The Complete Guide to Growth Marketing

⏱ Reading Time: 11 minutes

Growth marketing seems to be the new “favorite” in the marketing world. Can it really help you to grow your business in ways you never imagined possible? We are about to find out!

Finance deals with the amount of cash flowing in and out of a company. Growth deals with the number of customers flowing in and out of a product. This is something to keep in mind as we move further into the topic of growth marketing. 

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To different companies, growth means different things. It could mean any of the following:

• Increasing revenue and maximizing profit
• Increasing customer base
• Addition of new staff members to the structure
• Forming new partnerships with more clients

Whatever a company uses to measure its growth, it is important for growth to be consistent. Without steady growth, your business will eventually wither and die. Growth needs to be consistent and effective to ensure the steady success of any business. It is also important for growth to be sustainable over an extended period of time. Otherwise, the results will not lead to any long-term benefits. In the end, it’s like striking a matchstick that burns out after 15 seconds!

How Marketing Contributes to Growth

Marketing is a cornerstone in the success and growth of any business. It ensures the inflow of customers. It also brings the attention of more people to the services the company has to offer. However, it’s important to remember that growth takes time. There’s no magic to it and it doesn’t happen overnight.

Let’s face the facts; growth marketing is not just some fancy word. How do you think a company like Instagram achieved a whopping value of $1 billion in just two years of business? Yes, Facebook – the social networking giant – bought Instagram for that amount. Should we talk about Tinder? The dating app that sees no less than 1 billion swipes per day after just six years of existence. 

Growth marketing is not a “hype” or “buzz”. It’s not some passing trend. It’s the key to the transformation of your business. This is also why it’s crucial to keep abreast of the latest content marketing trends. It’s a serious strategy that up-and-coming startups are using to revolutionize their brand and redefine what growth means to a company. This also includes how to put said strategy to effective use.

Let’s move on to how to use growth marketing strategies to redefine your business success. We’ll also discuss the basics of growth marketing. But first, let’s take a quick look at how job roles such as “growth marketer” or “growth hacker” came into existence.

Read 7 Marketing Hacks That Will Make Your Brand Grow Faster

Picture 1. Growth hacking explained

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is about focusing on all stages of the sales funnel. It’s about maximizing the lifetime value of a customer. This ensures that a customer continues to patronize the services of a company even in the future. Growth marketing concerns itself with achieving this using minimal cost and time input. Using the right tools for time management is of the essence when it comes to growth marketing. By tracking time and results, you can easily check your growth marketing progress.

This means experimenting to find ways to acquire new customers at the top of the funnel. It also means developing tactics and strategies that’ll increase customer retention down the funnel.
They can use the results to find out what works and what doesn’t. They can then refine the data, improving on what works, and letting go of what doesn’t work. This is what helps a business to build a framework for success.

As David Arnoux, Head of Growth at Growth Tribe puts it, 

“What people call a growth hack is usually running through as many experiments as possible until we find something beautiful that works perfectly. We call it the golden nugget, the silver bullet, the growth hack. It’s that beautiful moment when you’ve found a perfectly working playbook that will help your company grow.”

Difference between Growth Marketing and Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is about lead generation. It involves focusing the entire marketing efforts of a company on the top of the sales funnel. More than 85% of B2B marketers consider lead generation as the most important goal in their content marketing strategies.

This style of marketing leads to missed opportunities. Opportunities get overlooked in terms of nurturing and building meaningful relationships with customers. Traditional focuses on acquisition only. It then neglects leveraging the entire sales funnel to bring about growth. 

Growth-marketing focuses on strategies to help acquire new customers. It also focuses on retaining them. The purpose is to build customer engagement at all levels of the sales funnel. On the other hand, traditional marketing focuses almost entirely on acquiring new customers.

Read 13 Unique Sales KPIs that Boost Business Growth

Picture 2. Difference between traditional and growth marketing

Why Growth Marketing Is Important

As we’ve already pointed out, growth marketing focuses on the total life-time value of a customer. It involves using strategies and tactics to improve the acquisition of new customers. It is also useful in improving the number of purchases that customers make in the future.

Existing customers are 50% more likely to spend money on new products from your company. In addition, they’re also willing to spend up to 31% more than new customers when making purchases. This is why customer acquisition and retention are important.

This difference is attributable to trust. A customer who trusts you is easy to upsell. They can even convince new customers to try out your product. This gives you the chance to repeat the “acquisition, retention, and engagement” cycle.

A study done by Frederick Reichheld shows you can increase profit through customer retention. By increasing your customer retention rate by just 5%, you can increase profit by more than 25%. This makes it clear that you need to focus on the entire sales funnel. Do not focus on the top alone.

5 Steps to Carrying out Growth Marketing

Growth marketing involves the following strategies:

• Do
• Measure
• Refine

A growth marketer continuously tries out unconventional growth strategies. They measure the effectiveness of each strategy. The results are then refined to achieve better results in the future. You have to find ways to optimize online ads, landing pages of websites, and email copy product page.

Step 1: Create a Must-Have Product

This step is an obvious one, however, many people go about it the wrong way. You need to involve your customers in the product development process. Do not focus only on creating the right product. After creating the first version of your product, ask your customers for feedback. Do they like the product? What will they like you to improve on?

Involving your customers in the process from the very start is a great way to earn their trust and support. Ask for feedback from your friends and family. The moment you get a “go-ahead,” don’t waste further time trying to create the perfect product. Launch it as it is and continue with the feedback process.

Read 10 Ways to Build an Effective Product

Picture 3. Is your product a must-have?

Step 2: Build a Framework

In growth marketing, growth marketers use modern-day software to analyze various distribution channels. The channels with the best performance are then given full focus.

To achieve growth, experimentation and testing should be done in high-velocity and high-tempo. This means you should deploy and experiment on your best ideas as quickly as possible. The next step is to collect the data from these experiments immediately. Finally, you use the collected data to understand what works best. This is useful in formulating a working process that you can use repeatedly.

To carry out high-tempo tests, these processes are involved:

• Brainstorm ideas with your team members
• Choose the best ideas and prioritize them
• Execute each of the ideas
• Measure and record the outcome
• Continue with the good and do away with the bad

Step 3: Optimize the Top of Your Funnel

It is always better to start from the top. To achieve this, you need to carry out experiments to find the best way to optimize your landing page. The homepage is among the most important aspects of your website. It can determine your conversion rate. When customers visit your website, they expect a user-friendly, fast-loading, and easy-to-navigate design. These things will drive them to take action by clicking on that “call to action” button.

The first thing you can do is to improve the loading time of your websites. In this fast-paced age, people are less likely to wait for slow-loading pages. Just a 1-second delay in loading time will reduce your conversion rate by 7%. Secondly, you need to make sure your homepage has a small description of the value of services you’re offering. In addition to this, there should also be a clear “call to action”.

Read How to Improve Live Chat Sales Funnel?

Step 4: Optimize the other Parts of Your Funnel

As explained earlier, growth marketers, unlike traditional marketers, focus on the entire funnel. They use this technique to achieve an increase in customer retention and engagement.

In this step, you have to optimize other elements of your website. You also have to develop your content strategy and improve your monetization structure. This is a great way to increase virality. By achieving this, you can quickly cover up for customer acquisition costs.

Step 5: Social Media and Viral Loops Are Your Allies. Use them!

Use social media to post optimized and well thought out content around your products. It is a great way to boost growth. It is also a great way to acquire new customers, retain them, and engage with both new and existing customers.

Viral loop is the process where a user invites more users to try out a product. A customer can invite one or more people to use your product and become customers as well. This creates a loop that repeats itself, hence the name “viral loop”. This repeating loop builds in momentum and yields incredible growth rates.

Read Importance of Social Media Marketing for Business

Conclusion

As we’ve mentioned, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing strategy for companies. When it comes to growth marketing, careful and targeted experimentation is important. It is a great way to find techniques that will work for you. 

Growth marketing involves going beyond what a traditional marketer will do. You have to test and experiment with new ideas, execute them quickly, and measure the results. The results are then refined to find a working process that you can use repeatedly. You also have to focus on the entire sales funnel – from the acquisition of new customers down to engagement. This is the best way to take advantage and increase the lifetime value of your customers.

In growth hacking, you have to take bold steps, become unconventional and data-driven.

Have you been able to achieve customer retention with any other unconventional techniques? Share this with us in the comment section!

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Ikechukwu Nnabeze is a tech expert and a successful freelancer whose main area of interest is to improve people’s lives with the help of modern technology. His interest in providing practical solutions to real-life tech problems has led him to a successful career in creating content for Traqq. His passion is to help individuals and organizations from all over the world to embrace the life-changing beauty of modern technology. He enjoys poetry in his spare time.