What is Growth Marketing? (and why you need it)

Over 500,000 new businesses are formed in the United States each year, and over $200 billion is spent on marketing each year.

In such a crowded environment, it can be difficult for your company to stand out from the crowd.

To stand out from the crowd, it is becoming more and more important to have a creative, iterative and compelling marketing strategy. A strategy that not only enables customer acquisition but also provides fertile soil for virality, word of mouth and organic growth.

This powerful new way to build a loyal user base has a name: growth marketing.

Let's take a look at what growth marketing is and what it takes to become a growth marketer.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is marketing 2.0. It takes the traditional marketing model and adds layers to it like A/B testing, value-added blog posts, data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, copy creation, and more. advertising stars and technical analysis of all aspects of the user experience. Lessons learned from these strategies were quickly deployed towards the goal of solid and sustainable growth.

A growth marketer is often a T-shaped marketer – with solid core knowledge, foundations, and depth.

How is growth marketing different?

Traditional marketing involves “set it and forget it” type strategies that consume a fixed budget and hope for the best. Think Google Adwords and display campaigns with basic text advertising. These strategies can be a great way to drive traffic to the top of your sales funnel, helping to increase business awareness and user acquisition, but that's where the value drops.

Growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel.

Done right, it creates value throughout the marketing funnel by attracting, engaging, retaining, and ultimately turning users into brand champions.

Growth focuses on the entire funnel, whereas marketing typically focuses on the top of the funnel.

These data-driven marketers don't get too involved in formulating strategy, trying new experiments and figuring out what works right away.

But growth marketing, like biological evolution, is also a stochastic process. This means that there is an element of randomness in any strategy that works. The only way to see which method works best is to throw things at the wall and see what works.

Qualities of Successful Growth Marketers

The best growth marketers are known to be:

Data Driven

The days of making decisions based on instinct are over. Ditto for decisions based solely on the HiPPO strategy (opinion of the highest paid person). The modern growth marketer dives into data to determine which strategies work and is comfortable with any tools that enable such analysis.

Creativity

The best growth marketers are ready to get creative. They never say “it's never been done before, so why try?”.

If that was Airbnb's attitude when they were trying to grow, they would never have thought of providing free professional photography services to everyone who registered on their site. What some thought was crazy or pointless turned out to be a fantastic engine to spur their growth.

Product focused

An axiom of the sales world is that you can't sell a product you don't understand. Since growth marketers are also salespeople and evangelists, the same rule applies. Your goal isn't to trick people into buying something they don't want, but rather to explain the many benefits of a valuable product that you think will help people.

Have a hacker mentality

A growth marketer must be a jack-of-all-trades. Every day you can create a video, optimize ad text, implement a new A/B test, or even code. The more and more varied your skills, the more value you can add to an organization (especially at an early stage).

Not afraid of failure

Successful growth marketers think a failed experience isn't a bad thing. In fact, failure is the fastest way to gain valuable insights.

No growth marketer is clairvoyant. You have to be willing to try anything and everything to see what works. Eventually you will find things that are successful, then you will optimize them and continue the process.

Know how to tell a story

All the data in the world won't help you figure out how to truly connect with your users. You need to be able to synthesize quantitative and qualitative information into a compelling story that resonates with your potential customers.

Take the case of TOMS. The brand growth team was able to effectively communicate that social good is a key part of their business.

Can juggle multiple responsibilities

An effective growth marketer must be something of a contradiction.

He is obsessed with details but does not lose sight of the big picture. Results oriented but comfortable with ambiguity. He measures everything and trusts data, but also appreciates human intuition.

What types of companies hire growth marketers?

Many types of companies are building growth marketing teams, but most opportunities are found at established tech companies or emerging tech start-ups.

By looking at a sample of job postings from each company type, we can see the type of candidate each stage of the company is looking for.

First, let's take a look at the responsibilities of an audience growth and digital marketing manager position at a large media company, Vice Media:

Now, take a look at the job posting from a much smaller and up-and-coming supplementation startup, Bulletproof 360, for the role of Director of Growth Marketing:

These growth marketing job descriptions have more similarities than differences. Both companies want candidates to have strategic skills and a passion for data analysis.

The main difference seems to be that the small business is looking for someone who can start and scale a project from scratch. The job posting suggests that you will have a little less resources, but probably a little more freedom. This is probably typical of any growth marketing role for a company that has yet to firmly establish itself as an industry leader.

Growth marketing or growth hacking?

Although the terms "Growth Marketing" and "Growth Hacking" are often used interchangeably, there are subtle differences between these roles in many companies.

Growth Hackers are more like expert consultants tasked with solving a specific problem, and solving it quickly. They are tasked, often with a small budget, with finding creative solutions to difficult problems. For a growth hacker, speed is everything and problems need to be solved yesterday.

Growth marketers tend to take a longer term approach. They need to strategize on how to scale many SaaS growth metrics in many different dimensions, and do so in a sustainable way.

Growth hacks can be compared to day-to-day stock trading. Sure, you can make money this way, but it's not necessarily a stable, long-term source of income.

An effective growth marketing process distils the best attributes of growth hacking (namely, the desire to think outside the box to gain momentum) into a sustainable practice based on sound principles. In this sense, growth marketing is the opposite of day trading – it's about investing for the long term based on data-driven metrics that are constantly optimized.

Important goals and metrics for a growth marketer

So what are the basic principles of growth marketing?

Goal: Drive traffic to your site

One of the main goals of any growth marketer is to increase the number of visitors. This can be done in different ways.

Organic traffic

These are users who come to your site after searching in a major search engine. In order to optimize organic traffic, you need to do everything that can help you rank high in search results. This includes sharing your quality content with other sites to build inbound links and produce content that has been carefully optimized for search engines.

An example of an organic growth hack is how Nerdwallet used an emotion overspend survey to drive organic traffic to their site and get other sites to include backlinks to the article. They managed to get links from The Simple Dollar, QuickenLoans, Yahoo and Fidelity.

Paid Traffic

These are users who come to your site through your advertising channels. You want to control how much you spend, how many impressions your ads get, and CPA (cost per acquisition).

In recent times, more and more companies have experimented with native advertising, which involves placing non-traditional advertisements by giving the impression that they are more content-driven. Dollar Shave Club is the company to emulate when trying experiences in the native space, as it has leveraged this medium with great success.

Referral traffic

This is all traffic that does not come from a major search engine. So it's traffic from social media as well as any other sites that link to your content.

If you do it right, people will start sharing and talking about your content just because they are naturally inclined to do so. This is the definition of viral content. Tracking the volume and source of all referral traffic will help you optimize in this regard.

You can use competitor analysis to gain an edge, such as monitoring your competitors' social media engagement spikes and trying to reverse their success.

Posting guest blog posts can also be a great way to build referral traffic.

On-Site

Metrics Knowing what's actually happening on your site is always critical. You want to know where your visitors come from, what actions they take, and how long they spend on the site. Another important number to monitor is your bounce rate, as this is a great indicator of how relevant your content or landing page is.

Goal: Get leads and improve conversion rate

All visitors in the world mean nothing if they are not converted into new users. Here are the key areas to optimize.

Conversion rate

What is the overall conversion rate of people who come to your site by any means? You should pay special attention to pages that show significant drops compared to other parts of the site.

Hubspot experimented with different website templates and found one that doubled their overall conversion rate.

Landing page conversion

rate What is the conversion rate of users who reach your main landing page? There are many ways to optimize this rate, including changing the text, design, and layout.

One area worth experimenting with is the title length of the content you display on a landing page. For example, short, punchy titles have been shown to generally perform better.

See how Doordash effectively entices drivers to sign up with the short, catchy headline “Bring home the bacon”.

Blog/Email Subscribers

Are you producing engaging content that people want to read? This should be your first priority. For an example of a business blog that people really love and get a lot of value out of, check out SEO company Moz's blog. This company builds long-running content that a lot of people would pay for, but Moz makes it available for free.

If you already create great content, then you want to make sure it gets the actions you want? You can tell by analyzing things like click-through rate, follower growth, and shares.

Switch from Free Trials to Paid Plans

If you have a freemium product, you ultimately want to convert free trial users into paying customers.

A great example is how growth marketers at DocuSign leveraged tracking technology to expose certain premium features to a unique subset of users. Their testing let them know exactly what features to show off, and their experience resulted in a 5% increase in upgrade conversions.

Goal: build customer loyalty

Reduce Churn Rate Churn

rate is the percentage of users who sign up for your service but then stop using it. This is an especially critical metric for SaaS companies in growth mode because churn is the arch-enemy of exponential growth. If you lose a significant portion of your customers, you simply won't be able to reach the critical mass of users you need to start generating significant revenue.

Analyze every aspect of why users stop using the service and ruthlessly iterate to fill in the gaps. One area that might trip you up? The user interface. Make sure it's smooth and seamless, otherwise users will walk away.

Increase average order value

By tracking and analyzing user behavior, you can start targeting them in ways that will increase average order value. Areas to consider include bundling, targeting customers based on past behavior, and upselling.

Increase Lifetime Value

Once you have a customer on board, how do you maximize the value you get from them? Strategies can include conducting user surveys to find new features people want, encouraging customers to switch to an annual billing cycle, or providing focused, quality customer service.

Objective: to create a brand

Once your business is reliable, trustworthy and provides a great user experience, you can leverage it to build a real brand. In other words, your name can become synonymous with quality in this particular sector.

It starts with building a quality corporate culture. Then, the brand-building process can be aided by a smart PR campaign, influencer marketing, positive word-of-mouth, and referral programs.

A toolkit for growth marketers

In order to grow with the best, you'll want to take advantage of some of these fantastic services.

Leadpages – helps you create personalized landing pages.

Adroll: Track people who visit your site through ads.

Sumo: Build an Outstanding Email List

Ahrefs – the industry leader in building quality keyword lists.

Proof – Increases conversions by letting the customer make the sale.

Po.st – Find out who shares your articles.

Buzzsumo – Analyze in detail the content of any of your URLs.

Voila Norbert: Build relationships with important marketers with this email research tool.

Amplitude – helps you find the most interesting features.

Apptimize: test your mobile application in A/B.

How to get started in growth marketing?

Learn from the best growth marketers.

Here are a few thought leaders in the growth marketing world you should follow closely:

Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at Hubspot, shares tons of insider information about growth marketing on his blog.

Danielle Morrill, former head of growth at Mattermark, is now a quick-witted venture capitalist blogging and diving into sales and marketing advice.

Neil Patel – His eponymous growth marketing site has millions of followers. He excels in his easy-to-read guides, like this one on writing a case study. Neil is a thought leader in SEO and content marketing, and he produces some of the best work in the industry.

Anum Hussain – Another Hubspot alumna, she's getting her MBA from MIT and her growth marketing videos have had over a million views.

Companies recognized for the excellence of their growth marketing

Hubspot – This company is practically known in this field, with more than 40,000 satisfied customers. They provide tools for everything from blogging to marketing automation to lead management, and their long-form blog content is second to none.

Intercom – these are the masters of messaging, expertly using bots and live chat to engage users the moment they arrive on site. Like HubSpot, they're happy to lay out their growth marketing strategies in a series of engaging manuals.

Proof – As industry leaders in using social proof to boost conversions, we're proud to share our in-depth knowledge of this new space on our blog. Some of our favorite articles discuss the importance of social proof and new ways to maximize conversion rates.

Customer.io creates a blog with engaging content for all email junkies. They have great articles on growth email marketing strategies, including writing upgrade emails that convert.

Forums and communities to consult

GrowthHackers – This site is run by growth marketer du jour, Sean Ellis, and is a place to talk strategy, find new ideas, and look for work.

BAMF – The acronym stands for Bad Ass Marketers and Founders. As the name suggests, this is a place where enthusiastic growth marketers can chat, exchange information and support each other.

As long as you continue to learn, relentlessly test, and focus on telling a compelling story through data, you will succeed in growth marketing. Good luck !