What is Growth Marketing? Strategies to grow your business.

Growth marketing: It seems self-explanatory. In fact, it seems redundant. Isn’t the very purpose of marketing to grow your business? You look for improvement or growth in metrics, such as the number of website visitors, leads, and customers.

Believe it or not, the term “growth marketing” actually refers to a very specific kind of marketing. It refers to businesses growing exponentially as they discover the power of tailor-fitting a marketing strategy for their company using both sides of the brain: creativity and data-driven practices.

So what exactly is growth marketing? How can small businesses use it to their advantage? Is it right for your company? Read on to find out.

In its simplest form, growth marketing, also known as growth hacking, is marketing that is hyper-focused on, well, growth. Its very existence is a response to rapidly growing technology, a shrinking world, and a culture that seems to change on a daily basis. Growth marketer Sean Ellis says a “growth hacker’s true compass is north.” Bigger, better, and more are what it’s all about.

Growth marketing is anything but old school. It differs from traditional marketing in that it uses modern tools and metrics to measure the performance of specific strategies and tactics as completely as possible. Different from old-school marketing, growth marketing is inherently tailor-fit to your company, and constantly evolves to fit changing customer attitudes, respond to industry events, and handle your competition. It’s completely dynamic.

In the past, marketers used generally accepted principles to guide their efforts, and worked creatively within those parameters. Growth marketing, however, depends on thinking outside the box. It’s highly experimental. It’s where marketing meets scientific theory.

Growth marketers don’t build a marketing strategy to implement, because their strategy is to adapt to whatever seems to be working best. In order to know what’s working, they have to just get out there and get started. You could say it’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks—if you then measured exactly how much each and every noodle stuck. Then, one at a time, you’d slightly alter cooking time, the type of noodle, temperature, angle of the throw, and more to see how each affected noodle stickiness. But you still wouldn’t be done, because then you’d test the best settings of each element together and fine-tune further to eke out just a bit more stickiness. By the time you finish that, someone will have remodelled the kitchen with fresh wallpaper. So you’d start all over.

If it sounds like a never-ending process, it is. But that’s the point. Your business environment is constantly changing, and so are your offerings as a company. And they’re changing faster than ever before. If you decide on a marketing strategy that isn’t dynamic, in the way that the Don Drapers of the world did, you’ll be out of touch before your campaigns ever go live.

Rather than focusing solely on customer acquisition, growth marketing takes a holistic approach to optimise the entire marketing funnel. It considers every stage of the funnel, aiming to improve conversion rates, customer retention and revenue.

So, what do you need to hack growth? More than ever before, marketing depends on technical savvy and the ability to gather, interpret, and act on data. So here’s what you’ll need:

The ability to test everything: That means views, clicks, and visits, as well as time spent on web pages and how much is made over the customer lifecycle. Some things are hard to measure, like exactly how many points of contact a customer needed before making a purchase, but a growth marketer will measure everything he or she can.

Robust data tracking solutions to accompany that testing: A team full of both creatives and analysts. They’ll need to work closely together to brainstorm, roll out, measure, and refine each and every strategy.

The ability to think outside the box. Just because many companies succeed using tried and true formulas doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to eke out a few more leads or improve your ROI by a few more cents.

A willingness to commit to the long haul: Sure, “growth hacking” and “growth marketing” might sound like magical incantations that instantly improve your marketing. But as any programmer (the original hacker) will tell you, hacking is a long process where each small success builds on the next to get big results.

If you can roll with all that, growth marketing could be the greatest thing for small businesses since the internet.

You may be wondering how to develop your growth marketing strategy. Thankfully, there are some industry best practices that you should always try to implement throughout your growth marketing strategy.

These include:

1. Gather information about the potential customers you want to target, and analyse whatever feedback you already have. 
2. Use the information you’ve gathered to develop a few simple A/B tests to test if your strategy may have success. 
3. Create and run sample campaigns through multiple marketing channels. This can include email campaigns, social media posts, blogs, podcasts, and other content 
4. Track engagement data on your test campaigns. 
5. Analyse what works best and add those tactics to a growing database. 
6. Reach out to other teams for new data and feedback before starting again

Throughout your growth marketing campaign, you must have KPIs and metrics that will influence the direction of your efforts. When choosing the metrics for your KPIs, choose the metrics that matter most to the growth of your company. It will act as the true north for you marketers and create a focus for the company.

If you’re struggling to decide, here's a summary of the key metrics to consider:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Measures the average cost to acquire a new customer. 
• Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of visitors or leads that take a desired action. 
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Estimates the total revenue a customer will generate over their lifetime. 
• Retention Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who continue using your product or service. 
• Churn Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service. 
• Revenue Growth: Measures the increase in overall revenue over time. 
• Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the return generated from marketing investments. 
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Measures the average cost to acquire a single customer. 
• Virality and Referral Metrics: Tracks the success of referral and virality initiatives. 
• Engagement Metrics: Measures user engagement with your website, content, or social media.

As your business grows, automation becomes essential for scaling your marketing efforts. It empowers marketers to replicate successful campaigns, streamline processes, and reach a broader audience without overwhelming manual efforts.

As you learn more about growth marketing and what makes your customers tick, work on streamlining your efforts. Learn which metrics make the most difference for your bottom line, and hone in on them. Streamline your testing process by writing down procedures and invest in better tools that make rolling out changes instant and easy.

Growth marketing is the future of marketing. But is it the right move for your business right now? While growth hacking is all about the long-term (a marathon, if you will) it happens in sprints. You’ll do a whole lot of testing, then spend time implementing what you’ve learned across your organisation. And because what you learn today could change next month, in order to take advantage of your investment, you’ll need to be ready to act on your findings right away.

Sometimes, you’ll get growth hacking results that your company simply can’t adapt to quickly enough. If, for example, as part of your A/B testing you end up with a huge influx of leads, but don’t have the sales team to nurture them into customers, you may miss out. And if you end up doubling or tripling your product orders, are you poised to fill them?

Prepare for Growth
Investing in growth marketing may require hiring new staff, guiding company culture in a new direction, and new equipment, software, or other tools. Before you do any of those things, make sure you’re ready to capitalise on your investment with these key steps.

• Line up additional suppliers, manufacturers, and other vendors to handle any overflow work. 
• Streamline your sales and other department hiring processes so you can find great candidates faster. 
• Ensure your board of directors and other executives are “all in” and ready to approve actions based on new discoveries. 
• Choose tools and technology that grow with you so you can avoid retraining, setup, and other unnecessary costs.

Make sure your tools allow you to focus on your relationships with your customers. Use a cloud-based system for service, community management, and marketing. The right platform will help you set up A/B testing for everything from social media posts to email drip campaigns. You can gather data from dozens of metrics, and also compile, display, and interpret it. Make it easier to share and implement your findings across your organisation, no matter how big or small.

Growth marketing is only as powerful as the technology behind it. With the right tools and people, you can find success in this very reactive, exciting marketing niche.

Are you looking to take your business to new heights and unlock its true growth potential? Then it's time to harness the power of growth marketing. Standing out from the competition is more essential than ever so take advantage of growth marketing strategies to give you the competitive edge.

Question: Why is Growth Marketing important?

Answer: By utilising data-driven and imaginative campaigns, growth marketing assists brands in expanding their customer base. This strategy is effective in boosting customer acquisition and sales, enhancing customer retention, improving the overall customer experience, and developing digital advertising campaigns that convert at high rates.

Question: What is growth marketing vs marketing?

Answer: Product marketing aims to craft a compelling value proposition and messaging for a target audience, while growth marketing focuses on expanding the reach and impact of the product or service. Growth marketers employ data-driven tactics to acquire and retain customers, optimise customer experience and develop highly-targeted advertising campaigns. These two roles work together to ensure a product's success and growth.