Growth marketing: What is it?

A lot of marketers call themselves “growth marketers,” but a growth marketing Strategy is for drawing in, interacting with, and keeping customers that place a strong emphasis on constant experimentation as well as the distinctive, shifting motivations and preferences of each individual client.

You may optimize your company’s growth quickly through a variety of channels, especially the ones that matter most to your customers, by developing and delivering highly targeted, individualized messages aligned to their demands. In addition to highlighting some typical situations where a growth marketing team may improve the user experience, let’s take a closer look at what it means to be a growth marketer.

What exactly does “growth marketing” mean?

The same tried-and-true methods are frequently used in traditional marketing to connect with consumers. Hold a sale, distribute a mass email, and utilize the same 50 keywords for a Google AdWords campaign. Even if you achieve some success, returns are likely to decrease over time because you aren’t altering your plan to make your money go further.

In contrast, growth marketers experiment often with various channels and tactics using growth hacking approaches, gradually refining their experiments to find the most effective way to optimize their marketing budget. Growth hackers were eager to deploy a variety of creative experiments and ongoing analysis to fast expand their user base at the lowest feasible cost. Entrepreneur Sean Ellis first used the phrase in 2010 when looking for someone to fill a new marketing position.

One decade later, growth marketing has advanced past the growth hacking “get-growth-quick” strategies. That doesn’t imply, though, that the effective aspects of its ascent to prominence have been overlooked. Growth marketing continues to rely on its foundations in experimentation, testing, and growth and applies these tenets to campaigns all throughout the customer experience.

It has been demonstrated that developing a highly tailored marketing strategy can reduce acquisition costs by half, boost revenues by up to 15%, and boost marketing spend efficiency by 30%.

The essential elements of a growth marketing approach

Metrics like customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, customer retention rates, and client lifetime value can be the foundation of a growth marketing plan. Here are some of the most effective strategies used by growth marketers today to draw in, convert, build, and keep loyal consumers. All of these strategies are often employed in the e-commerce industry, but they can also be helpful for businesses with physical locations.

A/B Testing

 One of the key components of a potent growth marketing strategy is A/B testing, or better yet, multivariate testing. Email marketing, landing sites, social media ads, and other forms can all benefit from the usage of A/B testing and multivariate. To determine whether the version of your content (with modifications to visuals, copy, design, and other features) does a better job of engaging your audience and boosting your conversion rate, you must either implement an “A” and a “B” test or a series of numerous tests.

Future marketing campaigns can then be tailored to that variant, iterating on your accomplishments to get better results with each test. It’s crucial to keep in mind that just because the “B” test performed well with one audience segment, the “C” test might do better with a different one. Send your A/B tests out individually rather than in batches to better understand the material that will resonate with each audience segment. Then, continue testing fresh variants to improve performance.

Cross-channel marketing

According to your audience’s preferences, cross-channel marketing focuses on creating a strategic channel plan to contact your clients. These channels may include email marketing, SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, and others. You should concentrate on the individual user when integrating a cross-channel marketing strategy into your growth marketing strategy in order to understand their communication preferences and then create your campaigns accordingly.

In order to tailor future campaigns to focus on push offers, A/B testing can first let you realize that a specific customer responds to push message offers at a 60% greater rate than email marketing offers, for example. Building a comprehensive marketing strategy that incorporates many channels is also beneficial since it will enable you to interact with your audience wherever they are through contextual campaigns that reveal their prior online activity on each platform.

Customer lifecycle

The journey that your consumers take as they discover, interact with, purchase from, convert, and reengage with your business is known as the customer lifecycle. Growth marketers concentrate on three crucial lifecycle stages for simplification: activation, nurturing, and reactivation. Each stage contributes differently to the client experience and is frequently identified by particular campaigns.

The activation stage is the first phase of the lifecycle, during which businesses try to pique the interest and attention of consumers. To establish familiarity and credibility, growth marketers use welcome, onboarding, trial, and other introductory tactics to target clients.

Businesses interact and nurture customers throughout the nurturing stage to strengthen relationships. Most of the cross-channel marketing that brands send to their customers during this stage includes sales, promotions, current updates, newsletters, and other things. Re-engagement is the main focus of the last stage of reactivation.

Campaigns for growth marketing, for instance

Making sure your existing consumers continue to purchase more of your goods and services is known as customer retention. Customers today have more options than ever when picking what to buy and from whom, so businesses must work hard to gain their trust. Brand sentiment can be raised by showing your clients that they are more than just a name and a dollar sign in your database.

The best approach to keep your loyal consumers coming back for more is through loyalty marketing. For instance, if your company offers a membership club, consider ways to reward members’ participation as a thank-you for their business. Campaigns emphasizing benefits like exclusive access, early access, or tier-based status awards confirm enduring brand devotion. By taking insights from previous customer conversions and fostering these desirable behaviors with a segmented loyalty program, you can maintain a strong relationship with your audience.

Referral programs

Marketers continually evaluate and improve their offers in an effort to use their most effective kind of advertising—current customers—to draw in new users. A strong reference can act as potent social evidence for attracting new users since 83% of customers say they trust referrals from friends and family more than any other form of advertising, according to Nielsen. Consider segmenting audience groups and distributing different types of incentives to each group in order to test referral offers: Finding the sweet spot where your referral conversions per dollar invested are maximized is the objective.

For examples of top-notch referral systems, look at successful SaaS brands: For instance, Dropbox started providing a two-sided referral scheme in which, upon the recommendation of a new user, 500MB of storage space was given to both the current user and the new user at no additional cost. The company raised overall signups by 60% while significantly reducing its ad spend to gain new members.

Onboarding

Once a new user has registered for your service or visited your website, you have the perfect chance to increase their engagement with your brand and gather more information that will enable you to create better user experiences. Remember that your goal is to improve the user experience for new users, so setting up a multi-channel onboarding process where they are likely to interact with valuable material might be beneficial.

For instance, you might send a straightforward “Welcome!” message as your initial message, followed quickly by a message asking users what kinds of things they are most interested in. If they would rather receive notifications by email or mobile, a different message might inquire. The sequence can then be continued based on the user’s specific preferences, and you can optimize the subsequent offers you make to them to increase interaction.

Engagement at the top of the funnel

Too much pressure for a quick sale when trying to draw in new clients can have the opposite effect. Instead, you should develop a long-term approach that makes it easier for people to become comfortable with your brand so they may proceed on their own terms. In this situation, a content marketing plan can assist your company in showcasing thought leadership expertise and engaging potential new customers. Create specific buyer personas to better understand your prospects and create content that will appeal to each of them.

Your calls to action may ask visitors to sign up for your email newsletter or claim a free gift like an eBook or checklist. Utilizing A/B testing to enhance your social sharing, adverts, and content headlines will help you attract your target audience through organic social media channels as well as paid social ads and retargeting.

Today, we have the technologies and tools to turn any marketer into a growth marketer. Utilizing techniques to draw clients based on highly individualized preferences, your priority should be on continuously testing and adjusting for higher engagement and a better customer experience. In order to build, test, and iterate along the way to consistently improve the customer journey, make sure that as you experiment with new tactics, you are collecting data as you go.