What is Growth Marketing
Growth Marketing (and Growth Hacking) is a marketing strategy, which most important goal is to produce growth with the least amount of resources as possible.
Growth Marketing is a combination of marketing (notably digital marketing), technical expertise, product development, and sales.
Growth marketing utilizes highly scalable methods that produce rapid growth when found.
In growth marketing, every possible method is used for growth, collecting data, and answering questions to make a more growth-friendly business.
Only utilizing one aspect of the tool kit doesn’t generate a powerful growth marketing strategy to be implemented.
Growth marketing doesn’t only focus on the end of the sales funnel. It takes all of the processes of the funnel into consideration.
- How to gain more customers?
- How to keep your customers happy?
- How to make repeat purchases from clients?
The mentality of growth marketing is speed, through fast implementation, testing, and the use of data, to make better growth-enabling decisions. It’s critical to always experiment with new ideas, methods, and combinations to find the right solutions for every situation.
Usage of analytics in growth marketing enables businesses to change negative results into positive ones. Analytics tells us what aspects of our strategy is a potential failure. The goal is to pinpoint the successful elements of each strategy and implement the best ones in a new iteration to achieve more growth.
A company that has mastered growth marketing has built the right team to lead it, implemented the principals to its business model, is ready for a change if required.
Growth Marketing Strategies
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Web Analytics
- Conversion Optimization (CRO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Technical/Engineering Capabilities (Website and product development)
- Strategic Knowledge Management
- Marketing Automation
- Use of Innovative Technologies
The best scalable strategies can be found for every goal with creative experimentation and testing.
Asking the right questions is essential when determining the use of a strategy. The questions should align with current and future business goals.
Example questions to be solved:
- How to increase sales in x time?
- What is the potential amount of leads that can be achieved currently?
- What would be the highest returning online traffic source to invest.
- Can the current iteration of the products compete in the marketplace well?
- What would be a real growth scenario for next year?
- What kind of content would create the most visits on the website?
- What are the best business metrics to use?
For every goal and question, there’s a strategy to be tested.
Creative testing and leading with data, create the best solutions for any goals, whether its B2B or B2C.
Find the strategy that works for the business and scale it accordingly. Every business is different and requires varying strategies to succeed profitably.
Growth Marketing Process
Planning Goals -> Testing – > Data and Analytics -> Decicions
The four simultaneous processes start with planning out the wanted goals and usable methods.
Then comes the testing phase, in which the goals are tried to be achieved with the methods chosen.
Accumulated data is used to analyze the results of the experimentation.
In the last phase, decisions are made based on the available data. Best results are taken into consideration when planning the next round testing.
The cycle continues until desired goals are met.
Constant communication with stakeholders and analyzation of data in every step increases the chances to recognize the best and worst strategies from each other early on.
The benefit of growth marketing cycle is that every phase develops even further with every iteration. Goals get more complex with deeper knowledge, and better ways of testing are found.
AAARRR - Metrics
In the process, we can take into consideration the key metrics of a sales funnel and classify them with AAARRR- metrics (Pirate Metrics).
After the process will be easier to understand and implement as the strategy develops.
Brand Awareness
- Website traffic
- Click-Through-Rates (CTR)
- Impressions
- User Behavior on Website
- Social media shares, likes, and comments
Acquisition
- % of users who become customers or leads
- How many leads have been generated in a given time?
- Cost of Acquisition (CAC)
- Email click-through-rate
Activation
- Time spent on activating a prospect into a client.
- How many sales are generated in a given time?
- Repeat customers
Revenue
- Average deal size
- Monthly sales generated by a new customer against old customers
- Yearly sales per category and expected sales per category.
Retention
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Customer Retention
- Customer churn
- Length of time of CLV
- Customer satisfaction
- Product and Service usage metrics
Referral
- NPS-score
- Social media shares
- Customer review conversion rates
- Share of referral business in sales.
Read more about AAARRR – Metrics.
In the process, these metrics show information on where there are chances for growth, possible problems in funnel or business, and where to invest the most.
How to start using growth strategies in a company
- Recognize your companies strengths and weaknesses in digital marketing.
- Recognize the potential of your technical team.
- Recognize your companies potential to collect data and lead with it.
What can your company of these three things do efficiently now?
Improve your strengths and potential through educating the team and/or outsourcing parts of the tasks.
Outsourcing:
Maintain strategic management of the outsourced team by listing key problems that need to be solved. Leave the execution methods, and ideas come from the outsourced team. Execution requires quick decisions, and it can’t be micromanaged well.
Find a partner company to do all the tasks necessary for a complete growth marketing suite. You can also divide the different tasks accordingly into projects done by several companies.
It’s recommended to have a single company do every task when outsourcing growth marketing. The process requires good communication between teams.
Internally:
Build a team that consists and can perform the task mentioned above. Key aspects of creating the team are their ability to communicate and perform freely under given goals.
A sustainable and profitable growth marketing team develops better over time as data improve its workflow.
Increased data develops better opportunities, which need to be tackled right away. Success today doesn’t guarantee success in the future.
The process of growth marketing is always developing, and it requires quick and creative decisions to be appropriated properly. Only then, the best strategies for growth are found.
Engaio Digital is a Helsinki-based growth marketing agency that designs agile growth strategies for companies.