What is Growth Marketing and Why Your Business Needs It

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.

In this article, we will explore growth marketing in more detail, including its key components and benefits, as well as some noteworthy examples of growth marketing in action.

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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.”

Simply put, growth marketers are known as T-shaped marketers who have a broad understanding of different areas in marketing like copywriting, UI/UX design, and social media, along with specialized expertise in 1 or 2 acquisition channels such as paid advertising, organic SEO, etc.

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 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. Whereas 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.  It is aimed 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.

Key Benefits 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 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.

Social media performance optimization requires paying 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 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:

• measuring customer sentiment through NPS survey methodology, customer ratings, feedback requests,
• making it easy for customers to contact you and provide 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

• Define specific goals for your business and track whether you achieve them in a given period. This allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of their spending. If the desired results aren’t materializing halfway through the allocated time, there’s an opportunity to review and adjust, ensuring that marketing budgets aren’t wasted on underperforming tactics. In essence, defining and tracking specific goals is crucial in achieving a higher ROI, making every marketing dollar count.
• Automate digital marketing tasks with tools and reduce staff costs. This efficient approach not only ensures consistent marketing performance but also allows for resources to be directed toward more strategic efforts.
• Neglect vanity metrics that don’t correlate with revenue (# of followers, post shares, etc). While vanity metrics such as the number of followers or post shares might be impressive at a glance, they don’t necessarily translate to increased sales or profitability. Prioritizing these can divert attention and resources from more crucial performance indicators. Instead, businesses should concentrate on conversion rate optimization, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value, which provide a clearer picture of marketing effectiveness and its tangible impact on the bottom line.
• Outsource your marketing to an agency, and set clear KPIs and expectations. Agencies bring specialized expertise and a diverse skill set, often resulting in innovative strategies and efficient execution. This collaborative approach, implemented with the agency’s experience, often leads to a more focused, effective, and ultimately profitable marketing effort.

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 engines, 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. 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, and 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.

• 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.

Examples of Growth Marketing in Action

Now that you have an in-depth understanding of growth hacking, let’s put the theory to the test.

Below, we will demonstrate the most common and effective examples of growth marketing in action.

Customer Onboarding

The first impression of your company is driven by the way you onboard your customers. An ideal onboarding should start with a brief “Welcome!” message, followed by a question about the types of products they prefer. Another message might inquire whether they prefer receiving notifications via email or mobile. Subsequent messages can be tailored based on their preferences, ensuring that future offers are optimized to enhance their engagement.

For example, Pinterest, Payoneer, and other top companies use well-thought-out onboarding programs that turn visitors into loyal customers.

Loyalty Programs

In a competitive market, where customers have many choices, brands need to constantly prove themselves trustworthy. Showing customers that they are important and not just a number can improve how they feel about the brand. Loyalty programs, like membership schemes with rewards, can motivate customers to keep coming back. Special offers, such as early access or tiered rewards, can also strengthen customer loyalty.

Customers are big fans of loyalty programs. According to statistics, 84% of consumers acknowledge that they favor sticking with a brand that provides a loyalty program.

Companies like Sephora (Beauty Insider Program), Lego (Lego Insider), and (Amazon Prime)have managed to craft the most successful loyalty programs that brought truly BIG results taking their businesses to the top.

Overall, by looking at past customer actions and adjusting loyalty programs accordingly, you can build strong relationships with your customers.

Referral Programs

“A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the holy grail of advertising”

Mark Zuckerberg

A strong referral can serve as compelling social proof for attracting new users. To test referral offers, consider segmenting your audience and providing one incentive to one group and a different one to another group. The aim is to find the optimal balance where you’re maximizing referral conversions per dollar spent. Look to successful SaaS brands like Dropbox for examples of top-tier referral programs. Dropbox, for instance, introduced a two-sided referral program, where both the current and referred users received 500MB of free storage upon the referred user’s signup.

Grow Your Business with Andava Digital

It can be difficult to succeed in business without implementing a growth strategy tailored to your marketing channels.

Andava Digital is there to help you prioritize your customers and make them the focal point of your business.

We are 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.

Contact us now, and let’s grow your business together!