A performance-focused mindset about marketing products and services in today’s competitive markets with less marketing budget.
You have probably heard about Growth Marketing, a buzz word quite often used in the world of startups and digital entrepreneurship. Also, because it is so trendy, many marketers started to refer to themselves as “Growth Marketers”. Though, its definition is not always clear.
Growth Marketing is a relatively young branch of marketing that focuses on attraction, engagement and retention of clients while using experimentations and iterations to identify customers profiles and make campaigns more efficient. By delivering highly customized and relevant messaging that resonates with the client’s needs, growth marketers are able to accelerate a company’s growth through multiple channels (mainly the ones that matters to the consumers).
So what’s the difference between digital marketing and growth marketing?
Most digital marketers very often rely on the same. Send out email campaigns, run a Google Ads campaign with the same 40 keywords, publishing the same type of content for presence on social media. “If it works, why should I change it?” The truth is this might be working today, but they are likely to lose ROI overtime since they are not updating their strategy even as consumers behavior and interests change.
The growth marketers go by a different mindset. They rely on growth hacking principles to experiment with multiple channels, test messaging variations, and continuously adapt their strategy to determine how they can make their marketing expenses more efficient and therefore boost sales. Growth marketers (a.k.a. growth hackers) like to explore different and innovative paths while constantly keeping an eye the analytical metrics ands KPIs to increase their customer base at the lowest cost-per-acquisition possible.
A brief history
The term of growth marketing was first used in 2010 by entrepreneur Sean Ellis, when he was looking to hire a new marketing person. Instead a traditional marketer, he was searching for a professional who would care about marketing efficiency and cost optimization. He aimed to grow his user base as quickly as possible. And this same goal was a central concern for SaaS startups that needed to surpass their competitors or die.
A decade later, as marketing technology has evolved, growth marketing has matured beyond the “grow quickly” tactics. Today, growth marketers are using A/B or multivariate testing, developing experimental and dynamic content delivered to different user segments, and they are using the results to create highly optimized strategies for each identified user segment, going down to the individual customer level.
Measuring success
Beyond growing the user base fast, growth marketing success can also be measured according to the user engagement, the increase of the lifetime value of each individual user.
A highly customized marketing has proven to cut acquisition costs, increase revenue and improve marketing expenses efficiency. Growth marketing also has revealed to retain more customers and improve their experience.
Growth Marketing Toolbox
Here is a non-exhaustive list of tools so you can start exploring and experimenting growth marketing:
- TrueNorth: Growth marketing management and forecasting software.
- ActiveCampaign: This platform combines CRM, email marketing and automation system in one place.
- Zapier: Connect apps between each other and automate tasks to save time and money.
- Hunter: Find email addresses of prospects at specific companies.
- SimilarTech: Find prospects using specific software technology.
- Drift: A conversational growth platform
- UsabilityHub: Growth through good UX.
- Userpilot: User growth, retention and experience optimization.
- VWO: Conversion rate optimization (CRO) for website, apps and software products.
- Chargebee: A place where you can manage revenue and subscriptions
