You have no business if you don’t have customers; your business must stand out in a world where new companies are launched daily. Most businesses don’t have the time or resources to run traditional marketing campaigns. 

 

In the modern era, it’s a race against time, and businesses have few shots. The spray-and-pray strategy that traditional marketers use isn’t effective anymore. Companies need strategies that fit their budget and marketing objectives. 

 

This is where growth marketing comes in; it optimizes an organization’s customer lifecycle and finds new ways to engage them. This article will walk you through growth marketing and why it has become popular. 

What’s Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing refers to fast experimentation across product development and marketing channels to identify the most effective ways to grow a company. It combines traditional marketing with data, new technologies, and unconventional approaches. 

 

Unlike traditional marketers who focus on the top funnel, growth marketers focus on the whole customer funnel. Growth marketers constantly tinker with ads, test hypotheses, and tweak websites to increase business revenue. 

 

Here are the five ways in which traditional marketers and growth marketers differ: 

 

• Full funnel: In recent years, acquisition marketing and lead generation have become unpopular. This is because these strategies solely focus on the top funnel. Growth marketers must be able to acquire leads and understand how to nurture them to convert and enhance these customers’ value over time.
• Speed: Growth marketers can’t effectively grow a company without speed. It takes speed to conduct experiments and execute various strategies to enhance a business’s growth.
• Small experiments: Savvy growth marketers understand that you must conduct small experiments to get big growth wins. These marketers have a toolkit with tactics such as product tweaks, email marketing, PPC ads, affiliate marketing, and SEO that can catapult growth. Such marketers order experiments based on ease of execution, scalability, and certainty to arrive at and iterate needle-moving strategies. 
• Technical skills: Growth marketers know how to operate on essential ad sites like Facebook and Google. They must have a basic understanding of coding to work with engineering and product teams to run A/B tests, make website SEO changes, and place advertising pixels. 
• Product marketing: While outside the job title, product marketing is crucial to acquiring customers. Growth marketing won’t be effective if you don’t understand your customer’s desires and messaging required to convert them.  

Reasons Growth Marketing Has Become Popular

Currently, growth marketing has become an in-demand skill across various industries. In the United States alone, there are 75209 growth marketing job listings on LinkedIn. Data from 

 

Google trends indicate that interest in growth marketing has increased by more than 100% in the last five years. This interest is attributed to various factors, the main one being that small and large company need to grow as companies must succeed.

 

Excellent growth marketers can accelerate business growth by defining customer segments, finding budget-friendly ways to acquire customers, and solidifying a growth approach to set up a company for success two to five years later.  

 

Growth marketers usually specialize in all or some aspects of the marketing funnel, and they commonly execute various strategies, including the following: 

 

• Paid marketing
• Product-led growth
• Email marketing
• SEO
• Affiliate/referral marketing
• Product and data analytics

 

Great growth marketers have adequate experience to identify marketing levers that can have an impact and pull them to accelerate growth. Their executions, experiments, and hypotheses must be data-driven. 

Growth Marketing Origins

1. The Release of Lean Startup By Eric Ries 

The term growth marketing was coined in 2011 by Eric Ries in his book,  The Lean Startup. Nevertheless, the concept was around even before the book was released in 2011. 

 

The book teaches business owners how to: 

 

• Make the best business decisions by being hyper-efficient with resources. 
• Carry out small experiments constantly; even if most of them fail, there’s one that’ll succeed and make your business scale faster. 
• Constantly learn and respond to customer behavior, iterating to ensure you always use an effective marketing strategy. 

 

For instance, if you start selling widgets, make three different widgets in the first month, then sell the best-selling widget in the subsequent months. Growth marketers play an essential role during the lean startup process by constantly tweaking and testing to make a company expand as fast as possible. 

2. Businesses Becoming Data Driven

Since growth marketing is data-driven, growth marketers usually focus on data and use it to acquire customers. Boardrooms in small and large firms have become increasingly data-driven as data gives them an edge over their competition. 

 

Experimentation, surveys, A/B testing, and funnel surveys help growth marketers harvest valuable data that can inform decision-making at the top level. 

3. Acceleration By Venture capital

Venture capital enhances the need for growth marketing; many venture capital funds have a ten-year duration meaning that such firms must invest, vet, and source in good businesses. 

 

These businesses must have liquidity in ten years, or the fund cannot return the cash to limited partners. With this limited timeline, startups backed by venture capital had to accelerate growth. 

4. Companies That Grew Due To Growth Marketing

Incredible success stories of companies that used growth marketing to accelerate their growth. Companies such as Mint, Facebook, PayPal, Dropbox, Genius (Rap Genius), and Nerdwallet all grew due to growth marketing. 

5. Cost-Effectiveness

Many businesses give marketers a fixed budget which they’re supposed to use to attract customers. Growth marketing usually takes a little budget for it to work. For example, Dropbox has a referral program that catapulted its growth. 

 

The platform offered customers 16GB storage bonuses for every new user they referred to the platform. This way, the site grew from 100,000 customers to 4,000,000 customers in less than two years. The customer acquisition only costs the platform a few cents per customer. 

The Growth Marketing Funnel

Growth marketing involves various stages to attract customers and make them your brand advocates. These stages are as follows: 

 

• Awareness: This stage involves educating prospective customers about your product and the solution you’re providing. You can create awareness by creating viral videos, sending cold emails, and through SEO-optimized articles. 
• Acquisition: In this stage, growth marketers find ways to collect consumer data by optimizing landing pages or acquisition pages through chatbots, case studies, etc. 
• Activation: In this stage, you must act and make people signed to your product use it. For example, you can offer a discount on the first purchase. 
• Retention: The aim in this stage is to make your customers return, and the best way to achieve this is by keeping them delighted. In this stage, growth marketers look for ways to offer personalized support or improve the value customers gain from your product. 
• Revenue: The goal in this stage is to get your customers to sign up for a higher subscription plan, cross or up-sell a product. To generate revenue, growth marketers usually assess the product and conduct experiments to make customers pay more. 
• Referral: This stage involves having a referral program where your customers can refer your business to others. 

Best Practices In Growth Marketing 

1. Collect Shares, Social Signup, And Emails

Growth marketing works best when there’s free communication between prospective and current users. Once a user signs up through a social channel platform for your site, you have their attention, and whatever you post will get to them for free; don’t pay to acquire the same customers. 

2. Stay Updated

Understanding trends in your industry and learning new approaches to leveraging growth opportunities is essential to growth marketing. Staying updated is crucial, as techniques that may have worked previously could be obsolete. 

3. Have A Niche 

The internet is big, and there are various companies making millions selling products others would consider silly. When you establish a niche, you become an expert in a specific field, and people will associate your product or service with it. When users have an association vector for your service or brand, you have to re-engage or acquire them will be lower. 

4. Have Strong Content

Regardless of what you’re selling or doing online, internet users want quality. Consumers see blogs and news daily; according to CBS News, people see approximately 5000 ads weekly. 

 

The only way to succeed online is with quality content that can come from excellent photography if you run an eCommerce platform or excellent blogging. Be customer focused and create something for others to consume and share. 

5. Be Creative

There’s no one shoe fits all growth marketing strategy; the nuisances of each company vary, and strategies have varying efficacy across sectors over time. Even great ideas go out of style with time. 

 

Competitors may start mimicking strategies that work, or customer sentiments may change, ultimately increasing costs due to steeper competition. In terms of growth, the first business to make a move always has the advantage.

 

It’s essential to think about growth intelligently rather than creatively. There are specific frameworks for thinking about growth that’ll make you better equipped to spot growth opportunities. 

6. Proof

Unless you’re a successful company like Google, New York Times, or Amazon, consumers have no reason to believe that your business is the real deal. Use customer testimonials and social and media proof to enhance your trust and build a strong brand. 

Reasons To Hire A Growth Marketer

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with growth marketing, you may be unsure if you need to hire a growth marketer. Here are several reasons you should consider hiring one: 

 

• They offer data-driven assessment: A growth marketer gives you access to data-driven assessments that’ll help you understand your customers and target market. 
• They’ll help you prioritize revenue increase: A growth marketer will help you market your products cost-effectively and focus on growth. This will help you generate more sales and leads, ultimately growing your business. 
• You’ll enhance your customer acquisition strategies: A growth marketer will help you implement and develop approaches to reach and convert prospective customers. 
• Help You know when to pivot: A great growth marketer will help you avoid getting too attached to one growth tactic and will help you know when to pivot based on customer feedback and data. 

 

As you consider hiring a growth marketer, you should know that while growth marketers are an essential growth component, they can’t make a poor product fit the market. 

 

Your business won’t grow if your product isn’t a market for you, and a growth marketer won’t solve this problem for you. Even though they may get leads and drive growth, they won’t be able to build a viable and sustainable product without a good product. 

 

You should also consider if you can afford to have a growth marketer; the average annual salary for growth marketers is $85000. Marketing is expensive, and the growth marketer will require a budget to generate leads, create content, and run ads. Additionally, a growth marketer must have adequate funding to set up experiments.

Bottom Line 

Growth marketing isn’t a fix-it-all; you must have an excellent product like  Nike, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, or Uber that fills a gap in the market. However, with a market-fit product, growth marketing can accelerate a company’s growth. Good growth marketers can conduct adequate experiments and assess data to develop strategies that’ll move the needle for your company.