What exactly is growth marketing

A recent study estimates that over 225 billion dollars are spent on advertising in the U.S every year. With a hard shift away from conventional marketing to digital, advertising is becoming increasingly competitive. 

The rise of new digital technologies, combined with a world that is extremely interconnected and fast-paced, has led to the emergence of a new wave of marketing practices to face the challenge. In place of the old-school conventional marketing strategies, savvy businesses are harnessing tactics focused on explosively growing their brand. 

These modern methods are collectively referred to as “growth” marketing. 

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is looked at by different organizations in many different ways, but at its core, it is the art and science of driving customer growth for your business.

To be effective, you have to be able to understand your customer and be able to communicate with them in a relevant way, so that they keep coming back to your brand time and again. Growth marketing is the practice of running marketing campaigns with the sole purpose of acquiring users, driving social media engagement, and increasing the number of leads, rather than focusing solely on the traditional goal of increasing sales.

Marketing, in general, could be defined as heavily focused on building awareness, establishing a message, getting consumers to a store, or getting people thinking about potentially buying a product. 

Growth marketers look at the world in a very different way. They tend to look at the whole customer journey from that initial awareness to consideration to purchase intent, but then also what consumers are experiencing when they start using the products. How are they sharing their experience with the product? How loyal are consumers to the brand, and how could consumers be turned into advocates for the brand. 

So in reality growth marketing is about taking a marketing approach to the entire consumer experience and thinking wider than just getting someone interested in using a product.

How Does Growth Marketing Work?

Growth marketers typically rely on a combination of two main strategies:

Driving customer acquisition

This is where growth marketers employ methods designed to drive traffic to a business’s website and social media pages.

Promoting customer retention

Once people have taken an action on a brand’s website for instance signing up for a newsletter or adding a product to their cart, it is important to keep them engaged and coming back for more. Growth marketers employ strategies that help retain customer loyalty by rewarding customer engagement and encouraging repeat purchases.

The achieve these two main strategies growth marketers generally focus on the following workflow:

• Identify what part of the customer journey your brand is offering can be improved upon.
• Dig through the brand’s captured data to brainstorm new ideas on how to improve KPIs.
• Utilize comparison tests like A/B testing to discover the most successful way to achieve your goals.
• Adjust your strategy based on information gathered during the A/B test.

The main goal of growth marketing is taking action to make a brand part of a consumer’s day-to-day life. We ultimately want to create customers that are willing to enthusiastically endorse a brand or product. Whether that is done through a Google ads strategy for small businesses or Facebook ads. 

Why Is Growth Marketing Important?

Traditional marketing generally relies heavily on old tried and tested tactics to acquire and retain customers. Tactics are generally repeated over and over again, without giving much thought to defining the process of testing and improving continually. The main challenge with this is that most businesses will see a decline in engagement, and conversion rate in the long run. 

The reality of marketing today is that a brand’s market, competitors, and target audience changes daily. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today anymore. Without constantly testing and analyzing customer behavior you could easily miss an opportunity that is presented.

Growth marketing addresses this challenge head-on by focusing on identifying and implementing 

New techniques with the main purpose of continual experimentation. Growth marketing is focused on constantly analyzing different acquisition channels and methods. To this end, a wide range of methods including SEO best practices, A/B testing, and product introductions are put in place. The focus is on creating a highly personalized user experience to align the brand as closely as possible with the values and personality of the target audience.

To successfully accomplish this they must be able to identify customer needs, generate compelling content, and execute digital campaigns that drive results.

Bottom line

Marketing today is an ever-changing landscape that could be difficult to navigate. Growth marketing provides a new way of thinking that is geared towards answering this challenge.

By continually testing, analyzing, and implementing new ways of doing things, a brand will ensure they stay relevant. 

A good way for a brand to stay on top of its growth strategy is to partner with a marketing agency with the skills and know-how to help them succeed. NAV43 is a marketing agency with a strong focus on growth marketing. Contact them today to learn more.