalable marketing strategies
- The discovery of data-driven strategies
As you can see, many parts of growth hacking rely on technology and utilizing it to its fullest extent, whereas growth marketing also looks into people, competition, and business as it exists in the real world.
As growth hackers are constantly strategizing and experimenting, they need instant access to data in the moment, whether it’s through A/B testing or lead gen info, in order to test and conduct theories.
Growth marketers, on the other hand, use data for the long game. Data is used to making updates to long-term strategy and maintain a high-level view of the ultimate desired outcome, which is brand growth and revenue growth.
Key Aspects of Growth Marketing
Here are the 4 main benefits that businesses experience by following a growth marketing strategy.
1. Data-driven and Results-focused Approach
Without the right tools and integrations, your growth marketing efforts are nothing but guesses – a waste of time and budget.
Instead, what growth marketing really is, is to define your KPIs based on channels, goals and technical setups. Data-driven decisions can take place only when the needed data is being defined and captured properly and accurately.
For example, if in the course of Growth Marketing you plan on optimizing your email marketing campaigns, you should track metrics like
- open rate,
- reply rate,
- click-through rate,
- reading time,
- unsubscribes.
For blog performance optimization, you should track metrics like
- daily and monthly traffic,
- impressions,
- click-through rate,
- conversion rate,
- new backlinks,
- number of keywords you are ranking for,
- ranking positions, etc.
For social media performance optimization, you should pay attention to metrics like
- post reach,
- profile visits,
- engagement (like, comment, share, save),
- follower growth,
- mentions,
- story views, etc.
While some metrics correlate with revenue and customer acquisition (they should become your KPIs!), some others are vanity metrics, and you should pay less attention to them.
2. Customer-centric Approach
Rather than ensuring one-time sales at all costs, growth marketing takes a broader approach to revenue generation. Building relations with customers, focusing on their experience and valuing their feedback are the processes boosting growth marketing activities and helping to build trust and create customers for life.
Customer centricity is the idea that companies should be focused on for growth marketing purposes in order to understand and meet customer needs. Here are a few ways to keep in touch with your customers in the pre- and post-sale period:
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- measuring customer sentiment through NPS survey methodology, customer ratings, feedback requests,
- making it easy for customers to contact you and providing quick responses,
- initiating phone calls to inform about new arrivals and discounts (for eCommerce companies specifically),
- getting customers involved in the product development process (for software companies specifically),
- giving value and sharing knowledge, without asking anything in return, etc.
3. Higher ROI on Marketing Spend
growth marketing is flexible and doesn’t put money into campaigns that don’t perform well. As a result, you should stop investing your budget on low-performing channels and tactics and focus on high-ROI opportunities. However, you also shouldn’t neglect the importance of finding new growth tactics and marketing channels. Here are a few ways to make sure your ROI will continue increasing:
- define specific goals for your business and track whether you achieve them in a given period,
- automate digital marketing tasks with tools and reduce staff costs
- neglect vanity metrics that don’t correlate with revenue (# of followers, post shares, etc),
- outsource your marketing to an agency and set clear KPIs and expectations.
4. Fast Results
While growth marketing is a sustainable and long-term approach for businesses, it also allows business owners to celebrate success earlier than you might have thought.
Here are a few ways to start seeing fast results from your business growth marketing efforts:
- consider running search engine, social media, or display ads depending on which channels and websites your audience is more active,
- optimize your homepage, services pages, and landing pages for high conversions,
- partner up with established companies and influencers to build trust,
- partner up with industry experts and host virtual events.
3 Core components of a Growth Marketing Strategy
Marketers use a set of components to implement their growth marketing strategy. Let’s discuss them below:
1. Cross-channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing is a way to promote your products or services using more than one type of media such as search engines, social media, and email. It’s important to use different types of channels when promoting your business because each channel has different strengths and weaknesses. If you only use one channel to promote your business, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential customers.
Not all potential customers use the same communication and information channels. Some people will prefer watching videos, others will prefer reading long-form content, while others will be interested in quick tips and short messages.
As a part of your growth marketing strategy, diversifying your channels and content types helps meet your customer needs and attract different groups depending on their content consumption habits.
2. A/B testing
A/B testing is a scientific method of improving conversion rates by allowing growth marketers to determine which elements of the page are most effective at driving conversions. It allows growth marketers to test multiple versions of the same page and determine which version performs better. It can be used to test any aspect of a webpage and website, including the copy and images, but it is most commonly used for elements such as headlines and calls-to-action.
Here are a few tips to run the A/B test effectively in the framework of your Growth Marketing Strategy:
- test the effectiveness of only 1 element at a time. Otherwise, you won’t be able to understand which element contributes to conversion success.
- run A/B tests for the same period of time. If you test one version for 1 month and the second version for 3 months, the second version will probably perform better.
- track how page visitors interact with your content by using heatmaps. You will understand where visitors are clicking, how they are scrolling, how the mouse is moving.
A/B testing – also known as ‘split testing’ – is a process of exposing two different versions of something to two sets of people at the same time and comparing which version performs better.
There are two key steps to running an A/B test.
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- You randomly allocate your users into two groups, A and B. Group A will see a control, and Group B will see a variant
- You measure how users respond to the new variant versus the control. You use statistics to understand that difference.
3. Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle is a process that describes the growth marketing solutions of acquiring, retaining, and growing repeat businesses from your customers.
As we mentioned above, interactions with customers aren’t limited to the purchase process alone. They include three stages and allow businesses to build closer relations with potential and existing customers. Growth marketing focuses on these three stages:
- activation
- nurturing
- reactivation
The activation stage of the growth marketing Strategy is when companies try to draw the potential customer’s attention and get them interested in their offer. In this period, businesses interact with customers through blog posts, ads, influencer content, etc.
During the nurturing stage, the relations grow through campaigns such as product updates, newsletters, promotions, etc.
And finally, the goal of the re-activation stage is to keep customers coming back and getting high-quality referrals from them.
All the tips and strategies described above are required to provide marketers with an in-depth understanding of what Growth is Marketing, how it is different from Growth Hacking and what are the best ways to deploy growth marketing Strategies for the success of your business, project and product.
Grow Your Business with Andava
Andava is a one-stop digital marketing agency that helps businesses plan, implement and incorporate Growth Marketing Strategies into constant user acquisition, conversion, and retention loops.
Get a 30-minute meeting to discuss your current approach to customer acquisition and retention. Then, we will discuss what goals you want to achieve in the short and long term and understand the role of growth marketing in that process.
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