The internet receives over 1145000 terabytes of data every day. That’s more than 286,250,000 movies, every day. It’s no wonder becoming and staying relevant in today’s web is incredibly hard. But people in the marketing industry are nothing but resourceful and have found new ways of keeping their campaigns creative, iterative, and compelling, and their content viral and organic. And these types of actions and strategies have a nave: Growth marketing.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a marketing method that adjudicates high value to goals, data analysis, testing, and experimentation. Its main objective is to generate measurable growth for a company or business, it accomplishes this by using a number of marketing techniques and strategies. The main difference between Growth marketing and traditional digital marketing lies in the methodology used.
Digital marketing applies many already known strategies to drive results, like SEO campaigns, content marketing, PPC, social media marketing, or email marketing, to name a few. Growth marketing teams take these actions and channel them in a different way. It’s a more data-focused approach, it is, basically a different method of using the same tools.
The goal is what ordains the structure of the campaign. A growth strategy can be centered around driving up revenue, increasing brand awareness inside its own industry, or centering around specific company metrics to reach by the end of a quarter.
Growth marketing has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent times, although it is not such a novel concept, it is revolutionary in the results it can give your company. It can be the key to transforming your business. In order to do that you need to be updated with the latest trends, have a detailed plan, and know that although it is a fast-paced environment, growth won’t happen overnight.
What is a growth marketing strategy?
Growth marketing (GM) strategies combine product management, design, digital marketing tactics, leadership plans, and engineering; they consist of actions specifically created to expand a business. These actions need to be relevant to the target you wish to market and to the product or service in itself you want to develop. The strategies will only be effective when launched by the company as a whole.
GM is a process, and a key phase of any GM strategy involves conducting experiments, gathering the data, and using it to improve your marketing efforts. It is an indisputable ally in developing highly personalized campaigns, building existing customer relationships, increasing potential customers, and increasing loyalty. It can be a while before you start seeing results, but the benefits are long-term.
The radical value of GM is enhancing traditional marketing models with new methods. These strategies usually require a deep and updated knowledge of social media, video marketing, copywriting, content creation, and digital community building, as a basis to create sustainable growth.
Growth strategies have data at their center, and we all know that data is the new oil. Growth marketers are constantly analyzing data and optimizing marketing actions basing their changes on real-time information. This is the natural experimentation done in these sorts of strategies, if an effort doesn’t generate the expected results you launch the next initiative, which should already be at the ready.
A huge and engaged audience is not the only thing GM aims to get. It can also increase their customer lifetime value. That’s the real reason behind the superb personalized approach: lowering acquisitions costs, increasing revenue, and driving up efficiency. Customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty are all by-products of these sorts of actions, when they are sustainable and consistent.
Components of a growth marketing strategy
Growth marketing is a global, and holistic approach that needs every part of a business taking part in the efforts in order to be effective, be it a startup business or a huge corporation. It changes the notion that the marketing department is the sole force behind increasing lead conversion and lead generation. And metrics are a big part of GM strategies.
The first phase of the GM model is tracking and analyzing metrics and KPIs across the whole business and with a varied knowledge of current marketing trends. Counting the total new users or leads, the return on investment (ROI) of lead compared to sales figures is no longer enough. These are good efforts in the traditional model, but it doesn’t take into account the business’s ability to increase the lead to conversion rates, which GM tackles with the application of best practices in inbound pipelines.
Some of the necessary components of a growth marketing strategy can be found on the cleverly named “pirate metrics” acronym: AAARRR (awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral).
Awareness
Brand awareness is a key aspect of any marketing campaign, from the most traditional ads in print to the state of the art of new marketing methods. Building and measuring brand awareness is one of the pillars of GM, along with a heavy pursuit of growth measurements. Many marketers will be able to tell you that brand awareness is the first step into entering the marketing funnel, of onboarding possible clients. And as such an important metric it has to be measured correctly, you can use tools like surveys, organic traffic analysis, search volume data reports, and social listening.
Acquisition
Even if brand awareness is the first step into the funnel, the acquisition is where the real customer journey begins: it is where leads are generated, and where most companies have the hardest time overcoming challenges. Growth marketing focuses on optimizing deeper parts of the sales funnel, creating more volume in this phase greatly helps the chance of reaching growth goals down the road. The types of actions in an acquisition may include resource download, trial offers, freemium memberships, newsletter signups, customer service bots, or anything that improves the quality of interaction.
Many growth marketing managers choose to deploy experiments in A/B test emails, landing pages, available content, chatbots, or trial offers. These studies are measured by tracking the overall leads, each acquisition channel lead rate, and general web traffic, with an especial focus on retention and bounce rates.
Activation
When a customer acquires the product or service it is important for them to use it as soon as possible and to have a positive experience with it. This rings true whether using a free trial, a freemium product or actually paying for it. For the first group, this is a way of increasing the chances of them buying the product in the future. For paying customers it can generate sales, renewals, and referrals. And can even help with understanding and updating the user experience.
The metric aspect of this point radicates on active user data, compared to the total number of users. The goal would be simple, to minimize the distance between these two rates, and marketers can take the divide as an excellent opportunity for experimenting with A/B testing. This is the start of a business/client relationship and should be treated with the importance it requires.
Revenue
Growth teams take a really close look at revenue. And even treat it as another area in which they can experiment to check what pricing strategy works the best. Gathering data on revenue-related topics can give valuable answers to the areas related to revenue operation and marketing professionals. This means knowing how cart abandonment, free-trial conversions, pricing options, and display are affecting each purchase ( or lack thereof).
Retention
When evaluating retention you need to take a close look at churn rates, drop-off rates, and return rates. New product usage or renewals are also important. The difference between a traditional digital marketer and a growth marketer is that while the first can be satisfied with an increase in new customers, the second needs to drive up client satisfaction.
Since loyal and long-term customers have no customer acquisition costs, they are the most valuable ones when thinking about net revenue. And that’s why growth marketers spend time and effort in keeping them, this can be done with specific programs that ensure customer satisfaction.
Referral
Improving referral rates is one of the most valuable pieces of work a growth marketer can do, in this area it is the most effective and cheap way to generate new customers. Measuring and optimizing these rates can greatly improve the bottom line of a business.
Customer referral programs are the most common strategy and need to be carefully reviewed, improved, and experimented with. These efforts need to be combined with retention actions since customer satisfaction will increase retention as well as referrals.
Why does growth marketing matter?
Growth marketing may be a new trend to some, and it can even be challenging at first since it might require you to change your marketing strategy completely. But, it’s worth the time. These days, you can’t expect customers to follow a linear path when browsing your products or hiring your services. And this is a symptom of the rising complexities of the internet as a whole. E-commerce webs are booming, you can find marketplaces in many social media outlets as well, and can even use multiple devices through the funnel journey.
Just like when the internet started, digital marketing was born, as the landscape changes so should the marketing strategies. Adaptation is king when new technologies arise. And now you need to facilitate each step of the purchase because every little stone in the way is a potentially lost client.
Growth marketing helps you get new clients, and look after the already existing ones. Developing methods to foster customers loyalty, and using available data to provide better service each step of the way is only logical. Growth marketing, by acquiring information can help you develop a detailed and specific marketing approach in order to reach your goals and grow your business.
What makes growth marketing different?
Growth marketing is different from other marketing strategies. It encompasses every step of the marketing funnel, attracting new clients and retaining them, while traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel. And the benefits are long-lasting. The approach taken is a broader one, using multiple channels, traditional and digital ones, to reach potential clients and retain your current ones.
These strategies expand the approach of traditional marketing. And they manage this by focusing on presenting the right product in front of the right target audience, and the way they tackle the full funnel builds relationships and thrives on engagement.
Some people can mistake it for growth hacking, a subject we already did a piece on. The latter has an energetic approach, while It focuses on rapid experimentation across marketing channels. Speed is king here. Its main goal is to improve revenue and sales and to do it fast. It usually has a more aggressive approach and focuses on rapid experimentation and testing.
Effective growth marketing is not a speedy endeavor. While it also focuses on growth using data-driven strategies, it is also worried about customer satisfaction and retention, not only conversions and revenue. The goal of GM is sustainable growth, in a steady process.
Why is it important to your agency?
In a crowded market, it is extremely hard to stand out. And the recent proliferation in the specialization in the advertising and marketing world can make things harder for small general agencies. We believe that the qualities that make agencies great can be only improved when paired with the necessary data. Growth marketing needs innovative thinkers and creative problem-solvers to work, skills that are common in agencies. If you develop and enrich your talent with the necessary tools they can go a long way, and help increase the bottom line of the business while doing so.
Growth marketing can really help with customer acquisition, referrals, and organic growth. And we, at COR, can help with profitability, taking better care of the talent, creating a more efficient culture, and making data-driven decisions. We want to give professional businesses our AI-powered software solution support in making the revenue they deserve while providing a great service for their customers. If you want to access a more data-driven mindset and become a streamlined creative operation, we can help you. Request a demo today.
