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Growth marketing is used by some of the largest corporations and fastest-growing businesses in the world. Used as a method of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers, growth marketing continues to gain traction. Growth marketing is ideal for organizations that are agile and willing to take risks, experiment, and optimize marketing tactics to see great results.
The goal of growth marketing is to significantly improve your marketing results by leveraging data and technology efficiently and sustainably. Not only do you want to acquire clients, but you also want them to be loyal and engaged customers who appreciate what you have to offer.
As the global market is changing quickly and businesses struggle to survive, standing out is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses, especially new ones. There is no way around the necessity of developing strategies that are not only unique and engaging, but they must be beneficial for both the customer and the business.
The customer-centric approach goes beyond just acquiring new customers and aims to build long-term relationships with your existing customers. Essentially this is a part of the foundation of growth marketing.
Growth marketing is not and should not be confused with growth hacking. Growth marketing isn't reckless like growth hacking which uses fast-paced digital marketing tactics that burn through mad amounts of cash and resources to rapidly gain users.
Growth marketing is for organizations that want to maximize profitability without taking on unnecessary risks. It is about agility, data, and advanced digital marketing, with a major focus on customer relationships. It is an excellent strategy for organizations to show their customers and competition they are a trusted brand and force in their market.
Let’s explore what growth marketing is, why it’s so valuable, and how you can add some popular growth marketing tactics to your 2023 marketing strategy.
1. What Is Growth Marketing?
A growth marketing strategy takes on an agile approach, tactical activities, experimentation, and continuous evolution. Growth marketing involves a multitude of valuable digital marketing techniques that include data-driven campaigns, SEO, A/B testing, unique content, and more.
Instead of targeting the top of the funnel (TOFU), growth marketing engages individuals throughout the entire funnel, which includes:
- Generating the demand to attract and entice new customers
- Engage, convert, and onboard them
- Captivate and keep existing customers engaged.
Growth marketing involves testing and validating new channels and strategies continuously, then scaling the results to maximize growth opportunities. Since growth marketing delivers performance-based ROI, it's the strategy of choice for companies seeking to scale quickly.
2. The Advantages of Growth Marketing?
The advantages of growth marketing include the following:
- Faster speed to market
- Higher ROI (return on investment)
- The capacity to rapidly scale marketing activities and produce the desired results.
Growth marketing produces higher ROI and establishes an emotional connection with your target audience based on their specific stage in the funnel. It combines data-driven marketing, product development, sales, finance, and more making the product or service more engaging for customers.
As a result of data-driven growth marketing, companies can leverage different tools to increase efficiency and prove the ROI of growth marketing activities more easily.
3. Growth Marketing vs Other Kinds of Marketing?
Most business owners will simply focus only on inbound marketing, performance marketing, or basically any other type of marketing only to later complain they were unable to reach their marketing and sales goals. The reasoning behind this is usually the obstacles behind any one of these marketing approaches.
Growing your business is the primary goal of growth marketing, but it combines all fields to create the best strategy to scale your business and achieve lucrative results. Business owners who need growth marketing are typically in one of the following situations:
- You just launched a startup and have limited to no experience in marketing
- You drive plenty of organic traffic to your website, but you lack any growth on your pillar channel
- You are about to launch a new product or service and need a go-to-market strategy
- Your product is growing in demand but you lack the resources to establish genuine relationships with potential customers
- You have allotted a hefty budget for paid marketing but do not have much ROI
- Your business wants to improve its branding across all platforms
- You have valuable content but are unable to market it accordingly
In a nutshell, if you find your business is struggling with any metric of the AARRR -acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue-, then growth marketing is the solution with an end-to-end strategy that your business needs.
Growth Marketing vs Digital Marketing
In a world where there are so many marketing options, it can be challenging to determine what your business needs, and one of the first mistakes business owners make is to confuse digital marketing with growth marketing.
There is a difference in methodology between the two, digital marketing encompasses all digital marketing tactics, such as SEO, email marketing, PPC, social media marketing, etc.
Data analysis, testing, and optimization are the primary goals of growth marketing, rather than developing tactics. Growth marketing uses a variety of digital marketing techniques, but the goal remains to drive measurable business growth.
Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking
The core difference between growth hacking and growth marketing is that growth hacking is focused on speedy short-term results, while growth marketing is focused on the entire perspective of long-term results. Below are thorough examples of the differences between growth marketing and growth hacking:
- Growth hacking involves achieving rapid growth, usually through acquisition, while growth marketing involves full-funnel strategies to achieve long-term growth.
- The goal of growth hacking is to experiment with data and refine the outcome, whereas the goal of growth marketing is to identify patterns and refine the strategy based on the data.
- The approach of growth hacking involves hands-on testing and tuning, while the approach of growth marketing involves automated and algorithmic processes that are continually adapted.
- Growth hacking is focused on addressing business pain points, while growth marketing is focused on discovering customer pain points.
There are significant differences between growth marketing and growth hacking. The listicle above gives you ample examples of how growth hacking is a fast result for the present but not a sustainable one for the future longevity and success of a business.
4. Key Elements of a Growth Marketing Strategy
The success of any growth marketing campaign is based on key performance indicators, such as customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, customer retention rates, and lifetime value of customers. Here are some of today's leading growth marketing tactics for attracting, converting, creating, and retaining customers.
Cross-channel Marketing
Companies can engage with prospects as well as customers through their preferred channels by adopting a cross-channel marketing strategy. It is therefore likely that the way a business communicates with its customers on Facebook will differ significantly from the way they communicate with them on Instagram, email, or its website.
A/B Testing
Businesses can compare two variations using A/B testing to see how they compare and differ. Whether testing a marketing strategy, a channel, or a piece of content, you need to understand which variation performs better and why.
Customer Lifecycle
For a business to know its customers, it must follow them throughout their journey, from the beginning to the end. Activation, nurture, and reactivation is three stages of the AARRR framework that simplify the more complex aspects of the framework.
5. Growth Marketing Channels
Regardless of the reason why you need growth marketing or business, you will need to cover the following areas to maintain sustainable growth:
- SEO (search engine optimization including keyword research, web optimization, building backlinks, etc.
- A strong call-to-action message in blog content will convert readers into leads
- Repurposing already created content can be repurposed and shared across different social media platforms.
- To determine valuable information using automated email marketing to engage and convert potential leads.
- Targeted email marketing allows each potential prospect or customer to receive a specific message based on their specific customer journey stage.
- Affiliate marketing is giving third-party access to promote your business to its new audience through collaborations and promotions.
- PPC or social ads target audiences who have shown previous interest in your business and you can target these potential customers.
- Use extreme measures like quirkiness and originality (something out of the box) to gain attention and traction swiftly and efficiently.
- Depending on the industry your business falls into, a trade show could be the place that has all of the key players you want to reach.
- Boost the effectiveness of your sales team, sales funnels, and customer service to achieve your growth marketing goals.
- Your business needs to be active in its community, this brings plenty of benefits because community building with people with similar demographics allows for rich data collection.
6. Growth Marketing Metrics
The entire growth marketing process is data-driven, so you can easily track whether your goals are being met, but by tracking these metrics consistently, you can optimize on time and achieve better results. Below are some examples:
- Better web traffic, which can be direct traffic, organic traffic, or traffic coming from other social media channels
- Better lead generation metrics, specifically marketing-qualified (MQL) and sales-qualified (SQL) leads for your business.
- Email track metrics such as click-through rate, open rate, reply rate, and of course conversion rate.
- SEO metrics such as website traffic and organic keywords will let you see your SEO performance.
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) allows you to track any predictable revenue that can be earned each month.
- A business’s average revenue per user (ARPU) indicates how much money it can generate at the customer level.
- Customer retention metrics such as the number of upsells and cross-sells as well as the churn rate measure what is working to keep customers around.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that calculates the total expected revenue from one single customer over a period of time.
- The return on advertising spend (ROAS), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and conversion rate are used to demonstrate the ROI of paid marketing
- An activation rate metric is the percentage of new users who take a predetermined action within a certain period
- Annual returning revenue metrics show your ROI over one year.
- The revenue churn metric calculates any lost revenue over a period of time
- The churn rate metric measures the number of subscribers/customers who have either not renewed their subscriptions or canceled them at a certain time
5. Growth Marketing Tactics
There are so many versatile tactics that can be applied within a growth marketing strategy to help you reach your desired goals and success.
The Benefits of Discounts Within Your Referral Program
If you want your target audience to take immediate notice of your referral program, you will need more than an easy landing page that invites them to share it with others. One way to make this more enticing is by offering different promotions or discounts within your referral program.
For example, you can offer promotions for a new user. You could offer an additional discount for purchasing more than one product and/or service, annual or quarterly discounts, limited-time offer discounts, and so on. This will help your business to start building its target audience of loyal customers that will come back to your business and make a purchase.
Offer Potential Customers Exclusivity
When something is unattainable or exclusive the interest in that specific thing immensely rises, it reminds me of the saying “you always want what you can’t have” well, in this case, it fits perfectly and that is exactly why many businesses offer exclusivity to potential customers.
This is a very useful tactic when a business is about to launch a new product. The more urgency you can create around the selling point, the more potential customers and current ones will be interested in it. Making the product or service not available to everyone right away gives it exclusivity and creates allure around it. If you limit the product’s availability you will get people hyped up to chase after it.
Gamify Onboarding
Adding fun to your onboarding process will not only motivate prospects but also better engage new customers. Depending on the number of new customers you get by a particular date, you can offer new features to your customers. You can even break features down into milestones and roll out a new feature once 500 new customers have been added.
Give Away Something
This is an easy tactic that works very well specifically for SaaS platforms, nevertheless, this tactic can be applied to products. If you can conjure up an aspect of your service that you can let people try for free it gives them the incentive to later buy from your business. This is very common in growth marketing, a free trial is a popular way to get more people to try your product or service. It can be used as a hook to get users back and you can collect data from who made a purchase or not.
Include Your Audience in The Process
Your audience and their thought and feeling about your business are essential for success. Why not take this opportunity to ask them to participate in a new product launch or a new website? You can invite both potential customers and current ones to participate in a contest, for example, where a winner will be selected to be a brand ambassador for your new launch. This allows for more personal connections to build and shows more transparency within your business.
6. What Does a Growth Marketing Agency Do?
Since growth marketing is entirely data-driven, you will be able to track whether your strategy is aligned with your goals. By constantly tracking these metrics, you will be able to optimize on time and perform better:
- Growth Leader: Builds agile organizations
- Growth Product Manager: Works on specific business metrics across the entire growth marketing funnel that will help improve business revenue and profits
- Growth Engineer: Utilizes data-driven testing to improve products
- Growth Designer: Develops product strategies, interaction designs, UX designs, and user experiences
- Full Stack Developer: Responsible for developing both backend and frontend applications
- Social Media Manager: Develops and improves online communication and presence
- Data Analyst: Analyzes data and makes data-driven marketing decisions based on that information
6. Growth Marketing Trends For 2023
Taking a step back will help you move forward, you must understand that your business can get lost and forgotten in the world of competition if you don't stay on track with growth marketing trends and continue to utilize outdated marketing strategies.
The ability to combine digital marketing aspects into a more effective strategy has become increasingly apparent to marketing experts. Traditionally, businesses would search for digital marketing services individually and put all their eggs in one basket.
Now, if you look at some of the best growth marketing agencies, you will find that they have aligned strategies. For example, when it comes to agencies focused on paid marketing, PPC, SEM, and CRO are usually aligned, if you take an integrated approach, they work better together.
In organic growth, there are multiple strategies. Let's break down some heavy hitters individually. The main purpose of Digital PR is to build credibility for your brand, which is important because it determines how genuine and legitimate your brand is perceived to be.
The quality of your SEO is determined by a variety of factors, such as backlinks, the design of your website, and the user experience on your site. With the fluctuating nature of search engine algorithms, they have become increasingly sensitive to discern discrepancies in authority and credibility.
You may also be penalized for a mediocre website that is difficult to navigate and doesn't have substantial session duration, as well as if you congest the internet with backlinks, but neglect your blog and your site has a poor user experience.
A content strategy involves helping your brand create content, especially blog posts that can help establish you as an industry authority. Several actions can help you reach this goal, including getting mentioned or featured in high-profile publications such as Forbes and this can establish credibility when trying to secure funding.
They all play some part in a marketing strategy but when combined they can create a solid marketing campaign that can skyrocket your brand visibility and brand authority. Here is why digital PR utilizes PR hacks to earn backlinks which in turn supports your SEO.
You need linkable assets and they need to be promoted to relevant publications to encourage them to share your content or write about your content and link it back to your site or affiliate platforms which all goes back to content. So instead of putting all your eggs in one basket with big risks and uncertain rewards, you can go the growth marketing route and get long-term success with agile marketing tactics.
But How Will This All Affect Your Business In 2023?
There will be strategy adjustments as integrated growth marketing campaigns become more mainstream in 2023 so prepare for the long haul. Rapid results are great and leave us feeling all kinds of good about shelling out a ton of cash on a marketing campaign may leave you feeling unsettled if the results were not what you expected. You must approach growth marketing as an endurance race if you want real, lasting results.
Why is a long-term approach better?
Growth marketing should be viewed as a continuous cycle of competition, and any steps you take are essentially aimed at overtaking your competitor’s market position. If you don't have this mentality it can become a problem because once you stop growth marketing efforts, you could potentially be overtaken by competitors within a few months.
Building a solid marketing foundation that remains active for longer periods of time is becoming increasingly important for businesses. Long-term activities are more flexible for making strategy adjustments along the way because more data analysis is needed at the beginning to ensure maximum effectiveness.
So in 2023, you must think beyond the short-term gains to a months long marketing campaign. Invest in an ongoing campaign that runs for 6 to 12 months to advance efforts in owning your industry. Those looking for long-term marketing results will need to adjust their budgets as needed to make the best investments for long-term success.
The Value Behind The Experts
To make significant strides in growth marketing, however, you’ll likely need to bring in specialists. The goal of growth marketers is to increase user acquisition, engagement, retention, and lifetime value by conducting tests. Basically, a growth marketing agency will assemble the right team with the expertise to solve your problems, including copywriters, designers, social media experts, strategists, web developers, and more.
In Conclusion
Growth marketing gives businesses a multitude of opportunities to redefine and finesse how your business interacts with potential leads and customers. This will help you reach your business goals and optimize everyone's experience. Growth marketing is the perfect balance of scientific data, experimentation, creativity, and innovation that achieves a better end result for your business and its customers.
