Growth marketing is a step ahead of marketing and sales. It’s a process that uses data-driven methods to drive growth by using insights from marketing campaigns, outputs from experiments, and even insights from people who face customers. 

Its outlook might change across companies. Growth marketing may involve only paid social advertisements in an e-commerce setup. But in a small SaaS, you might see the complete emphasis of growth marketing only on SEO or maybe a few search ads. 

By carefully analyzing data and feedback, growth marketers discover the most effective methods in the ever-changing business landscape.

Techniques that work today or for one business may not be effective in the long run because of emerging trends, applications, and evolving user interests. 

 

What is Growth Marketing

 

Growth marketing is a type of marketing optimization process that goes beyond typically marketing a product and instead helps businesses grow by enabling customer loyalty. 

It does that by maximizing your efforts utilizing several core digital marketing methods like A/B testing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and data analysis to implement better, more effective, and other cross-channel strategies and campaigns to promote growth.

Growth marketing shortens the innovation cycle rather than relying on continuous innovation efforts with no long-term goal in sight.

It helps you learn more about your key user demographics, pain points, their willingness and capacity to pay, and behavior and interaction with your product.

 

How Is Growth Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing?

 

As we’ve mentioned, growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey and marketing funnel rather than the top. Traditional marketing may concentrate on brand awareness and customer acquisition without spending time on what happens after a prospect converts into a customer.

But growth marketing focuses on the entire marketing funnel, from brand awareness to retention and beyond. Let’s quickly discuss a few examples of growth marketing activities:

 

1 – Using email marketing to increase brand loyalty through offering special deals to subscribers.

 

2 – Providing a quality product based on customer feedback and continuous improvements of that product.

 

3 – Redesigning marketing campaigns using results from A/B testing to improve key performance indicators (KPIs) and increase conversion rates and lead generation.

 

4 – Running a search engine optimization process to improve the search rankings of key converting pages. 

 

5 – Improving user interaction using heat maps for easy navigation.  

 

All these activities have one goal in mind. Make everything easy for the customers and remove friction in their experience. 

 

 

Key Aspects of Growth Marketing

 

1 – All Hands On Deck Approach

 

Growth marketing never happens in isolation. It requires a collective mentality where each person thinks about a role to play in the overall growth. Everyone thinks about ways to attract more users and keep them engaged.

This focus on growth applies across different departments, from product development to customer support. Each team has valuable insights and a unique perspective to offer, inspiring fresh approaches to attract, delight users, and serve users.

The marketing team in specific serves as a central hub, integrating and analyzing data from the rest of the teams. This cross-team collaboration helps shape future campaigns. 

 

– Product development primarily focuses on feature requests, improvements, and related products. Their upcoming plans and goals can be used in marketing campaigns.

 

– Analytics track unusually high or low web or mobile traffic, data that can motivate marketing teams to try something new or unique with their digital campaigns.

 

– Customer support regularly communicates with users, and their discussions are valuable for marketers. Customers express appreciation for positive aspects and point out issues to fix.

 

Growth marketing can only start with a source of data that prompts innovation.

Use that data to brainstorm new strategies, then test those new strategies with a pilot program or an experiment to see whether they’re worth expanding.

When starting out with growth marketing, try a few different tactics, and only make small changes to your newsletter, emails, or social media calendar.

The excitement happens when you see how these small changes impact your product engagement, downloads, or subscription renewals, giving you clues as to what new direction will work best.

It’s also important to bring small changes because you’re never sure if a big change can have a drastic effect.

 

2 – A/B Testing

 

With the latest marketing and analysis tools at your disposal, you can directly compare results from different marketing collateral. For an A/B test, you create two different content pieces, push them for a pilot experiment, and then analyze the results to select the one that performed best, and why. 

For example, you might try two versions of your email newsletter to two small but similar groups of subscribers. The first newsletter can be showcasing features of your product and the second might focus merely on design upgrades. 

Again, you would set up each test email to go out to a portion of your mailing list—maybe you split it in half or send one version to a small sample. You should also set the metric or goal you’re trying to meet with this test. 

 

– Are you looking to increase open rates? 

– Decrease unsubscribes?

 

The test results will show you which email and newsletter template helped you meet those marketing goals so that you can direct your efforts to the winning email.

Data like this can become part of a long-term strategy of continuous improvement, where you compare your old best strategies with new ideas. 

You’ll need to have a record of what’s been tried before, so make sure you track your efforts.

 

3 – Customer Feedback

 

Customers today are way more educated about products. When they reach out to you, there is a big chance they already have quite a good idea of what they’re talking about. So it’s important to collect, understand, accept, or deny with respect their feedback. 

There are multiple ways to collect customer feedback. You can use surveys, feedback collection boards, or even email campaigns. But what’s important is to collect it centrally in a way that has no friction for a user to feel hesitant. 

To collect meaningful information, create more opportunities to engage with your users. Try to go beyond the quantitative information gained from your site and reach out and get their thoughts on your product.

Survey Monkey can be a great tool for this research. With surveys, you can have in-depth answers using open-ended questions.

But running surveys is a difficult and time-consuming process. It’s not continuous as you have to plan it like a campaign each time you want to get some ideas validated.

Using feedback boards with a chat-like structure can get you a lot of in-depth information pretty easily. You can look into Canny & FeedBear for this. 

Feedback will tell you exactly the problems, frictions, and frustrations your customers are facing that if removed will improve their experience and loyalty to your product. 

 

4 – Responsiveness and Flexibility

 

Growth marketing often means responding quickly to new opportunities. To stay nimble, you’ll want to organize short campaigns with plenty of time to analyze the results.

Depending on your culture and structure, the cycle may be longer or shorter, but it never takes too long to respond in time.

Growth marketing is responsive. You don’t assume that the same kind of advertising or content will work forever. Instead, you keep trying new things based on the feedback that both analytics and customer surveys tell you. 

 

5 – Multi-Channel Marketing Efforts

 

There should always be articulation, coherence, and coordination in your marketing channels and the effort you put into the process. 

A smart marketing team when working under a growth marketing perspective utilizes multiple channels, including email marketing, text (SMS) marketing, direct mail, social media, and more.

This can help you find the best ways to boost your marketing efforts and increase your return on investment (ROI).

Being flexible and testing your marketing strategies helps you understand user behavior better. Based on that, you can improve them to achieve optimal results. 

For example, you might determine that email marketing has a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than push notifications but a lower response rate. Based on this data, you can improve your email marketing efforts and cut-down push notifications.

 

Growth Marketing Best Practices to Implement a Successful Growth Strategy

 

– Gather information about potential customers and analyze each piece of feedback carefully.

 

– Use the information you’ve gathered to develop a few simple A/B tests.

 

– Create and run sample email campaigns, social media posts, blogs, podcasts, and other content.

 

– Track engagement data on your test features.

 

– Analyze what works best and add those tactics to a growing library of customized best practices.

 

– Reach out to other teams for new data and feedback before starting again.

 

Final Thoughts

A good growth marketing team views everything that goes on in their company with a marketing mindset. Look out for opportunities to leverage feedback and data. Take every opportunity to revisit your marketing plan, tweaking it for optimization.

It’s challenging to thrive without utilizing a well researched growth strategy specifically developed using data and feedback. Follow the tips we’ve shared to build and follow a great growth marketing plan that suits your business needs.

 

Ready to scale up your business with growth marketing? Look no further!

Our experts will guide you through every step of the process, from analyzing marketing campaigns and customer insights to implementing cross-channel strategies.

In our free consultancy session, we’ll dive deep into your data and use-case helping you identify the most effective growth marketing techniques to attract and retain loyal customers.

Schedule your free growth marketing consultancy session today and let’s take your business to the next level together.