What is Growth Marketing?

You may have heard of the byword “growth hacking”, but growth marketing has got nothing to do with hacking. It is a goal-oriented process of conducting experiments, planning, designing new strategies, and improving the results of the targeted metric.

chart, graph, arrows, growth marketing dummy image

As rightly described by Bruno Estrella - Head of user acquisition at Webflow, "Growth marketing is the combination of marketing and science. It's a scientific approach to validating marketing assumptions that have a direct impact on the company's bottom line. "

Growth Marketing Definition

Growth Marketing is all about:

  1. Analyzing areas to monitor and improvise on
  2. Identifying processes and developing necessary experiments to augment them
  3. Leading experiments to monitor the assumed improvements 
  4. Scrutinizing the end-results and conducting additional solutions or experimentation as required.
  5. Using a scientific method to design and carry out experiments.
  6. Focusing on data-driven marketing plans rather than the creative aspects of an organization.
  7. Preparing for failure with a plan B lined up. Ready resolutions for both, where expected and unanticipated failures are addressed.

Execution of Growth Marketing 

Growth marketing is applied through popularly known pirate metrics, more commonly contained within the AAARRR acronym.

AAARRR definition of Growth Marketing

Awareness

Awareness is about educating customers about brand-building and providing appropriate resolutions. This technique incorporates schemes revolving around SEO-optimized content to understand which kind of content gets the most engagement and social media tactics to test the frequency of posts that are most effective in driving blog traffic and TOFU offers.

Acquisition

The acquisition is the procedure of acquiring new prospects and generating leads. This can be done by conducting several experiments to enhance the form submissions through a dedicated page, use chatbots, monitor email collection forms, provide a free sign-up or another strategy through gated content.

Activation

Activation is a technique of Inbound Growth Marketing that promotes people to effectively and quickly use the purchased service or product. This involves a successful and optimized strategy, and the onboarding process is a part of this. 

For example, growth marketing is about experimenting with how to find friends and add them to a specific social media platform. Once done, activation leads to the likeliness of these added members to respond and engage positively towards the page.

Revenue

Revenue within Growth Marketing means addressing money-making metrics, which can involve pricing strategies and how they can be displayed attractively. It involves strategies that monitor the purchasing of a product, examining upselling techniques, regulating the upgrading of a service or a product, promoting the signing of a contract, or arranging for sending messages to consumers when he is close to the plan’s limit.

Retention

Retention means retaining the customers and keeping them satisfied. This involves providing value-added services to consumers and offering personalized support.

Referral

Growth marketers create referral programs to incentivize customers who are satisfied with your services or products, and they further promote it to other consumers. A productive referral program can involve lucrative promotional methods or incentives to create better results.

Features of Successful Growth Marketing Planning

The best parameters of an effective growth marketing strategy involve:

1. Data Driven

Growth marketing depends on data rather than on gut-feeling. It delves into strategies and plans that work effectively to enhance the outcome and to imbibe better tools that help in such an analysis.

2. Creative Approach

Growth Marketing is all about innovation. You need to think out of the box, which can eventually turn out to be a fantastic plan to drive the growth and development of the organization.

3. Product-Focused

It is rightly said that you must focus on the benefits of a valuable product, highlight them effectively and make it presentable in front of your customers to entice them with the uses and advantages.

4. Hacker Mentality

A growth marketer should have a varied and professional skillset, a person who can think from all perspectives and is a jack of all trades. You should be competent, realistic, innovative, and productive in the very early stages of adding value to your service or product.

5. No Fear of Failure

Growth Marketing is not about failures; it is about converting failures into opportunities. It is the quickest way to access valuable information, and it is always open to taking risks. You eventually hit on fruitful factors that will help you succeed and continue the process of growth, customer satisfaction, and profitability. 

6. Involves a great technique to highlight services and products

You must have the potential to amalgamate qualitative and quantitative information and form a perfect picture to truly connect with your consumers. The way your products and services are highlighted and displayed matters the most.

7. Multi-tasking

Growth marketing is a contradiction of sorts. It imbibes contradicting factors like relying on data but considering human intuition as well, considering results but analyzing ambiguity as well. It is about the bigger picture and how each aspect of running an organization is effectively considered.

The Ultimate Goal of Growth Marketing

Growth marketing means enticing customers, keeping them involved and engaged, providing the best services, retaining the consumers, and finally converting them into referrals or champions to further promote your services and products. Let us look at the end-objectives of growth marketing:

1. Growth marketing focuses on the full funnel 

It is data-driven, which involves shaping, planning, and designing a strategy, trying innovative experiments, and monitoring failures to zero in on what effectively works for the organization.

2. Retaining Customers

One of the most valuable aspects is to retain customers by reducing churn. Churn refers to a specific volume of consumers who sign up for a service by don’t use it. This is an archenemy of the exponential growth of a company. To start making serious revenue, you would need to control the churn, work on it proficiently and convert into a bunch of satisfied customer base by applying growth marketing.

3. Building a Brand

Growth marketing not only involves building a customer base and making profits, but it also constructs a great company culture. You can build a brand by following smart PR campaigns, initiating attractive referral programs, promoting influencer marketing strategies and influencing positive word of mouth.

4. Getting Leads & Improving the Conversion Rate

It means nothing to have more people visiting your company or website and leaving you mid-way. Eventually, it Is all about converting prospects and valuable visitors into long-term customers.

5. Getting Traffic to Your Site

One of the major goals of growth marketing is to boost and highlight traffic which could be of various kinds:

  • Organic Traffic refers to people who arrive at their destination after a thorough search
  • Paid Traffic- visitors who reach your site through paid advertising channels.
  • Referral Traffic – This doesn’t come from a single search engine, instead, it is accumulated from various other sites that link them to your content. 

Conclusion

Growth marketing can involve a range of processes, from changing the background color of your site to redoing the entire onboarding process. It requires a solid foundation to grow. 

To upscale your company, investing in growth marketing is a lucrative option that can enhance your Return on Investment, improve your pirate metrics, tweak and profitably revive your marketing efforts and eventually lead to a profitable and growth-oriented branding of your organization.