What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing definition

Growth marketing is a type of marketing optimization that goes beyond marketing a product and instead helps businesses grow by enabling customer loyalty. This type of marketing maximizes your efforts by utilizing methods like A/B testing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and data analysis to implement better, more effective strategies to promote growth.

Growth marketing shortens the cycles of innovation rather than relying on extended efforts. Just-in-time campaigns and micro campaigns respond to the current moment’s needs. The results generated by each campaign or piece of content help you learn the answers to key questions, such as:

• What are your key user demographics?
• What are your users’ pain points—and how much are they willing to pay to solve them?
• How often are your users interacting with your product and how deeply?

The “growth” in growth marketing can be adding more users, boosting revenue, or even gaining name recognition. The key is to start small and get some information on what marketing efforts are most effective. Then, focus your efforts on the channels that the data supports. Later, you can determine how much of your marketing budget to devote to those efforts.

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.

On the other hand, growth marketing focuses on the entire marketing funnel, from brand awareness to retention and beyond. The goal of traditional marketing is not only to get more website traffic or build awareness. Instead, it wants to take that awareness, convert visitors into customers through engagement, and provide a good customer experience that turns customers into your brand advocates. A few growth marketing examples include:

• Using email marketing to increase brand loyalty through offering special deals to subscribers.
• Providing a quality product based on customer feedback and continuous improvements of that product.
• Redesigning marketing campaigns using results from A/B testing to improve key performance indicators (KPIs) and increase conversion rates and lead generation.

Growth marketing allows you to reach customers where they spend their time, whether that’s on social media, via email, or the web.

Key aspects of growth marketing

Because growth marketing takes traditional marketing methods further, it requires extra work and more considerations for how you can increase customer loyalty and get your customers to be your biggest brand advocates. Key aspects of growth marketing include:

All hands on deck approach

Growth marketing doesn’t exist in a silo. Everyone in a company is working toward the goal of growth. After all, everyone wants to find more users who will engage with their product. That mission of growth is fulfilled everywhere—from product development to customer support. Every team has something to share that can inspire a new way to draw in and delight users.

Your marketing team becomes a hub where data from other teams is combined and analyzed to help create the next batch of campaigns. Consider how teams other than marketing gather relevant marketing information all the time.

• Product development pays attention to requests for features, upgrades, and complementary product lines, and their upcoming plans and goals can be used in marketing campaigns.
• Analytics and developers track unusually high or low web or mobile traffic, data that can motivate marketing to try something new with their digital campaigns.
• Customer support is in constant contact with users, and their conversations are relevant to marketers. Customers compliment what is going well (telling you which features to highlight) and share persistent concerns (highlighting areas to work on and then remarket).

Growth marketing can begin with any source of data that spurs 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, making 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 to what new direction will work best.

A/B testing

With today’s digital marketing capabilities, you can directly compare results from different email content, social media posts, and other marketing efforts. You can write almost any piece of marketing content in 2 ways to create an A/B test.

For instance, you might try 2 versions of your email newsletter, the first emphasizing a certain feature of your product and the second emphasizing a different element. These different versions form the A and the B of A/B testing.

In this case, 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 helped you meet those marketing goals so that you can direct your efforts to the winning email.

Maybe more people clicked on the link in email A, but a higher percentage of people actually purchased after clicking through to the feature highlighted in email B. This is valuable data! It indicates that certain users are more likely to follow through and purchase, and those users prefer email B.

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 know what’s been tried before, so make sure you track your efforts.

Customer feedback

With modern digital marketing, there are countless ways to analyze your data through sites like Google Analytics. You can get instant feedback as well, in the form of a click on your link or a like on a social media platform.

To collect even more valuable data, 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. Mailchimp’s hosted survey form makes it easy to connect with users, get feedback on their latest interaction, and see what they think about your ideas for future product updates.

To combine engagement data with data-driven marketing, you need new ways to solicit customer feedback. You might want to track website visitors who downloaded your app but haven’t logged in yet or those who entered their email to purchase a subscription but never completed the transaction.

You can then create behavior-based automations that are triggered after a certain amount of time has passed. These emails can solicit feedback on why your users haven’t logged in or what questions they have about the subscription they were about to purchase. Use the information to get insight into what would have pushed them to click Order Now.

You might find that the payment page was confusing or they’re not sure about the subscription terms. Product development, customer support, and even engineering can all work on improving the customer experience with this feedback.

Marketing in particular can look at this data and learn what content to emphasize in the next campaign. Maybe you could send a welcome email to users right after they download your app to help them log in. Or perhaps a page about all the benefits of subscribing to a paid plan would be a great addition to the company website.

Feedback can also guide how your company chooses between updating a product and developing a new feature. The marketing team may discover that first-time customers are increasingly recommending your product or that there is a growing need for a complementary feature. These are strong marks in favor of expanding your offering to give loyal customers even more features to try.

However, your data may show that many first-time visitors are creating a free account but choosing not to subscribe or purchase your product. In this case, it may be better to tinker with the functionality of the original product. As with other aspects of growth marketing, customer feedback can play a role here. Maybe there’s a perception problem, the features don’t quite fit the need, or the value it offers isn’t clearly shown.

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 company, the cycle may be longer or shorter, but it never takes too long to get clear results.

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. There’s creativity in it, but it’s creative problem solving not random chance.

Multi-channel marketing efforts

As mentioned, your marketing strategies shouldn’t exist in their own silos. Instead, they should work together to improve your strategy and earn more loyal customers. Building a plan utilizing multiple channels, including email marketing, text (SMS) marketing, direct mail, social media, and more, 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. For example, you might determine that email marketing has a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than push notifications but a lower response rate. From this information, you can customize your marketing efforts and adjust them for better performance.

Growth marketing best practices: How to implement a successful growth strategy

To implement a successful growth marketing campaign, you may:

• Gather information about potential customers and analyze whatever feedback you already have
• 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

Use growth marketing to your advantage today

A good growth marketing team views everything that goes on in your 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 better and better growth.

Remember, a growth marketing plan extends beyond traditional marketing to form better relationships with customers, increase loyalty, and boost repeat purchases. Growth marketing should encompass many different types of marketing, from traditional marketing materials to your website, social media, and email marketing strategy. This type of marketing forces you to learn about your customers by obtaining feedback on your product and service offerings. Customer feedback and A/B testing can help you create better products and improve your marketing efforts.

It's challenging to thrive in business without utilizing a growth strategy specifically developed for your marketing channels. With Mailchimp's marketing solutions, you can make your customers the center of your business.