You’ve likely heard the term ‘growth marketing’ being used more and more over the last few years, and you’re probably wondering what it actually is and how it’s different from other types of marketing.
As a digital marketing agency specialising in creating growth marketing strategies for clients, we know a thing or two about growth marketing – and we want to share that knowledge with you.
So, in this article, we’ll help you understand growth marketing, how it differs from other types of marketing, and what tactics are involved. We’ll also give you valuable tips for creating your growth marketing plans.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is a more data-driven and customer-focused approach to marketing that helps businesses create consistent, stable growth.
Rather than focusing on specific marketing channels or individual campaigns, growth marketing is about taking a wider view and optimising the entire customer journey to nurture your prospects through your marketing funnel and turn them into loyal, repeat customers.
Growth marketing is about constantly testing and refining your marketing to ensure that each audience touchpoint delivers real value and creates a positive experience that helps drive customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and increased customer value over time.
With an effective growth marketing strategy, you can scale your business efficiently and sustainably, using marketing strategies proven to deliver consistent positive results and ROI.
How Growth Marketing Differs from Traditional Marketing
For the most part, growth marketing doesn’t involve any wildly different marketing tactics or channels. The difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing is in the view and goal of the strategy itself.
Here are a few examples of what these differences are:
Long-term vs short-term focus
Traditional marketing usually focuses on short-term wins, like boosting leads or sales through a particular channel or campaign. Growth marketing looks at the bigger picture, focusing on optimising every step of the customer journey for long-term success.
Full-funnel vs top-of-funnel
Traditional marketing largely concentrates on the ‘awareness’ and ‘acquisition’ stages of the customer journey, which means customers are often forgotten about after completing a purchase. Growth marketing, however, ensures that every step of the customer journey nurtures and engages customers to acquire and retain new customers for long-term growth.
Experimentation vs assumption
Growth marketing heavily relies on continuous testing. Every part of the marketing strategy, from emails to landing pages, is tested and tweaked to find what works best. Traditional marketing tends to rely more on assumptions, with fewer in-campaign adjustments.
Data-driven vs gut-driven
In a successful growth marketing strategy, data guides every decision. From looking at website engagement data to customer feedback, growth marketing involves using real-time data to measure and optimise your marketing to get the best results. With traditional marketing, businesses rely more on intuition or long-standing industry norms, which can lead to less effective campaigns.
Agile vs static campaigns
Growth marketing is all about being adaptable and adjusting campaigns in real-time based on performance metrics and goals. Traditional marketing campaigns are more static and are usually left to run their course before making post-campaign changes and relaunching.
Key Growth Marketing Strategies
A strong growth marketing plan relies on a few core strategies, which together create a strong foundation for revenue and business growth.
Each of these tactics plays a vital role in testing and optimising your growth marketing strategy, helping to drive sustainable, long-term business growth.
A/B testing
A/B testing is a core aspect of any growth marketing plan.
It involves comparing two or more variations of an email, ad, or landing page to see which version generates the most engagement, interest, and conversions.
For example, if you’re A/B testing on Google Ads, you might notice one ad generated more clicks and website conversions than the other.
This process allows you to experiment with different approaches systematically and helps you base your marketing decisions around accurate user engagement data rather than just making assumptions.
A/B testing helps you fine-tune your marketing strategy, making little changes that, over time, can lead to big improvements in your conversion rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement.
Customer lifecycle optimisation
As we’ve already covered, growth marketing isn’t just about attracting new customers. It’s about optimising the customer lifecycle to keep customers happy, retain them for longer, and generate more cross-sell, upsell or referral opportunities.
When a customer makes their first purchase, you should be considering ways to provide extra value straight away.
Post-purchase emails are a great way to deliver tips for using the product a customer has bought or provide a ‘refer a friend’ offer for a discount on their next order to promote repeat purchases.
You should also consider retention in your strategy. This could involve creating a loyalty programme or personalised using re-engagement campaigns to keep customers coming back for more.
By improving each stage of the customer journey, you’re not just focusing on acquiring new customers but also getting more value out of your current customers and converting them into long-term brand loyalists, which helps drive business growth and brand advocacy.
Personalisation & segmentation
Personalisation goes beyond just using your customer’s first name in an email.
To personalise a growth marketing strategy, you need to use customer data to deliver highly targeted, personalised experiences that resonate with individual users.
For example, you could send personalised recommendation emails to encourage repeat purchases.
Segmenting your audiences is crucial for personalisation. By segmenting them based on their behaviours, interests, and demographics, you can more easily tailor your messaging to each group.
This will help your marketing communications become more effective because your customers are getting content that’s directly relevant to them.
When done right, personalisation can increase your engagement and conversion rates and can help boost brand loyalty.
Content marketing & SEO
Content marketing can be a powerful tool for a growth marketing strategy, but it has to be done right.
Rather than just churning out blog posts, you should create purposeful content for each stage of the customer journey.
For example, at the ‘awareness’ stage, you could focus on creating educational blog posts and optimising them for SEO to attract more relevant organic traffic.
As customers move further down the funnel, content like case studies, product demo videos, or customer testimonials can address specific concerns or pain points and drive more conversions.
SEO also plays a critical role in growth marketing by helping your content reach a wider audience.
By targeting high-value keywords, optimising your website and content for search engines, and building high-quality backlinks, you can improve the visibility of your content and increase your website traffic and, ultimately, conversions and revenue.
Data analysis & user feedback
Data is the fuel for your growth marketing strategy. Without it, you’re flying blind.
Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar give you valuable insights into your user behaviours and can help you identify friction points in your customer journey.
For example, if users drop off at a specific point in your checkout process, you can investigate and optimise that step to provide a better experience and drive more conversions.
In addition to quantitative data, qualitative insights from direct user feedback are also extremely valuable.
Surveys, interviews, and customer interviews can offer a deeper understanding of customer wants, needs, and frustrations, which you can use to optimise your marketing and improve customer engagement.
If you’re not sure where to start with this, our UX specialists can help.
Tips for Creating a Strong Growth Marketing Strategy
Now that we’ve covered what tactics to use, here are some tips for planning an effective and sustainable growth marketing strategy.
Start with clear goals
Before you do anything, you need to set clearly defined goals for your marketing strategy.
Without defined goals, your growth marketing can quickly become scattered, with no clear indication of what success looks like. This can make it more difficult to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns or make the right changes to your approach.
Your goals need to be specific, easily measurable, and aligned with your overall business objectives.
Whether you’re aiming to increase website traffic, increase conversion rates, or improve customer retention, having clear targets will help guide your marketing and ensure that each decision you make is getting closer to achieving your goals.
Research & understand your audience
Understanding your audience is fundamental to creating an effective growth marketing strategy.
By creating detailed customer personas, you can tailor your messaging and campaigns to meet your audience’s specific needs and preferences and solve their problems.
To do this, you need to know more than just demographics – you need to understand your customers’ behaviours, motivations, and challenges.
Accurate data is vital here. Look at your customer data to find behavioural trends and patterns in different segments of your audience. Try to answer questions like, what motivates them to complete a purchase? What are their biggest challenges? What are their most common objections?
Understanding your audience at a granular level will allow you to create marketing messages that deeply resonate with your customers, helping to increase engagement and conversions.
Prioritise testing & optimisation
To make your growth marketing successful, testing isn’t just an option – it’s a necessity.
A/B testing, multivariate testing, and other types of experimentation will help you identify what works and what doesn’t with your marketing.
To make your testing as valuable as possible, you should approach it systematically. Start with change suggestions based on real data and customer insights, and run controlled tests that allow you to isolate the changes and collect accurate testing data.
Doing this testing in a controlled and gradual way will allow you to identify what changes have led to improvements and will help you deliver consistent improvements to your long-term marketing.
Automate time-consuming tasks
Automation can be a massive help by allowing you to grow your marketing efforts while still being efficient with your time and making things personalised.
Tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Hootsuite allow you to automate and schedule email campaigns, social media posts, and customer segmentation, freeing your time to focus on more big-picture tasks.
The important thing to remember here is not to become a corporate-sounding robot. Automated marketing can still be human.
Using customer behaviour data from your website, you can create automated but incredibly personalised follow-up emails to encourage your customers to complete abandoned purchases or place repeat orders.
As long as you personalise your automated marketing, you save time and increase your engagement and conversions at the same time.
Create a great user experience
Even if the rest of your marketing is spot on, a bad user experience can ruin your chances of success.
Creating a seamless user experience is vital for naturally converting prospects into customers and retaining them long-term. Every touchpoint with your brand should be smooth and effortless for your customers, whether they’re navigating your website, signing up for your newsletter, or buying a product.
Important metrics to look at are your bounce rate and abandoned carts.
If your bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site without visiting other pages or converting) is high or if many users leave halfway through the checkout process, it’s a sign that your website has usability issues that need addressing.
Using engagement data and customer feedback, you can identify areas of your user experience that can be improved and take steps to optimise these areas and improve conversion rates.
Focus on retention just as much as acquisition
Customer acquisition is important, but retention is often more cost-effective and can lead to higher profitability.
As we’ve already covered, growth marketing focuses on attracting new customers and keeping them engaged and coming back for more. And things like loyalty programmes, personalised content, and re-engagement campaigns help maintain strong relationships with your customer base.
Aside from increasing customer lifetime value, prioritising retention can lead to organic growth through word-of-mouth and referrals.
Happy and engaged customers are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family, which can create a cycle of growth that can help you limit the need to advertise through paid channels.
Implement growth loops
Growth loops are self-reinforcing and help drive consistent growth.
Unlike a typical marketing funnel, which ends once a customer converts, a growth loop is a circular system where user actions lead to more users.
A referral programme is a great example: customers refer friends, those friends become customers, and they refer more people – creating a continuous cycle of customers and growth.
Here’s a great article that explains more about product growth loops.
Incorporating growth loops in your strategy can help you acquire new customers without significantly investing in new campaigns or strategies. Building these loops naturally into your products or services can also lead to faster and more sustainable growth over a long-term period.
Speak to our Growth Specialists
Looking to create an effective growth marketing strategy for your business?
Our Growth Specialists can create a clear, data-driven growth marketing strategy to help you tackle your growth challenges, reach your marketing goals, and create consistent, stable growth for your business.
To speak to a Growth Specialist, book a discovery call or fill out our contact form.
