These days, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. So you need to put into action a strategy that’s not only creative and compelling but also a strategy that helps you with customer acquisition.
Well, that’s exactly what growth marketing does. It aims at improving customer experience and attracting more engaged customers. Growth marketing is an approach that’s unique.
It’ll help you to develop a highly tailored message that matches your customers’ needs. This way, you’ll be able to grow through multiple channels.
Unsure about what growth marketing entails? You’re in the right place! In this guide, I’ll tell you all about growth marketing. We’ll cover from growth marketing fundamentals to advanced details.
What are you waiting to try this new type of marketing everybody is talking about?
Let’s jump right in!
Chapter 1
What is growth marketing?
In this chapter, I’ll explain what growth marketing is. Then, I’ll tell you what makes it different from other types of marketing.
Thus, I’ll compare growth marketing with traditional marketing, growth hacking, and digital marketing.
To conclude, I’ll show you why growth marketing is important nowadays.
What is a growth marketing strategy?
A growth marketing strategy consists of several actions and plans that allow your company to expand. It combines product management, design, marketing, leadership, and engineering tactics. It has to be relevant to your product and target market. And it’ll only work if you implement it into the whole organization, especially since you intend to make money anytime and from everywhere based on your expanded marketing strategy.
Thus, growth marketing is a process that you can use to design and conduct experiments to improve your marketing efforts. Growth marketing allows you to reach your company goals by means of several growth marketing strategies – I’ll explain them in detail later on.
Not surprisingly, growth marketing is an ongoing process. It allows marketers to develop highly personalized campaigns. Besides, it focuses on customer relationship building and fostering loyalty. Thus, it’s got long-term results.
What growth marketing does is enhance the traditional marketing model with new methods. For example, growth marketing makes use of social media, video marketing, copywriting, content marketing, and community building to create sustainable growth.
It focuses on analyzing data and optimizing your marketing efforts based on real-time information. If an experiment doesn’t produce the results you expected, you need to have the next option ready.
Growth marketing aims at building not only a highly engaged audience but also increasing their lifetime value. It is for this reason that it employs a highly personalized approach that will help you reduce acquisition costs, lift revenue and boost efficiency.
What’s more, growth marketing improves customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty. Still, this can only be achieved through valuable customer experiences. And, you must be consistent, or else your results won’t lead to long-term benefits.
Growth marketing is key for the transformation of your business. But this change won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to carefully plan your strategy and be up-to-date with the latest marketing trends.
On top of that, growth marketing can be different for different companies. For example, some would be interested in increasing revenue and boost their user base, while others may want to add new staff members or partner with new clients.
What makes growth marketing different?
Growth marketing can be seen as a challenge since it’s different from other marketing strategies. What makes growth marketing different is that it goes beyond the top of the funnel.
So, growth marketing won’t only help you to attract users. It also focuses on engaging and retaining them. There might be strategies that don’t work. But once you manage to achieve your goals, they last for a long time.
Growth marketing significantly differs from traditional marketing in that it takes a broader approach to reach and convert your target audience. Growth marketing uses multiple channels, traditional and digital ones, to engage potential clients and retain your current ones.
However, traditional marketing only uses traditional channels such as television, radio, or print media. Traditional marketing might not be enough to reach your goals since more and more consumers rely on digital channels nowadays.
What growth marketing does is expand this somehow simplistic approach of traditional marketing. You can achieve this by focusing on presenting the right product in front of the right audience.
Growth marketing takes into account each step of the marketing funnel, whereas traditional marketing only focuses on the top of the funnel. Traditional marketing aims at lead generation. It focuses on the acquisition of new customers. Thus, some opportunities might get overlooked.
Growth marketing centers its attention on the acquisition of new customers but also on retaining them. It aims at building a relationship by engaging with customers through all levels of the sales funnel.
Growth marketing
- Aims at converting and retaining customers.
- Employs digital and traditional channels.
- Is a new form of marketing.
Traditional marketing
- Focuses on generating leads and converting customers.
- Uses traditional channels.
- Is one of the oldest forms of marketing.
Interestingly, growth marketing also differs from growth hacking. Don’t know what growth hacking is? Well, growth hacking is a much more energetic approach. It focuses on fast experimentation across marketing channels. Speed is crucial for growth hacking.
Growth marketing is not obsessed with speed. Growth marketing focuses on your company’s growth using a data-driven strategy. Growth marketing is also worried about customer satisfaction and retention, not only conversions.
Growth marketing and growth hacking have some things in common. Both approaches aim at driving revenue growth. Besides, they rely on qualitative and quantitative data before experimentation.
However, growth marketing aims at sustainable growth, while growth hacking focuses on rapid growth. What’s more, growth marketing is a slow and steady process, whereas growth hacking growth is spontaneous.
Growth marketing
- Follows a data-driven approach.
- Concentrates on strategic experimentation and A/B testing.
- Aims at improving revenue and client retention.
Growth hacking
- Its main goal is to improve revenue and sales.
- Follows an aggressive approach to grow quickly.
- Focuses on rapid experimentation and testing.
Interestingly, growth marketing and digital marketing have lots of things in common. However, there are certain aspects in which they are completely different.
As the name implies, digital marketing aims at attracting, converting, and retaining your audience through online channels, such as social media, email, or search. Similar to growth marketing, it leverages data to make informed decisions and design a marketing campaign.
Growth marketing focuses on converting and retaining users. But, growth marketing does go beyond digital channels. It makes use of traditional and digital channels to reach your target audience. Thus, this approach is somehow more complete than digital marketing.
Besides, growth marketing implies data analysis, goal setting, testing, and experimentation. It uses some digital marketing techniques, but its main goal is to foster your company’s growth.
Digital marketing uses digital tactics to deliver success to your business. These tactics include PPC, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media, etc. What makes digital marketing different from growth marketing is that the latter has a methodology while the former is just a set of tactics.
Growth marketing can be company-centered, industry-centered, or revenue-centered. You must set goals that are specific, attainable, measurable, relevant, and timely. Growth marketing helps you to implement tactics to reach your goals.
Growth marketing
- Its decisions are data-driven and strategic.
- Focuses not only on conversions but also on client retention.
- Makes use of digital and traditional channels.
Digital marketing
- Its strategies are data-driven.
- Aims at improving conversions and client retention.
- Uses digital channels only.
Why does growth marketing matter?
Growth marketing may sound a bit challenging at first since you might need to change your marketing strategy completely. However, it’s worth the effort. These days, customers don’t follow a linear path when buying your products or hiring your services.
They can start the buying journey with a device and finish it with another. Thus, you must adapt to their needs and focus on each step before and after the purchase. This matters due to the fact that it’s more expensive to get new clients than to retain existing ones.
Growth marketing not only centers its efforts on getting new clients, but it’ll also help you to retain them. It’ll allow you to develop strategies to foster your customers’ loyalty and trust through online reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, testimonials, etc.
Merchandising and marketing need to go hand in hand. This way, you’ll be able to provide better services and increase your customers’ satisfaction. For example, you can leverage user data to recommend related products, offer valuable resources and maximize your benefits.
Not to mention that you can use offline and online data to optimize your strategies. If you get information on consumers in different stages, you’ll be able to grow your marketing efforts.
You can track the conversion journeys of new clients and monitor the actions your current clients take. Growth marketing will help you to develop a detailed marketing approach so that you can reach your goals and grow your business.
Now that you have a better knowledge of what growth marketing is and its importance, it’s time we move on. In the next chapter, I’ll explain what a growth marketing executive and a growth marketing manager are. Keep on reading to find out more about these two job posts.
Chapter 2
What is a growth marketer?
In this chapter, I’ll analyze what a growth marketing manager is. I’ll talk about their qualities and responsibilities so that you can better understand their job.
Afterward, I’ll explain what a growth marketing executive is. Likewise, I’ll focus on their qualities and responsibilities to help you distinguish this job from the previous one.
To conclude, I’ll tell you what’s a growth marketing agency and why they’re so important. Ready?
What is a growth marketing strategy?
A growth marketing strategy consists of several actions and plans that allow your company to expand. It combines product management, design, marketing, leadership, and engineering tactics. It has to be relevant to your product and target market. And it’ll only work if you implement it into the whole organization.
Every company needs a growth marketing manager. Yet, their responsibilities may vary a bit depending on the company. But, most growth marketing managers are at least responsible for defining the company’s growth plan, coordinating and executing growth programs, and optimizing the revenue funnel.
A growth marketing manager job position sits in between marketing and product development. Thus, a GMM is in charge of improving customer acquisition, retention, activation, and upsell.
Besides, growth marketing managers need to work cross-functionally to be able to design and accomplish growth initiatives. But, above all, a growth marketing manager must ensure he’s got the right data infrastructure.
Not to mention that a GMM must help the company to set its growth objectives. Setting goals is mandatory to check the company’s growth. Growth marketing managers also need to provide customer insights and use this data to help the product team implement growth initiatives and product changes.
Once the growth objective is clear, the GMM has to design and implement tests. A growth marketing manager works with a cross-functional team including marketing, product marketing, engineering, design, analytics experts, etc., to execute several tests.
As you may well have already noticed, a GMM needs to be fluent in most acquisition channels, including owned, earned, and paid media. Each channel has its advantages and drawbacks. Thus, being knowledgeable about them allows a GMM to use the most effective ones to reach their company’s target audience.
Not surprisingly, a growth marketing manager needs qualities such as strategic thinking, leadership, and creativity. These skills are critical to manage a growth team and face the challenge of continuous experimentation and tests.
Let me summarize a growth marketing manager qualities:
- Be skilled at science, data, and creativity.
- Know how to use and design experiments.
- Be able to coordinate teams.
- Understand user behavior data.
- Experience in leadership to coordinate cross-functional teams.
- Be tech-savvy.
- Comprehend the financial fundamentals to make informed decisions and be able to run a profitable business.
- Knowledgeable in data analysis and processing tools.
- Have excellent communication skills.
- Experience in online and offline marketing, statistics, and funnel building.
- Possess some knowledge about customer acquisition channels.
- Be skilled in project and product development.
- Good knowledge about everything that relates to the core product.
Here you’ll find a growth marketing manager responsibilities:
- Identify challenges and develop hypothetical solutions.
- Prioritize experiments and evaluate results.
- Monitor and respond to market changes.
- Handle the lifecycle of existing and potential customers.
- Grow the user base through acquisition, retention, engagement, and upsell practices.
- Collaborate with different departments to identify growth opportunities.
- Work with engineering, design, and product teams to carry out tests.
- Evaluate results and make any necessary adjustments.
- Come up with a structured growth plan.
What is a growth marketing executive?
A growth marketing executive is someone who aims at improving profits through sales strategies that match customer needs. Growth marketing executives develop and oversee marketing campaigns to advertise your company’s products or services. They have to combine digital, analytical, creative, administrative, and commercial skills to reach their objectives.
Growth marketing executives’ responsibilities may vary from company to company and depend on the industry. Still, they are likely to have to work with other employees, such as growth marketing managers and experts in sales, distribution, production, advertising, and marketing research. So, they need exceptional teamwork skills.
Besides, a growth marketing executive tends to have a lot of responsibilities from the very beginning. They also have to compile and distribute financial and statistical details with team members and higher-ups.
In addition, they’re in charge of updating databases, maintaining the company website, looking at data analytics, managing social media campaigns, writing, proofreading creative copy, and much more.
The growth marketing executive role generally implies a lot of digital and online marketing work. So, they must have exceptional IT skills. What’s more, growth marketing executives contribute and develop integrated marketing campaigns.
Thus, they need to be good at PR, event organization, product development, advertising, planning, sponsorship., research and distribution. As you may well have already noticed, growth marketing executives need knowledge and skills in lots of areas.
Growth marketing executives are responsible for monitoring and reporting on competitor activity. They are also in charge of tracking their company’s marketing performance and write weekly or monthly reports.
Not to mention that a growth marketing executive must have foreign language skills if they work for multinational companies. They also need to be able to work well under pressure. And, they should possess great influential and negotiating skills.
Anyway, let me summarize a growth marketing executive qualities so that you can get the whole picture easily:
- Have great written and verbal communication skills.
- Be creative and full of new ideas.
- Posses copywriting and storytelling skills.
- Have good personal organization and project management skills.
- Be flexible and not afraid of change.
- Have strong analytical and data-driven background.
- Demonstrate great attention to detail.
- Be able to think creatively.
- Prove excellent IT skills.
- Be good with numbers and naturally analytical.
As to a growth marketing executive responsibilities, they are the following:
- Support the growth marketing manager and paid media manager in whatever they need, such as help them to get new customers.
- Contribute to the growth strategy and provide ideas.
- Develop growth strategies and experiments to drive improvements and foster customer satisfaction.
- Work with the growth marketing manager to create a long-term growth marketing strategy.
- Design and put into action B2B and B2C marketing campaigns on digital and traditional channels.
- Plan and carry out marketing campaigns to push customers along the funnel.
- Assist in the management of the company’s website and social media accounts.
- Conduct market research and collect campaign insights to make informed decisions.
- Organize and attend events, such as seminars, conferences, exhibitions, and receptions.
- Handle paid social media campaigns and paid search campaigns.
- A/B testing to optimize the performance of the company’s existing and future campaigns.
- Use creativity to come up with new marketing tactics.
- Collaborate with CRM, Product, SEO, PR, and Content teams so that you can create integrated marketing campaigns.
- Find out opportunities for new campaigns and channels to grow the business.
What is a growth marketing agency?
A growth marketing agency supports your business so that you can achieve your growth objectives. Such agencies make use of marketing, technology, and growth marketing to build a successful strategy.
Besides, a growth marketing agency uses data to make informed decisions. They not only influence marketing KPIs, but they also have a say in the development of your product or services.
Growth agencies implement data-driven strategies. It is growth marketing managers who will help you see the big picture. They’ll develop flexible plans for your business. They’ll experiment and test until they make your business grow.
Anyway, growth marketing agencies provide services like sales enablement, inbound lead generation, website development, sales and marketing alignment, etc. They’ll also support you with the aid of consultants who carry out specialized work.
A growth marketing agency also addresses any current problems your business may be facing. They use marketing, sales, and technology to organize and handle your roadmap.
A growth agency prioritizes its work to ensure your company’s growth and expansion. They’ll help you grow every aspect of your business. For instance, they’ll help you optimize your content efforts using several testing strategies across all marketing channels.
Besides, growth agencies make use of inbound methodology to ensure your brand is making the most out of your marketing efforts. Constant testing and optimization are key.
Growth agencies will help you find new growth opportunities and new ways to strengthen the communication with your customers. They’ll also make sure you’re providing helpful and high-quality content to foster customer satisfaction.
A growth marketing agency helps your business operate more efficiently and effectively. Still, you must adopt a growth marketing mindset. This will help you achieve long-term company success.
A growth agency helps each of your brand’s departments to build individual growth goals. This will encourage a growth marketing mentality which in the long-term will mean your overall company’s growth.
Growth marketing teams are familiar with the latest growth tools and technologies. They know how to interpret data and will help you plan and carry out a strategy so that you can improve your results and grow.
Hiring a growth marketing agency will help you better understand your marketing funnel and develop a framework for optimization. This matters to ensure your company is always growing.
And that’s all for now. In this chapter, you’ve learned what’s a growth marketing manager and what’s a growth marketing executive. They both are critical for growth marketing agencies and your company’s growth.
In the next chapter, I’ll focus on growth marketing strategies. Carry on reading to find out more about growth marketing and how you can make the most out of it.
Chapter 3
Growth marketing strategies
In this chapter, I’ll explain what’s a growth marketing strategy in detail. Then, I’ll talk about the core components of a growth marketing strategy. And to conclude, I’ll deal with growth marketing strategies you can try.
What is a growth marketing strategy?
A growth marketing strategy consists of several actions and plans that allow your company to expand. It combines product management, design, marketing, leadership, and engineering tactics. It has to be relevant to your product and target market. And it’ll only work if you implement it into the whole organization.
A growth strategy will help you to better run your company, manage your team and improve your marketing efforts in the long term. Take into account that implementation is not at all easy since it’ll probably involve many different steps.
If you want to boost your company’s growth, productivity, customer base, or activation rate, what you have to do is to invest in a strategy that’s relevant for your product, customer market, and any problem you may be currently facing.
Types of growth strategies
Growth strategies do not happen overnight. There is not a magic button. You’ll have to carefully choose your growth strategy based on your specific goals. There exist different types of growth marketing strategies. Some of the best ones are as follows:
Internal growth strategies
Internal growth strategies are those that rely on your company’s own resources. Internal or organic growth strategies are those that take place when a business expands, developing its own resources and capabilities.
In other words, your company expands without the help of external resources or external parties. Thus, internal growth strategies have advantages like strategic independence, culture management, and improve your knowledge about your company, to name a few.
Product development.
Product development strategy consists of improving your product or service so that it meets your customers’ expectations. If your customers are satisfied with your product, they’ll keep on using it. They might also share their experience with their family and friends.
This strategy not only helps you to attract new customers and boost sales, but it’ll also help you expand your market share. Still, make sure your new products offer an improvement in comparison to the previous version.
You can develop a product strategy by offering a new design, new feature, or more powerful device compared to the previous model. Besides, you can also solve any problems your customers had with the previous version. This way, you’ll foster their interest and satisfaction with your products.
Market expansion.
The market expansion strategy consists of expanding your market and reaching a global audience. Mainly, what you can do with this strategy is to target customers of a new demographic.
It helps you serve a new and different market. This strategy aims at growing the market share. Besides, the market expansion will help you reach other market segments and increase your sales and brand awareness globally.
Market penetration.
The market penetration strategy involves developing a unique product. You can either offer your product or service at lower prices to get more customers or charge more to target a different market segment.
Whatever strategy you employ, make sure you differentiate your brand and products from others. Besides, you must make your service or products more attractive. You can make use of a powerful marketing strategy.
It’s worth mentioning that market penetration is used for marketing purposes once the product creation is completed. This strategy will allow you to grow your market share. So, it’s worth trying.
Diversification.
This growth strategy involves introducing your product or service in an unexplored market. Thus, it is quite risky in comparison to the previous strategies. You can use diversification to expand your reach into a completely new market.
In other words, your company will have to get into some markets that are completely different from your own. This way, you’ll be able to expand your reach and increase your market share as a whole.
External growth strategies
External growth strategies refer to strategies that are implemented with the help of the resources of other companies. External strategies aim at increasing your business reach with the help of resources that aren’t developed by your company.
These resources come from the merger or partnership with other companies. Still, these strategies can also be advantageous to growth marketing. They’ll help you obtain rapid growth, financial efficiency, increase your company’s capabilities and reduce competition, among others.
Mergers.
Mergers or brand unifications are more and more common these days. This means that two or more companies merge into one. When this happens, there exist two possibilities. It is a horizontal merger when two businesses that compete with each other in the same stage merge.
Businesses that compete in different stages can also unify. These are called vertical mergers. These associations have to be beneficial for both parties, or else they won’t succeed.
Joint ventures or partnerships.
Likewise, two brands can create a new company or organization. They’ll have to reach an agreement. Generally, these brands participate in equity capital. Both brands can use this strategy to expand their market share.
Components of a growth marketing strategy
Now that you know what a marketing strategy is and its types, it’s hard time we deal with the components of a growth marketing strategy. These can vary from strategy to strategy, but generally, they are the following:
Target audience.
Not surprisingly, you must define your target audience. Instead of using mass marketing, you can segment your audience and target only those who are interested in your products or services.
This will allow you to convert leads and increase sales easily. But before that, you’ll have to collect demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. This is critical to creating your buyer personas.
All of this matters since it’s important to optimize content creation, product development, and alignment of resources. It’s worth investing in some research. This will allow you to create better growth marketing strategies.
Goals and objectives.
Besides, each and every growth marketing strategy needs to have goals and objectives. In other words, you should have long-term goals and specific objectives that help you reach your overall goals.
You can carry out a SWOT analysis to identify your goals and objectives. This will provide you a clearer picture. So, it’ll be easier to identify opportunities and handle challenges. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Content creation.
Content creation is a must-have component of your growth marketing strategy. Content marketing is necessary to improve customer satisfaction and demonstrate you’re knowledgeable and trustworthy.
Besides, it’ll help you solve your audience’s pain points as long as you provide high-quality content. It also boosts brand awareness. So, content creation is something you must invest money and time in.
You should create varied content, such as blog posts, podcasts, infographics, guides, videos, etc. Make sure your content is well-structured and aligns with your company’s purposes.
Competitor analysis.
Competitor analysis is vital to find brands that are a potential threat to your business. If you research your competitors’ social media presence, marketing strategies, website, and products, you’ll be better prepared to beat them.
What I mean is that it will be easier to find potential opportunities. For example, you can find gaps in the market or areas where you can perform better than them. Besides, being aware of your strengths and weaknesses compared to others is key to design marketing strategies.
You must differentiate yourself from your competitors. There are lots of tools that can help you with competitor analysis. It takes more than a quick Google search. Don’t be afraid to use all resources at your disposal.
A/B testing.
A/B testing is one of the core components of any growth marketing strategy. The variation of your content will help you to better engage with your audience and increase your conversion rate.
A/B testing is mandatory to customize your landing pages, social media ads, website graphics, copy, design, etc. This way, you’ll improve not only UX but also customer satisfaction. And it fosters loyalty. The benefits are endless.
You can optimize future marketing campaigns and improve your performance with every test. Make sure you adapt your content and marketing strategies for each of your audience segments. Provide content that’s high quality and resonates with them.
Agility.
Being agile is essential for any growth marketer. You’ll have to use data and analytics to find new opportunities and solve problems in real-time. A growth strategy is based on experimentation.
Growth marketers have to be able to switch between different tasks and respond quickly to changing landscapes. They have to find out how to make the brand they work for grow. Having an agile approach enables growth marketers to try several strategies and carry on with those that work.
Focus on the full funnel.
A good growth marketing strategy has to focus on different stages of the buying cycle. You can not create a different strategy for each website visitor or customer. So, you’ll have to classify those who share similarities together.
If you want your growth strategy to be effective, you’ll have to consider the whole funnel. There exist several lifecycle stages that growth marketers need to pay attention to. These are activation, nurture, and reactivation.
If you want to succeed, you’ll have to plan and execute different campaigns to activate your customers’ and prospects’ interests. Then, you’ll have to strengthen your relationship with them. And finally, focus on re-engagement. All these stages are equally important to grow your business.
Cross-channel marketing.
It comes as no surprise that you have to diversify the channels if you want to succeed in growth marketing. What worked before won’t necessarily work again since consumer practices, and preferences change over time.
Good growth marketers are non-stop exploring and experimenting with marketing channels. This is vital for an effective growth marketing strategy. Cross-channel marketing will help you better reach your customers.
You can use A/B testing and cross-channel marketing to optimize your future growth marketing campaigns. This will allow you to engage with your audience where they are. And you’ll have more chances they end up converting.
Efficiency.
Efficiency is a basic component of any growth marketing strategy. Growth marketers have to do their best to make companies grow fast. There are tools that can streamline the process and optimize your strategy’s efficiency. So, it’s worth investing in some of them.
Measurement.
You must measure the results of your growth marketing strategy. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know whether it worked or not. Periodic measurement is key to ensuring your tasks, objectives, and marketing efforts produce your expected outcomes.
Thus, it’s necessary to monitor your growth marketing campaigns performance regularly. This won’t only help you to know whether you succeed or not; it’s also relevant to optimize future campaigns.
Besides, you should analyze whether there is consistent growth or not. And whether what you’re doing is helping you to beat your competitors.
Growth marketing strategies to try
It comes as no surprise that you need to use the right strategies if you want your growth marketing strategy to succeed. Well, there exist lots of strategies out there. Still, some have proven to be more effective than others.
Below, there is a list of the most powerful strategies. They’ll significantly help you grow your business and improve your marketing efforts consistently. So, let’s have a closer look at them!
SEO.
SEO matters since it can help you improve your brand awareness. Growth marketing aims at reaching customers in each stage of the buying funnel. So, you must do your best to boost your brand and products visibility online.
This strategy is a must-have. You should try to appear at the top of search results. This will help you reach your target audience more easily. Still, make sure your SEO strategy helps you reach users on the different stages of the buying funnel.
PPC.
Likewise, PPC can help you reach your target audience while they’re online, either searching for information or just browsing. Besides, this strategy can help you call your audience’s attention in the early stages of the buying funnel.
Not to mention that ads are mandatory to boost brand awareness. If you want online users to move through the funnel, you’ll have to draw their attention first. Besides, all stages are important.
PPC can help you with email sign-ups, guide downloads, social media interactions, etc. You shouldn’t underestimate the power of this strategy. The only drawback is that you need to consider your budget. The more you spend, the sooner it’ll bring you benefits.
Social media marketing.
No one denies the importance of having a social media marketing strategy. There are lots of social media platforms. And most people have at least a couple of social media accounts nowadays.
To succeed in this growth strategy, you must know where your target audience prefers to spend their time. You must target them where they are most likely to engage with you. It would be wise to create several campaigns based on audience segmentation and research.
Social media offers endless opportunities. You can share relevant and high-quality content. You can interact with your audience through likes, comments, etc., and increase customer satisfaction.
You can promote your products or services too. Just make sure you follow the specifications of the social platforms you use. There might be aspects that change from one network to another.
Content marketing.
Content marketing is a strategy that consists of creating content that’s relevant to your target audience. You’ll have to research your audience and understand their needs and pain points. And then, you need to create content that’s high quality, original, and valuable for them.
As you might have already noticed, this is time-consuming. However, it’s worth the effort since content marketing can also help you reach users through several stages of the buying funnel.
You need to employ the right keywords so that your content appears at the top of search results. When planning your content marketing campaigns, focus on creating shareable content, such as videos. This can help your content go viral.
Email marketing.
This growth marketing strategy has an extraordinary return on investment (ROI). Not to mention that it offers valuable data. You can collect feedback and personalize your email marketing campaigns.
As it happens with other growth marketing strategies I mentioned above, email marketing can help you reach users at different stages of the buying funnel. You must create your own email list and send customized emails.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a strategy that will help you drive sales and generate online revenue quickly. There are several parties involved in the affiliate marketing process: the seller, the affiliate, and the consumer.
The seller can be only a person or a large enterprise. The seller is the product creator and doesn’t need to be involved in the marketing process. The affiliate can also be an individual or a company.
Affiliates earn a commission in exchange for marketing your company’s products. What affiliates do is promote your product to persuade users to buy it. And, consumers are those who buy your products.
Affiliate marketing is not only convenient and flexible, but it’s also cost-effective. Besides, there are many affiliate marketing channels you can use—for example, influencers, bloggers, email lists, media websites, etc.
Referral marketing.
Interestingly, referral marketing can help you convert leads much faster than other strategies. You can use referral marketing to boost your brand awareness and user reach. Besides, thanks to referral marketing, customer retention rates are higher.
Apart from getting new customers, you should focus on retaining them. This strategy can help you with this. On top of that, it allows you to cut down on costs. So, the benefits are endless.
Brand partnerships.
It is no secret you can benefit from business partnerships and collaborations. This can end up being an effective growth marketing strategy since it’ll help you create social media buzz and a lot of website traffic.
It’s an opportunity to enhance your visibility. What’s more, partnerships can even work for companies that operate in different industries. All you have to do is reach an agreement that’s beneficial for both enterprises.
Community events.
You should attend community events and conferences. You can learn about new tools and insights. Being up-to-date is fundamental for any business that pretends to grow. Not to mention that you can make connections and learn more about your industry.
Guest posting.
Guest posting will help you get high-quality organic leads. All you have to do is create interesting content for other websites, and they’ll provide a link to your site in exchange. This matters since it’ll help you rank higher in SERPs.
What’s more, you’ll not only benefit from organic website traffic, but guest posting will also help you reach new audiences. So, although it takes time to create content, it’s worth trying.
Influencers.
Influencers can significantly help you with growth marketing. Collaborating with them is a great way to reach a wider audience and increase your brand awareness. In other words, influencers can help you promote your products and services in a way that’s somehow attractive for your target audience.
If done properly, influencer marketing is one of the best growth marketing strategies. However, you must find influencers whose audience you’re interested in. It’s also important to partner with influencers that share content related to your industry. And, of course, influencers that match your budget.
HARO.
HARO is a platform that can help you with growth marketing too. As it happens with guest posting, the HARO strategy takes time to be fruitful. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll get lots of organic exposure.
You’ll receive emails with questions where journalists need help. If you are an expert in one of these areas, you should answer ASAP and follow the specifications. Who knows, they might pick your pitch and help you with brand awareness.
And, that’s all for growth marketing strategies. In this chapter, you’ve learned what’s a marketing strategy, its core components, and some growth marketing strategies you should try.
Carry on reading to find out more about growth marketing! In the next chapter, I’ll explain how to put it into action. Ready?
Chapter 4
How to implement growth marketing
In this chapter, I’ll explain how to implement growth marketing. To begin with, I’ll focus on the importance of setting growth marketing goals.
Then, I’ll talk about growth marketing metrics. And finally, I’ll share a list of key steps so that you can easily implement growth marketing into your business. Ready?
Growth marketing goals
The overall goals of growth marketing are typical goals for any business. Still, you should set your own if you want your strategies to be more efficient. The most common growth marketing goals are the following:
Customer retention.
Customer retention is one of the most important growth marketing goals. Customer satisfaction is critical to ensure loyalty to your product or service. Not to mention that it’s easier and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than convert a new one.
If you improve customer retention rates, your business will increase its revenue and reduce acquisition costs. You can apply several strategies, such as conducting an email marketing campaign, employing loyalty reward programs, or using surveys to collect feedback.
Brand awareness.
Brand awareness is more difficult to measure. Yet, it’s vital to move customers through the buying funnel. Since growth marketing focuses on all stages of the buying funnel, brand awareness is a must-have goal.
You can boost your brand awareness with social media marketing and digital advertising campaigns. Content marketing and influencer marketing are essential too. Brand awareness will help you make your brand, products, and services more visible and familiar to your audience.
Word of mouth, referral programs, and PR campaigns can also help you boost your brand awareness. This goal is critical since it’ll help you boost loyalty, UX, and customer satisfaction. You need to be seen as reliable and trustworthy. This will help you build a great company culture.
Customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction measures how happy your customers are with your brand, products, and services. Some people confuse customer satisfaction with customer retention. These are related, but they’re not the same. So, it’s better if you differentiate them.
Customer satisfaction matters since happy customers are more likely to make a new purchase or recommend your products to their family and friends. You can measure customer satisfaction through surveys and collect interesting feedback.
But, you shouldn’t stop here. Once you know what your customers think, you must make changes to improve their sentiment. This will help you increase customer satisfaction rates, loyalty, trust, etc.
Customer acquisition.
The acquisition of new customers is vital for each and every business. It consists of reaching new users and convincing them to make a purchase. If you improve customer acquisition, you’ll be able to expand your business, hire new team members and boost your revenue.
But, how can you increase your customer acquisition rates? Well, you must develop an integrated approach. For instance, you can combine several strategies such as enhance your web design, content marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising.
Influencer marketing can also help you boost customer acquisition rates. Whatever strategies you decide to employ, make sure you measure them and know where new customers are coming from. This will allow you to strengthen your efforts where needed.
Conversion rates.
There exist several types of conversions like sign-up for an email newsletter, make a purchase, or social media comments, likes, follows, etc. Not surprisingly, you’ll have to create specific goals for each type of conversion.
Yet, increasing your overall conversions is vital for growth marketing. That’s why it’s a general objective you must focus on. You’ll need to put into place several actions to boost your conversion rates.
For instance, you can optimize your landing page conversion rates, enhancing its design and layout and creating a better copy. You can increase the number of subscribers by creating high-quality and relevant content. And you can also boost conversions by offering free trials.
Company revenue.
Growing your revenue is another typical growth marketing goal. So, you need to design an effective pricing model and target quality users who are interested in what you sell. In other words, you must narrow your target audience.
This goal matters to ensure your strategy is sustainable. To make sure your marketing strategy is profitable, you’ll need to increase your customer’s lifetime value. It not only matters to get customers; you have to retain them and let them be your brand ambassadors.
Get traffic to your site.
Not surprisingly, boost your site’s traffic is one of the major goals of growth marketing. What’s more, you’ll have to employ several strategies to increase your organic, paid, and referral traffic.
You can increase organic traffic by sharing quality content. Besides, you can leverage paid traffic by using native advertising, for instance. Referral traffic matters too. It can help your content go viral. This happens when your audience trusts you and speaks on your behalf, sharing your message. Guest posts can also help you increase referral traffic.
Growth marketing metrics
Determining the right metrics to track to boost your growth marketing efforts is not at all easy. In fact, it’s a time-consuming and tedious task. Besides, you must understand what the metrics that matter most for your business are.
Metrics and objectives go hand in hand. This means that the right metrics will vary depending on your goals and objectives. You shouldn’t waste your time measuring vanity metrics.
You should identify strategic metrics instead. These are the ones that can provide powerful insights and help you build a better growth marketing strategy. What’s more, there exist different metrics for each stage of the marketing funnel.
I’ll cover the most relevant growth marketing metrics just below. This will help you increase your knowledge and make informed decisions. Each metric has a specific purpose. Let’s have a look at them in more detail!
Awareness.
Checking your marketing efforts at the awareness stage is of vital importance. Awareness is key to educate your audience and let your prospects know about your products. It includes anything from social media marketing to SEO-optimized content.
To measure your brand awareness, you must analyze metrics such as website traffic, visits, and conversions by source, social media reach, brand mentions and searches, engagement, landing page, and CTAs performance. I’ll explain each of them just below!
Website traffic
Website traffic is a metric you can use to decide which channels to invest in to boost volume. What’s more, you should track your weekly, monthly, and yearly traffic. You can collect this data from several tools, such as Google Analytics. The latter is not only free but also easy to use.
Visits and conversions by source
Visits and conversions by source mater to measure awareness too. You must analyze the number of visitors that come to your website. Still, you should also find out where they’re coming from (social media platforms, referring websites, organic search, etc.). This will help you optimize your growth marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, you can use Google Analytics to streamline the process.
Social media reach
Social media reach is an indicator of your branding efforts through social media platforms. As it happens with website traffic, social media reach efforts can be organic or paid. You can measure social media reach through social media networks’ own analytics. Yet, if you want advanced information, you can use specialized tools such as BuzzSumo or Ahrefs.
Brand mentions and searches
Brand mentions and searches can also help you measure and track awareness. You can use a tool like Google Alerts to help you with this task. Still, there exist other tools which provide more in-depth information like Mention. On top of that, Google Search Console can also be productive. However, what tools to use to check your brand mentions and searches is up to you.
Engagement
Engagement is essential to find out how your audience interacts with your content. You need to check metrics like the average time on site and bounce rate. These will help you better understand how visitors are doing. Interestingly, you can make use of tools like CrazyEgg to help you with this task.
Landing page performance
Landing page performance can help you analyze the performance of each of your landing pages. Usually, each landing page has specific marketing purposes. You can check metrics like conversion rate, traffic source, total conversions, or total landing page visits for each of your pages. This will help you make informed decisions for your campaigns.
CTAS performance
CTAS performance is critical since it affects conversion rates. So, you’d better learn how your navigational and conversion CTAs are doing. Your CTAs’ color, copy, and placement affect effectiveness. So, you must check how your CTAs are doing and make changes when necessary.
Acquisition.
Acquisition consists of generating leads and acquiring new customers through several methods like chatbots, gated content, subscriptions, trial offers, etc. Whatever method you use, it’s vital you A/B test. And then measure and track your performance.
Tracking your marketing costs is quite simple these days. You just have to divide the cost of a marketing campaign by the number of customers acquired. This will tell you the customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Although this is not the only metric to consider, CLTV and ROI are relevant too – I’ll explain them in detail later in this section. This also matters to check the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Remember to track and analyze your campaign’s performance for each marketing channel. And, don’t be afraid to A/B test to optimize your efforts. At times just the color or wording of your CTA can make a great difference.
Activation.
Activation means getting users to take the desired action, such as using the product or service they purchased. It’s an onboarding process. This matters so much since the sooner you get them to use your product, the more chances they become recurring customers. You can also activate them by making them move through the buying funnel.
You can increase your activation rate by providing more personalized copy, offering a free demo, or including a tour for using your app. Activation can also lead to upsells, renewals, and referrals.
Thus, you should measure your activation rate. To calculate it, you just have to divide the users who performed the desired action by the total amount of users. And then multiply by one hundred. The number you get is the activation rate.
Revenue.
Measuring your marketing revenue gives you an idea of your overall marketing performance. Yet, you shouldn’t stop at getting numbers. Look at where your revenue is coming from instead.
You’ll probably be using several channels. To boost your revenue, you can invest more in those that are providing positive results. You should also look at how promotions, discounts, and special offers affect sales.
There are several revenue-related metrics. These can vary if you experiment with pricing strategies and how your products/services are displayed on your prices page. It’s worth checking and experimenting with upselling tactics too. Don’t be afraid to test different payment models.
Annual returning revenue
Annual returning revenue (ARR) is a metric that tells you the return on investment over a year. It’s fairly easy to calculate. You just have to take your total value of investment and take away the initial value of investment. Then divide the number you get by the initial value of investment and multiply by a hundred.
Monthly recurring revenue
Likewise, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is a metric that you can use to predict the revenue expected to be earned each month. It gives you an idea of the performance of the resources employed in the campaign in question. To check it, you have to multiply the average revenue per customer by the total number of accounts per month.
Average revenue per user
Interestingly, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is a metric that helps you determine the revenue-generating capacity of your company at your customer’s level. To calculate this metric, you’ll have to divide the total revenue generated over a specific period of time by the number of users during that period.
Retention.
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of your existing customers. In other words, you must analyze not only customer loyalty and satisfaction but also customer retention. If you want to improve customer retention, you’ll need to provide personalized support.
Retention strategies include customer surveys, offering a loyalty program, and creating new products or improvements to the existing ones. Remember that keeping existing customers is as important as acquiring new ones.
Customer churn rate
Customer churn rate tells you about those customers that stopped buying from you or no longer want to be subscribers. To measure this metric, you have to subtract the number of customers you had at the start of a period from those at the end of that period. Then, you need to divide that number by the number of customers you had at the start of the period in question. Easy, right?
Net promoter score
Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that tells you how loyal your customers are. In other words, this metric informs you whether your customers are satisfied with your brand and products.
To find it out, you’ll have to carry out a survey and ask them to rate you on a scale of 1-10. Depending on the score, you’ll classify them as promoters, passives, and detractors. To calculate the NPS, you need to subtract the detractors from the promoters.
Customer retention rate
Customer retention rate (CRR) provides you the number of customers who keep using your service or buying your products over a period of time. If existing customers spend more on your brand, it’s a sign you’re doing things properly. However, when the number of existing customers drops, it’s a red flag.
But, how can you measure CRR? You take the users at the end of a period and take away those you acquired during that period. The number you get has to be divided by the users at the end of the period. Finally, you multiply by a hundred, and you’ll get the CRR.
Referral.
Not surprisingly, the referral stage is of utmost importance. To encourage referrals, you can offer referral bonuses or incentives. Measuring the referral rate is critical for growth marketers since one of the most efficient ways to get new customers is through referrals.
What’s more, customer satisfaction not only matters for optimizing your retention rate it also affects referrals. Highly satisfied customers are more likely to refer your product or service to someone they know.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV).
This metric informs you about the total revenue your company expects to earn from your customers. You can use this information to target those segments that are valuable for your business.
To calculate it, you need to follow this process:
First, you have to calculate your average purchase value. So, divide the total amount of revenue you got over a period and divide it by the number of purchases you got in that period.
Then, you need to calculate the average purchase frequency rate. For this, you have to divide the number of purchases by the number of customers who purchased.
The next step is to calculate your customer value. Thus, you have to multiply the average purchase value by the average purchase frequency rate.
Afterward, calculate your average customer lifespan. The latter is the average number of years a customer does business with your brand.
Finally, to calculate your customer lifetime value multiply the customer value by the average customer lifespan.
Cost per lead (CPL).
CPL is an important metric for growth marketing too. You can calculate it by dividing the amount spent on a campaign or marketing initiative by the number of leads generated. This metric can help you optimize various stages of the funnel as well as increasing conversions. One way of improving this metric is with effective advertising campaigns.
Make sure you A/B test until you find out what’s more effective for your brand. You can test your ads, the platforms where you display them, and the target audience segments to whom the ad is addressed.
Return on investment (ROI).
ROI is one of the most important metrics to track for growth marketers. This is the metric that tells you whether your marketing efforts have been fruitful or not. To measure your ROI, you’ll need to take your current value of investment and subtract the cost of investment.
And then, you have to divide this number by the cost of investment. What you get is your ROI. It will help you measure your progress and the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Steps to implement growth marketing
Traditional marketing models imply making a great investment to acquire customers at the top of the funnel. Growth marketing focuses on all stages of the marketing funnel, not just the top.
It not only matters to acquire customers; you should also focus on retaining them and boost their lifetime value. However, no one knows the right formula that works for each and every business.
If you want your business to grow, you’ll have to experiment and find out what works for you. This is exactly what growth marketing does. You have to figure out how to reduce customer acquisition while improving customer retention. This way, your marketing efforts will be sustainable, and it’ll help you to grow.
But how can you do it? Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Have a product.
You need to have a great product and collect feedback as soon as possible. This will help you improve your product’s quality as well as boost customer satisfaction. Besides, if you involve your customers in the development and optimization of your products, you’ll have more chances to get their trust and ensure their support.
Step 2: Develop a framework.
As I mentioned before, growth marketing is a data-driven approach. This means that growth marketers use the latest technology and tools to experiment with what works best for your business in different channels.
In other words, growth marketing involves a lot of testing. You’ll have to brainstorm ideas, test them and determine what works or doesn’t work. Then, you can continue with the good, scrap the bad and start again with a new test.
To run an experiment, follow the steps below:
Find out which area needs improvement.
If you want to grow and optimize your business, you’ll have to research and identify which areas you’re already doing well and those in which you need to improve. You must be familiar with your strong and weak points.
Once you find out something which could be improved, you have a potential opportunity to do it better. I advise you to experiment with small things first. It’s preferable to try to change big aspects of your marketing strategy.
Design an experiment.
Once you know what needs to be improved, you’ll have to develop a hypothesis. Think about what you want to change. This change doesn’t necessarily have to be a big change like redesigning a landing page. It can also be something small, like changing a headline or the color of your CTA.
You must have something to compare it with. You can A/B test the new version with the old. And then check which one performs better. Do not forget to collect data so that you have something to compare it with.
Carry out your experiment.
Afterward, you’ll be ready to implement your experiment. It’s critical you select a timeframe that has enough statistical significance. Another key aspect is that you have to test only one thing at a time, or else you wouldn’t know what was the change that made the difference.
Analyze the results.
Once your experiment is over, it would be time to analyze your results. Check whether you reached your goals compared to the initial results. Find out whether the change you introduced optimized your marketing efforts or not.
Your experiment can also underperform or exceed your expectations. Just because you introduced a change to prove a hypothesis, it doesn’t mean you are going to succeed.
Make sure your results are directly related to the change you introduced before making any further changes. At times, there are seasonal changes or changes in the whole industry that don’t have anything to do with your experiment.
Make changes and start with a new experiment.
There are two possibilities here. If the results of your experiment improved your performance, you should make any necessary changes and look for another area that needs improvement.
However, when the results of your experiment don’t take you to where you expected, you might need to keep on testing the same area but making changes on another aspect. In other words, you need to look for a different solution to improve your performance in the area you are experimenting with.
Step 3: Optimize your funnel.
Growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel to increase not only conversions and engagement but also retention. Thus, you must do your best to improve UX all throughout the funnel, not just at the top.
So, you can try to optimize your website speed, landing pages, content, CTAs, etc. Try to make your content go viral with the help of your brand advocates, and you’ll also reduce customer acquisition.
Step 4: Boost growth with social media and viral loops.
If you want your content to go viral, you’ll need to optimize your social media strategy. Posting content regularly on social media is detrimental to growth marketing since it increases brand awareness and word-of-mouth, among many other things.
There’s something called viral loops that’s worth considering too. It consists of a customer that gets you more customers. This will also help you grow and expand your business quickly.
And that’s all for now. In this chapter, you’ve learned how to implement growth marketing. Thus, it’s time we move on. In the next chapter, I’ll talk about growth marketing campaigns. So, you can’t miss it out!
Chapter 5
Growth marketing campaigns
In this last chapter, I’ll share some examples of typical growth marketing campaigns so that you can get ideas. There exist lots of growth marketing campaigns these days. Yet, the ones I’m about to explain below will help you reach your goals more easily.
Besides, these growth marketing campaign examples are fundamental to optimize your brand awareness, engagement, loyalty, trust, revenue, and much more. So, let’s have a look at them!
Here are some of the most well-known examples of growth marketing campaigns:
Referral programs.
Not surprisingly, existing customers are one of the most valuable forms of advertising. People trust recommendations from friends and family more than what brands say about their products.
Referral programs are unquestionably efficient in getting new users. Still, if you want to succeed, you should offer a stimulus. What’s more, you can even offer an incentive to the current user and another to the referred user.
Engagement.
Engagement campaigns are extremely useful to attract new customers and push them through the funnel. However, engagement campaigns form part of a long-term strategy. You won’t see any results immediately.
It would be wise for you to create high-quality content that solves your customers’ pain points. This will demonstrate that you care for them as well as your leadership and expertise. What’s more, you need to develop your buyer personas to understand your audience’s needs better.
Apart from offering valuable resources, you can engage with your audience through social media channels. Make yourself available and A/B test to boost the effectiveness of your campaign.
Another way to strengthen your marketing efforts and drive more engagement is by offering a personalized experience. You must keep on collecting data and enhance the customer journey.
Loyalty programs.
Not surprisingly, loyalty programs are essential for customer retention. This will help you improve your customers’ lifetime value. It is cheaper to convince your existing customers to make a purchase than to acquire new customers.
Therefore, you must demonstrate to your customers that they are more than just a number in your database. Loyalty campaigns will help you convince your most engaged customers to keep on buying from your brand.
You can offer rewards such as exclusive discounts, sneak previews, or rewards to ensure they are loyal to your brand. It’s necessary you reinforce and strengthen your relationship with your best customers. This type of campaign promotes ongoing loyalty for your brand and boosts conversions. So, it’s highly beneficial.
Onboarding.
Interestingly, once you’ve convinced users to sign up for your website, you can collect data and offer them a better customer experience. If you enhance their journey, they would be more likely to engage with your content and move through the funnel.
So, after you welcome them onboard, you can ask them what kind of content they are interested in. This will help you send them only what they asked for. Chances are they are satisfied and stay longer with you, provided you offer valuable content they are interested in.
Conclusion
Growth marketing is among the best marketing approaches nowadays. This data-driven methodology is not only centered on getting new customers quickly. But, it also aims at fostering a good relationship with your existing customers and retaining them in the future.
There are lots of marketing strategies you can apply to grow your business. Yet, growth marketing focuses on those that bring long-term results. Now that you know what growth marketing is, its benefits and how to implement it, what are you waiting for to optimize your marketing efforts and grow your business?
Now I’d like to hear from you …
What growth marketing strategy are you going to put into place first?
Is there anything relevant to growth marketing I forgot to mention? What is it?
Have you got any questions about this post?
What are your growth marketing goals for this year?
Leave a comment below and let us know!
We’d love to answer any questions you may have!