The Real definition of growth marketing‍

What is Growth Marketing?

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“Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers.”

‍-Mike Volpe (CEO,Lola.com). ‍

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When we hear many marketers refer themselves as “growth marketers”, what exactly do they mean? It’s an approach of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers that’s focused on persistent experimentation and in intense focus on the changing motives of your customers. Growth marketers bring a specialized skillset to the table. As tech companies go all-in on growth, growth marketers are emerging as an interpretative component of winning growth models.

Growth Marketing is Marketing 2.0.

It’s widely accepted that you need great growth marketing to win. But most people couldn’t tell you what great growth marketing is. Growth marketing is one of the trendiest terms in tech these days. Global interest in the term has increased steadily over the past decade, and in 2021, “growth marketing” was the top trend in the B2B Marketing Trend Tracker, beating out other popular terms like personalization, marketing automation, and martech stack.

Growth marketing can be described as Marketing 2.0. When traditional marketing is taken and layers of A/B testing, value-additive blog posts, data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, creative ad copy are added, then growth marketing strategy is said to be formed. The insights gained from these strategies are quickly implemented in order to achieve sturdy and sustainable growth.

How is growth marketing different from other growth functions?

Growth marketing makes use of triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring new customers and to retain the existing customers into the product to experience its value. Growth marketing is said to be a stochastic process, like biological evolution. This means there is a component of randomness to the strategies that might work. The only way to be certain what will be successful is to start experimenting.

- Better understanding of current and emerging channels

Growth marketers accomplish their mission through a toolkit of levers that define the who, what, where, how and why components of target audience. They understand how decisions made in channels flow to backend product economics, and the diminishing returns and impact of media at a granular level. What distinguishes growth marketing from product and other growth functions is that it typically controls most of the channels and the language designed to elicit and immediate response.

- Data-driven mindset.

The modern growth marketer dives deep into the data to figure out what strategies are working and is comfortable using all the tools that allow for such analysis. They must use a wealth of customer and user data available from channels, the product itself, research and 3^rd parties to inform their approach.‍

- Product defines the core actions that you want the user to take.

Creating a team, inviting team members, and signing up as key moments that drive user growth and defined features like the “add people” search tool that uplift those actions in the product.

- Growth marketing powers the loop.

Bringing in new customers and ensuring that they stay engaged on the loops over time. They might do this by bringing new users into the “New user Signup” step through ads on paid social.

- Collaboration with growth partners.

With committed product and engineering support, growth marketers are typically the most technologically-enabled marketers on your team. A strong ongoing partnership with product, engineering and design is critical to their success.

‍The objectives of Growth Marketing

The objectives of growth marketing for any business:

• Retention of customers
• Acquiring new customers
• Increase in profit

As the business ramps-up growth strategies become more necessary both from a cost and a conversion rate perspective. How can one expect to achieve these objectives?

- Retention of customers

The most important goal of growth marketing is to retain existing customers. The existing users should be satisfied in order to ensure loyalty to your company’s product or service. Since there is less friction when repeating a purchase, it is far easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer. Areas to test for customer retention are incentive programs, user onboarding and email triggers.

- Acquiring new customers

After customer retention has stabilized, the pursuit for new customers becomes financially feasible. The acquisition of new customers is the capability to successfully reach new buyers and convince them to purchase. One of the principles of customer acquisition is visibility within the marketplace. The areas to test for customer acquisition are social media, paid search, free trail periods.

- Increase in profit

In the long run, if your growth marketing strategy is not sustainable, your revenue may increase while profitability decreases. If customer acquisition costs exceed the lifetime value of customers, no matter how exponential revenue growth may be, the economics of the business model will never recover. A successful growth marketing strategy will provide new sources of revenue without putting an unnecessary load on expenses. The areas to test are annual billing, customer surveys and bundled package offerings.

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Conclusion

Growth marketers need to be analytical in their approach and willing to act on their findings. Today there are many tools and technologies to make every marketer a growth marketer.

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