Growth marketing is a multi-pronged approach to scaling profits, gaining an edge in a competitive market and driving tangible results with minimal effort. It’s become a respected and core marketing function because of its ability to open opportunities that create massive lift—with minimal effort.
This powerhouse strategy offers an efficient way to acquire, convert, engage, and retain customers over time and gives companies a significant edge in expanding their market share.
In this blog post, we’ll explore everything there is to know about growth marketing—from what it entails to the strategies and tactics marketers use today. Get ready. Here we go.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a holistic approach to marketing that focuses on experimentation and optimization. It is an iterative process that leverages data and analytics to identify and target high-value customers and optimize marketing campaigns for maximum conversions.
This is different from any other type of marketing in that it is highly focused on testing and optimizing. Instead of relying on intuition and guesswork, growth marketers constantly test and refine their campaigns to get the most out of their investment.
By testing different strategies and tactics, you can identify the most effective ways to reach your target audience. This type of marketing requires an understanding of analytics, data-driven decision-making and an ability to think outside the box.
Growth marketing involves several techniques, from social media marketing to email marketing and SMS marketing. It’s a great way to maximize the return on your marketing investment and is especially helpful for startups and small businesses that need to make every dollar count. (And let’s face it, in today’s economy, every company is measuring the impact of every dollar.)
Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing
Growth marketing is a relatively new concept, but it is quickly becoming the go-to approach for many businesses. So, how does growth marketing differ from traditional marketing?
At its core, traditional marketing focuses on creating and delivering messages that appeal to potential customers. It can involve anything from radio and television ads to billboards and even direct mail. Growth marketing, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach.
Rather than focusing on single messages, growth marketing looks at the overall customer experience to identify areas for improvement. This includes everything from product design to user experience and even customer service.
The primary purpose of growth marketing is to increase a business’s metrics and user engagement. To that end, growth marketers will use data and analytics to measure their campaigns’ success and adjust accordingly. This helps them get the most bang for their buck, leading to more conversions and sales.
In short, growth marketing is a far more efficient way of getting customers. Its focus on data and analytics makes it a more efficient approach than traditional marketing, and its ability to track metrics gives businesses a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Key components of growth marketing
We just touched on a few things that growth marketing does, but let’s get more specific and dive into the “how.”
A/B testing
A/B testing is a crucial component of growth marketing. It compares two versions of a website ad, or other marketing assets to determine which version performs better. This testing allows marketers to quickly identify the most effective version of a marketing asset and optimize their campaigns for maximum performance.
When creating an A/B test, focus on testing the elements that are most likely to influence customer behavior. This could include the headline, images, call-to-action or other features likely to impact customer behavior.
Note that A/B testing isn’t a one-and-done process. You should continuously test and refine different elements to identify the most effective combinations.
SEO strategy
You want to make it as easy as possible for your buyers to find you, and that’s where SEO comes in. SEO involves optimizing a website for search engines, such as Google, to ensure that it appears at the top of the search engine results page.
It requires an understanding of how search engines work and how to optimize content for maximum visibility. This involves a combination of on-page optimization (content optimization and keyword research) and off-page optimization (link building).
SEO is an iterative process, and it’s important to test and refine different strategies to make sure you’re always ranking the highest you possibly can. It’s also important to keep up with the latest trends and best practices to ensure your website remains competitive. And trust us—this is key. The world of SEO is always changing.
Data-driven email campaigns
An email is a powerful tool that allows you to reach a large audience with highly-targeted messages. Email campaigns help to build relationships with customers, drive conversions, and promote products and services.
Data-driven email campaigns combine the power of email with data analytics to create highly-targeted and personalized messages. This type of marketing involves segmenting customers based on their behavior and preferences and creating messages tailored to their needs.
It also allows marketers to identify the most effective messages and offers for a given audience, increasing engagement and conversions and building customer relationships.
Personas
Personas are an important part of growth marketing. They are fictional representations of a target customer and are used to help marketers understand the needs and behaviors of their target audience.
This is used to create content that resonates with a target audience and to identify the most effective messages and offers for a given customer segment. This type of marketing requires understanding the customer’s needs, motivations and behaviors.
Building your personas allows you to create highly-targeted and personalized campaigns. By understanding the customer’s needs, marketers can create messages and offers tailored to their target audience.
Ad copy
Ad copy is a critical component of growth marketing. It’s the text that appears in an advertisement and is used to communicate a message to potential customers.
When creating an ad, focus on creating a compelling message that resonates with your target audience. Ad copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive and focus on the product’s or service’s benefit.
Test different ad versions to identify the most effective messages and offers.
How to build a growth marketing strategy
To build a meaningful (and impactful) growth marketing strategy, you need to first have an intimate understanding of your customers’ journey, from how you identify them as a prospect to when they make their purchase—and even beyond. It’s what will guide how you interact with them and how you iterate to optimize results.
Your growth strategy should be all about optimizing the customer journey. (After all, that optimizes your funnel too.) So, without further ado, here are the steps you should take to build your growth marketing strategy.
1. Determine your goals
The first step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy is getting clear on what you want to achieve, your goals. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to increase your customer acquisition rate? Increase your conversion rate? Increase your customer retention rate? Or all of the above?
Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. SMART goals will help you track the progress of your growth marketing efforts and ensure you’re on track to achieving your desired outcomes.
2. Understand your ideal customer profile and personas
An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the types of companies you sell to, the ones that are most likely to become your most valuable customers. This is a step a lot of company’s gloss over (and pay for down the road).
The misstep? A lot of companies define their ICP using only firmographics. The problem there is that firmographics alone are superficial. We find that companies that include exegraphic data into their ICP have a better picture of who to target—and how to talk to them.
From there, it’s also important to understand the personas within the companies you’re targeting. A persona is a fictional character that represents your users and buyers. Knowing who they are is vital in creating strategies to reach and convert them effectively.
When building personas, you should focus on your target customers’ needs, motivations, goals and pain points. This will help you understand their needs and empathize with their pain—which will serve as a solid foundation for building trust.
3. Map your customer journey
The next step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy is mapping your customer journey. Your customer journey is the path your customers take from when they first become aware of your company to when they make a purchase. By clearly defining the journey and the stages within it, you’ll be better poised to serve them at any given time.
The customer journey typically consists of the following:
- Awareness stage: Your customers become aware of your product.
- Consideration stage: They’re considering whether or not to purchase your product.
- Decision stage: They’re deciding whether or not to make a purchase.
At each stage of the customer journey, your potential customer will have different questions. At the awareness stage, they may ask questions like, “What is your product?” and “How does it work?” At the consideration stage, they may ask, “Why should I buy your product?” and “What are the benefits?” At the decision stage, they may ask, “How do I purchase your product?” and “What are the payment options?”
Understanding the questions and objections they may have at each stage will help you proactively address them, making the entire experience smooth. The other element to take into consideration is how to reach them during each stage of their journey.
It takes time to really understand where to effectively (and efficiently) reach potential customers during each phase of the journey. So, test. You may find that social media is great for awareness and that email is better for consideration, but other channels may work more effectively for your audience.
4. Build creative and intentional content for every stage of the journey
Next, create assets and content that will resonate with your potential customers at each stage of the funnel, from awareness to decision. And remember, the content needs to be compelling enough to move them to the next stage.
At the awareness stage, you should focus on creating content that will help introduce your product and get your customers interested. Include blog posts, videos, infographics and even podcasts.
At the consideration stage, you should focus on creating content to help your customers understand why they should purchase your product. Case studies, product demos and customer testimonials work great.
For the decision stage, create content that helps your customers make a purchase: sales pages, special offers and even payment options.
5. Go live
Once you’ve created your campaigns, it’s time to launch them. This is where you’ll start seeing results from your growth marketing efforts.
When launching your campaigns, ensure that they’re well-targeted. Target the right audience based on your ICP, and make sure the campaigns resonate with them. Additionally, make sure that your campaigns are well-timed.
6. Test, test, test
Testing is what growth marketing is all about. You should test different elements of your campaigns, such as the copy, the visuals, the timing and the channels. This will help you see what’s working and what’s not and adjust accordingly to drive the results you want.
When testing your campaigns, track your progress. Make sure that you’re tracking your metrics, such as customer acquisition rate, conversion rate and customer retention rate.
7. Repeat
Repeating the process is the last step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy. Growth marketing is an ongoing process, and it’s important to test, optimize continually and repeat. It continuously improves your campaigns and ensures they’re effective.
Final thoughts
Creating a successful growth marketing strategy can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right tools and techniques, you can create a successful growth marketing strategy that will help you acquire, convert and retain customers.
If you’re looking to make the biggest impact possible on your growth marketing strategy, start by getting clear on who you’re targeting. Afterall, if you’re targeting the wrong ICP from the beginning, you’re spending resources—time and money—on accounts that will never close or will churn quickly.
Let us help you avoid that. Contact us, and we’ll build you a free AI-powered ICP and even give you a free list of target accounts that fit your profile.