What is Growth Marketing?

What is growth marketing?

Like many marketing terms, you’ve probably heard of "growth marketing", but do you actually know what it means? Don’t worry if you said no, you’re not alone. Growth marketing is a process that focuses on running experiments on specific target areas to produce optimal results for your clients. Growth marketing teams aim to attract, engage, and retain customers throughout this process.

Different from traditional marketing, growth marketing is really all about experimentation. Adjusting strategies frequently, testing different channels and analyzing results allows growth marketers to determine the best path for success to optimize a client’s marketing budget. Traditional marketing techniques may produce some results; however, these strategies are not sustainable in an ever-changing environment.

What makes growth marketing different?

Data driven

As an analytically driven process, growth marketing puts a lot of focus on data. The proof is in the numbers for growth marketers. They will investigate the analytical breakdown of an experiment or campaign to determine the level of performance. Based on the results, there may be an opportunity to adjust specific elements to optimize a client’s marketing strategy.

Customer focused

Adopting a growth marketing mindset means the focus is on the customer. Understanding the customer journey from the onset and establishing strong customer relationships is an important facet of growth marketing. The better you understand your customer and their needs, the more likely you will be to deliver successful marketing outcomes. 

How to implement growth marketing

One of the most common ways we see growth marketing being used is by implementing the AARRR framework. Also known as ‘pirate metrics’, this framework covers the following marketing metrics: Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral.

Acquisition

• Focused on acquiring new customers and lead generation, this stage is extremely important for a growth marketing strategy. Marketers should be running frequent experiments throughout this stage in effort to understand how people are discovering the company and products/services. 

Activation

• The activation stage deals with the speed at which you can get your customers to realize the true value of your product or service. The quicker you can get people to use your product or service after purchase, the more likely they are to experience the value. 

Revenue

• Growth marketers look at revenue to determine if the costs of their efforts are profitable or not. Knowing a customers willingness to pay for a product/service is important for marketers to understand before setting a pricing strategy. Running tests for different strategies can be a good way to find the pricing strategy perfect for your company. 

Retention

• Customer retention is an important metric for every business. Growth marketing looks at a business’ current customer retention rate and seeks out different tactics or technologies to improve retention in the future. Keeping in contact with customers through email blasts, social media, and frequent blog posting are all great ways to increase customer retention. 

Referral

• In a perfect world, all customers would recommend your product or service to their family and friends. However, sometimes customers need a bit of a push to get to the brand advocate stage. Growth marketers would experiment with referral programs, social media campaigns or incentives like a contest to try and increase results.

Growth Marketing in action: 

Wordstream does a great job explaining growth marketing using the example of Slack. Starting with a freemium model, the communications platform collected extensive feedback from early users and used it to modify the platform accordingly. Slack was able to launch with a solid, well established brand because they focused on improving their user experience. After launch, they shifted gears to focus on obtaining new customers. The platform has since been able to make the necessary changes to enhance user experience and retain new and existing customers.

Growth marketing is taking the term ‘data-driven’ to a whole new level. Growth marketers use data to provide direction on experiments and testing to ensure that they are deriving optimal results. As technology continues to advance, the rise of sophisticated data is going to continue to compliment the growth marketing mindset. HubSpot already has an extensive library with free growth marketing resources and as a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner, we are excited for all of the innovative solutions to come.

If you’re interested in trying out growth marketing on your own business, start by using the AARRR or pirate metrics or the tips outlined in this blog. If you’d like to learn more about how our team can help you with growth marketing, send us a message today!