What is growth marketing?
Hundreds of thousands of businesses are started annually in the United States alone. Put other countries into the equation, and you have millions of businesses springing up everywhere each year. The sad part of the story is that most of these businesses fail and fizzle out of business in the first year of existence. Three more years down the line, you will notice that almost 90% of these businesses have failed. What is the big problem?
Marketing
While several things can lead to business failure, lack of customers is a prime factor. A business that doesn’t have customers is not really in business, and it is just a matter of time before it closes up if something does not change. How do you change the trajectory when it comes to customer acquisition? Marketing!
New Buzzwords on the Marketing Scene
Growth and marketing are regular positive words used often in business circles. If you are a marketing enthusiast, you must have been hearing of such new buzzwords as growth hacking and growth marketing. These are concepts that are not just trending but making so much impact on the marketing and business scene.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing can best be described as intelligent data-driven marketing for the purpose of adding revenue to the bottom line of business and achieving robust, sustainable growth. It is a scientific approach to marketing that identifies key areas of improvements, defines objectives and key results, as well as conducts experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area.
Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing goes a long way deeper in detecting and correcting marketing problems. The overall objective is always to grow a business in the long run, but it starts with determining areas to test and improve upon, designing and conducting appropriate experiments to test hypothesized improvements, and coming up with s framework for long term growth.
Why Is Growth Marketing So Special?
The first thing to know about growth marketing is that it is based on scientific methods. In addition to that, it brings sustainable results.
As you know already, growth marketing differs from traditional marketing in terms of strategies. While traditional marketing follows the ‘set it and forget it’ approach, growth marketing follows the ‘experiment and analyze’ approach.
The difference in approach implies that growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel. Traditional marketing can get a lot of people at the top funnel and will do very little to engage them till they become customers. Growth marketing, on the other hand, will add value throughout the marketing funnel to engage and retain most leads even after their first purchase. It is a holistic approach to marketing and involves growth content every step of the way.
But, What Is Growth Content?
Growth content can be described as a long term solution that can bring about key indicators of growth. Growth contents are known to yield positive results within 30 – 60 days after publishing. It is usually a compelling content created to strategically bring specific results, based on an objective that aligns with the need of the business organization. It is an indispensable tool in growth hacking.
What is Growth Hacking?
To prevent any kind of confusion, it is important that we look at the term growth hacking. While it is variously used interchangeably with growth marketing, there are subtle differences you should know. These differences exist in many firms but blur out in some others.
While growth marketing is a holistic approach to marketing that involves scientific methods, growth hacking tackles specific marketing problems. Often, when growth marketers are hired, the objective is to get the company from where it is to where it can/should be. In the case of a growth hacker, the emphasis is often on a specific problem, and the goal is usually to solve the problem as fast as possible. Growth hackers are mostly expert consultants who can achieve a lot with so little.
Growth hacker marketing is another phrase used to describe the services of growth hackers. It is the most creative aspect of marketing that involves the implementation of low-cost strategies that can help businesses acquire and retain customers. Growth hacking marketing can also focus on a particular marketing objective, depending on the specific need of the business organization.
How to Implement Growth Marketing
Implementing growth marketing involves taking a holistic and scientific approach to marketing. Instead of focusing on awareness and acquisition, as a traditional marketing team will do, a growth marketing agency or team will focus on the full funnel. A growth marketing manager will get the right team ready and work with them efficiently to add value all the way through the marketing funnel. The different areas it will apply are all included in the acronym AAARRR.
Awareness
This is the top of the funnel where the focus is getting people to know about your brand and solution. It may involve experimenting on social media strategy and types of content that work.
Acquisition
This is the level the interested persons become leads. Growth marketing at this stage may be focused on increasing the amount of form submission and similar metrics.
Activation
This is the point the audience members turn to costumers for the first time. It is always about getting people to use your products or services as quickly as possible.
Revenue
This is the part of the marketing endeavor that actually makes the company or business organization money. It is mostly about customers purchasing the products you are selling or signing a contract to use or upgrade to a better service you offer.
Retention
This is the part where you try to keep the customers you have acquired already. Efforts, at this point, are mostly aimed at improving the value users gain by using your products or services.
Referral
This is the last part of the complete marketing funnel. It is the point that customers are so pleased with your products or services that they refer others to your business. A referral program can help do the trick, but ensuring that the first set of customers are satisfied is the best way to approach it.
There you have it! Above, we have been able to answer the question; what is growth marketing. Growth marketing is a new, efficient approach to marketing for most organizations. While it is best suited for growing businesses, it can be very beneficial to any business organization desirous of growth. With the perfect growth marketing framework for your organization, business can get a lot better after a while. The growth will be sustainable too.
