Today’s environment may not be very friendly to companies, as competition is the order of the day. Standing out is not an easy task. Thanks to Growth Marketing and its strategies, a company can make its way in the midst of the diversity of proposals that exist today.
To break through the competition, the key will always be to have a creative, constant and convincing marketing strategy. A strategy that not only helps to acquire customers, but also encourages virality, word of mouth and organic growth. All this is achieved with Growth Marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth Marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a specific metric you want to reach, growth marketing is a method you can apply to achieve it.
Building on the traditional marketing model, growth marketing adds other aspects to growth: value-added publications, SEO optimization, data-driven email marketing campaigns, creative copywriting and technical analysis of every aspect of the user experience. All of these strategies are quickly applied to achieve solid and sustainable growth.
Actions to implement growth marketing
- Analyze the results and conduct further experiments as needed
- Determine areas to test and improve
- Develop and design experiments to optimize identified processes
- Conduct experiments to test hypothesized improvements
- Growth marketers use the scientific method to design and conduct these experiments.
- Within an organization, growth marketing is an analytically minded function that focuses more on the data side of marketing than the creative aspects.
What makes growth marketing different?
Growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel. When done well, it adds value throughout the entire marketing funnel, attracting users, engaging them, attracting them, retaining them, and ultimately converting them into advocates for your brand.
These data-driven marketers are heavily involved in crafting a strategy, trying new experiments and failing fast to hit on what works.
But growth marketing is also a random process, as some strategies may work and others may not. The only way to be sure that the path will be fruitful is trial and error.
Which companies hire growth marketing professionals?
There are many companies that are dedicated to building Growth Marketing teams, but truth be told, most opportunities are found in established tech companies or tech startups.
Growth Marketing job descriptions have more similarities than differences. Both companies want candidates to have strategic skills and a passion for data analytics.
The difference mainly centers on the smaller company wanting someone to launch and scale something from scratch. From the job offer, it appears that you have slightly less resources, but probably a bit more freedom. This is likely to be typical of any growth marketing role for a company that has yet to firmly establish itself as an industry leader.
Differences between Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking
Although the terms “growth marketing” and “Growth Hacking.” are often used interchangeably and many tend to link them, there are some subtle differences between these roles in many companies.
Growth hackers are more like expert consultants hired to solve a specific problem, and to solve it quickly. They are tasked, often on a shoestring budget, to find creative solutions to difficult problems. For a growth hacker, speed is everything, and problems must be solved yesterday.
Growth marketers, on the other hand, tend to take a longer-term approach and projection. They have to strategize on how to scale many different SaaS growth metrics across many different dimensions, and how to do so sustainably
Growth tricks can be thought of as something akin to day trading in the stock market. Sure, you can make money this way, but it’s not necessarily going to be a stable source of income over the long term.
An effective growth marketing process needs the input of growth hacking as it is a sustainable practice based on sound principles. In this sense, growth marketing is the opposite of day trading: it is about investing for the long term based on data-driven metrics that are always being optimized.
How can Growth Marketing be applied?
Growth Marketing can be applied to many areas of your business. It is best to approach growth marketing in the AAARRR (or pirate metrics) framework, which encompasses all the major components of marketing:
Awareness
Awareness includes brand-building efforts that educate potential customers about your brand and solution. This can encompass tactics such as paid campaigns, social media outreach, SEO-optimized content and company news.
Traditionally, marketers have leveraged digital advertising (especially on Google) to test the message and subsequent impact on website traffic. However, as the digital advertising landscape matures and competitive differentiation becomes more difficult, growth marketing approaches must become more focused and results-oriented.
For example, marketers may consider testing multiple variations of the message for the same audience to see which one generates the most engagement. We’re also seeing marketers leverage “brand generation” tactics (such as paid campaigns that include exclusive content offers) to help drive both brand awareness and conversion.
In addition, social platforms – especially LinkedIn – offer immense opportunities as a driver of awareness and expansion. Social media should be an essential component of growth marketing in the coming years. Experimentation with LinkedIn audience segmentation represents a business-critical opportunity for growth marketing teams looking to both drive awareness and customer proximity.
Acquisition
Acquisition is nothing more than is the process of lead generation and net new customer acquisition, whether through gated content, chatbots, a freemium signup or anything else.
Activation
User activation can be defined as the process of getting people to use the product or service they purchase as much or as quickly as possible. The customer onboarding process is part of this. As customer experience grows in importance in the B2B world, this area is increasingly the domain of marketers and revenue teams.
Customer onboarding initiatives can play a key role in growth marketing approaches through the use of customer data and analytics and the promotion of “user-generated content” tactics. Experimentation with these can play a key role in growth marketing and will likely become key components of demand generation in the future.
Revenue
Revenue includes all actions that make a company money, such as customers buying a product, signing a service contract, or upgrading their current product or service.
Growth marketers can address revenue-related metrics by experimenting with pricing strategies or how prices are displayed on the pricing page. They might also examine upselling tactics, such as sending messages when a user is close to their plan limit.
A growth marketer could look at a pricing page and run experiments around how tiers are displayed.
Data enrichment tools allow new customer insights to be identified, leading to improved marketing opportunities.
Retention
Customer retention is critical for any subscription business. Keeping customers delighted is a key component of this, but improving retention can also be a growth marketing play.
Data enrichment and customer data science, once prohibitively expensive or resource-intensive for many organizations of scale, are now affordable. These technologies provide greater insight into your customer opportunities, helping you better design customer outreach and engagement strategies that drive an improvised overall experience with your brand.
Referrals
Ideally, people are so happy with your products or services that they simply refer new business to you, but marketers can also create referral programs to incentivize this.
A growth marketer could experiment with different incentives or promotional methods around the referral program to increase results.
Essential growth marketing goals and metrics
Goal: Get traffic to your website
One of the main goals of any growth marketer will be to increase traffic numbers. There are several ways to achieve this
Organic traffic
It’s all about the users who come to your site after performing a search on an search engine traffic important. To optimize organic traffic, you want to do all the things that help you rank near the top of the search results. This includes sharing your quality content with other sites to build inbound links and producing content that has been fully optimized for search engines.
Paid traffic
These are the users coming to your site through your advertising channels. You want to control how much you are spending, the number of impressions your ads generate and the CPA (cost per acquisition).
Lately, more and more companies are experimenting with native advertising, which is the placement of non-traditional ads that are made to look more content-centric.
Referral traffic
This is all traffic that does not come from a major search engine. So, traffic from social media, as well as all the other sites that link to your content.
If you’re doing things right, people will start sharing and talking about your content simply because they are naturally inclined to do so. This is the definition of viral content. Tracking the volume and source of all referral traffic will help you optimize in this regard.
You can use competitor analysis to gain an advantage, such as monitoring your competitors’ spikes in social media engagement and then trying to reverse their success.
Guest blogging can also be a good way to generate referral traffic.
On-site metrics
It is always critical to know what is happening on your website. It is important to know where visitors are coming from, what actions they take and how long they spend on the site. Another important figure to monitor is the bounce rate, as it is a great indicator of the relevance of your content or landing page.
Goal: get leads and improve conversion rate
All the visitors in the world mean nothing if they don’t convert into new users. In this case, these are the key areas to optimize.
Conversion rate
what is the overall conversion rate of people coming to your site through any avenue? You should pay special attention to pages that have a significant drop-off compared to other parts of the site.
Landing page conversion rates
what is the conversion rate of users coming to your landing page? There are many ways to optimize this aspect, such as modifying text, design and layout.
One interesting area to experiment with is the headline length of the content you display on a landing page. For example, it has been shown that shorter, punchier headlines tend to yield better results.
Blog/email subscribers
That should be your first priority. If you’re already creating good content, then you need to make sure that you’re driving the actions you want…. You can find this out by analyzing things like click-through rate, subscriber growth and shares.
Upgrade from free trials to paid plans
If you have a freemium product, you ultimately want to convert free trial users into paying customers.
Goal: retain customers
Reduce customer churn
Customer churn refers to the percentage of users who sign up for your service, but then stop using it. This is a particularly critical metric for some companies. If you lose a significant portion of your customers, you simply won’t be able to reach the critical mass of users you need to start earning serious revenue.
Analyze all the issues why users stop using the service and try ruthlessly to plug the holes. One area that could be a stumbling block? The user interface. Make sure it’s smooth and seamless, or people will leave.
Increase average order value
By tracking and analyzing user behavior, you can start targeting users in ways that increase average order value. Areas that can be explored include bundling, targeting customers based on past behavior and upselling.
Increasing lifetime value
Once you have a customer on board, how can you maximize the value you get from them? Strategies may include surveying users to find new features they want, encouraging customers to switch to an annual billing cycle, or providing targeted, quality customer service.
Goal: build a brand
Once you have a trusted, reliable company that offers a great user experience, you can leverage this to build a true brand. That is, your name can become synonymous with quality in that particular industry.
It all starts with creating a great company culture. Next, the brand-building process can be aided by a smart PR campaign, influencer marketing, positive word-of-mouth and referral programs.
What you should keep in mind
Growth marketing is not the right marketing method for every company. It requires a solid foundation from which to grow, so if your company is still in the startup phase, you should establish yourself before devoting too many resources to growth marketing.
If you’re at the point where scaling your company is your main goal or you’re seeing high growth and need to adjust your marketing efforts to get more ROI, consider implementing some growth marketing experiments to improve pirate metrics.
