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What is growth marketing? Why is it important?
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The term “growth marketing” has risen in popularity recently, but what does it actually mean?
Some companies use it as a synonym for performance marketing, while others append the word “growth” to existing titles to cast the role as more quantitative or experimental.
While there’s some debate as to what growth marketing truly is, and how much it actually differs from traditional marketing, it’s an area of marketing with great impact and lasting power.
Growth marketers are often hired to build and optimize specific channels , such as SEO or conversion rate optimization. Sometimes, a growth marketer is a generalist whose job is to test more broadly and choose the highest impact channels.
Growth marketers look for repeatable and compounding efforts sometimes called growth loops. While singular campaigns like public relations efforts or email blasts can feed into growth marketing programs, they’re not usually the core focus.
By measuring and analyzing key metrics such as customer acquisition, retention, and referral rates, growth marketers can refine their strategies to optimize their campaigns for maximum impact.
Not everything is growth marketing
Growth marketing is a specific subset in marketing at-large, yet modern job descriptions attach “growth” to a title with little difference in the actual job requirements.
Paid acquisition, performance, and demand generation marketers are often grouped together and called “growth marketing managers,” however by doing this the point of a growth marketer gets missed.
Let’s use demand generation as an example:
A demand generation specialist may use top and middle of funnel marketing tactics like paid ads and webinars to build awareness and create interest in a product or category. While they may care about what happens after the event, their primary goal is to generate interest in the event.
A growth marketer on the other hand would focus on a wider range of goals, for instance: Click-throughs from the ads, conversions on the webinar landing page, live attendance rates, engagement during events, post-webinar followup, and sales demos booked.
They may run continuous A/B tests throughout the customer journey to find the optimal headline, image, and copy that drives the most results, then implement those learnings into future endeavors.
Businesses can apply growth marketing principles to demand generation, however, to be done effectively, should be considered separate functions.
While all marketing can and should generate attributable growth for a business, growth marketers are defined by their methodologies, reliance on experimentation and data, and on their position in the org chart (they often sit much closer to product teams).
Growth marketing vs. growth hacking vs. growth product management
Sometimes growth marketing is mistaken for growth hacking. Both often include a scrappy ethos, creativity when executing a concept or campaign, and a general experimental mindset.
Yet, growth hacking is more concerned with short-term results rather than growth marketing overall with the aim to measure information over time.
Growth initiatives can occur in marketing organizations and product organizations. One usually helps the other. Growth product management works more closely with engineers and product designers to develop features that not only drive customer satisfaction, but meet or exceed business growth metrics like new users, referrals, and user monetization.
Key components of growth marketing
Growth marketing functions vary company to company but most growth marketing roles contain the following components.
Multi-disciplinary approach
Growth marketers are sometimes called “T-shaped marketers.” Instead of being a specialist in a specific niche or area, growth marketers tend to exhibit a broader base of skills, while also having a deeper skill set in one or two specific areas or channels.
Because growth marketing is channel and tactic agnostic, growth marketers need to be adaptable and nimble, especially if they are helping grow a company during its earliest stages.
New companies don’t necessarily yet know the most effective channels or methods to get information to customers and bring them in. Growth marketers must use data, experimentation, and research to find and scale the right channels.
Data and measurement
Almost every marketer’s role concerns data and measurement. For growth marketers, data and impact measurement are foundational to what they’re trying to achieve in scaling a company.
Growth marketers usually set up their own tracking especially for marketing analytics (such as setting up LinkedIn Insights tags), monitoring it often. They have strong data literacy and set up dashboards to track campaign performance, read cohort reports, and analyze A/B tests with precision.
Growth marketers use data to help tell a different story about a company. There is a creative flair in how growth marketers source and use their data in analysis and execution. These are analytical marketers looking for any growth lever or opportunity available.
Experimentation
Experimentation is a defining characteristic of growth marketing.
In a marketing experiment, these marketers take different data sourced through research and customer feedback to come up with a hypothesis and measurable benchmarks. Then, they analyze results to gauge efficacy.
The most common type of business experiment is an A/B test, where a control (the existing version of an experience) is tested against a variant (a new version of the experience). Statistical analysis is used to determine what, if any, effect the intervention has had.
Growth marketers deploy A/B tests, and other broader experiments, to test out new tactics, channels, and strategies.
For example, a growth marketer may believe that, in addition to a business’s inbound marketing channel, they could benefit from investing in outbound sales development. Instead of pouring a ton of time and money into it, a growth marketer can set up a minimum viable experiment to see if outbound sales development warrants further investment. This is not only a way to de-risk new investments, but a great way to encourage innovation and constant tinkering.
Customer feedback
Customer feedback is the lifeblood of any company, and especially useful for the marketers helping them to scale.
Growth marketers are known to maintain close relationships with customers through surveys, interviews, and market research.
Quantitative data is extremely important for any business. Customer feedback is useful to integrate into overall goals and metrics because this feedback helps marketers bring customer concerns to campaigns, marketing copy and messaging, and further experiment to encourage more customer satisfaction.
Strategic agility
Growth marketers need to be nimble—and strategic. They can’t rely only on one tool, tactic, or channel for success, and must be willing to move fluidly through many in order to find the best results for a business.
Growth marketers operate without strong dogma or channel preference. To growth marketers, it depends on what the biggest opportunity is for a business. What if SEO is the channel that works best at the moment? Maybe paid acquisition channels are stagnating. Growth marketers need to monitor what’s happening and seek ways to optimize or improve campaign efforts to get more impact.
There’s often a strong level of alignment needed between growth marketers and product or business leadership to understand what the product is meant to achieve, how it’s being communicated to customers, and experiment with familiar or new channels and strategies to lead to greater results.
Full funnel focus
The marketing funnel sometimes dictates where marketers use their efforts and how their roles are shaped. The top of the funnel may mean customer acquisition through a role like brand awareness. Demand generation may be middle to bottom. It all depends but growth marketing usually touches every part of the marketing funnel and following the entire customer journey, start to finish. This includes customer acquisition, but also activation, retention, monetization, and referrals.
Depending on the stage of the company, one growth marketer may be in charge of the entire funnel (common at early stage startups), or growth marketing may be split into separate teams, each in charge of one part of the funnel. For example, a mature organization may have a growth marketing team fully focused on user activation and onboarding.
How to run a growth experiment
Getting a growth experiment up and running takes a few steps. These experiments are in a broad category and can be tailored to whatever a company needs to know in order to improve the business. They can include rigorous controlled experiments,like A/B tests, but sometimes they’re looser in nature, testing channels, and strategies. Before running a growth test, look to the following steps for guidance.
Growing a company takes time, experimentation, and strategy. Growth marketing helps to achieve growth goals with data, testing, and focused areas to run measurable KPIs. While any type of growth may be good for a business, it’s far better to engage in growth marketing techniques and strategies, keeping focused on one area to another, to ensure growth can be sustained, and not collapse.
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