Growth marketing seems to be everywhere that you look across the business ecosystem. The term is commonly used as it relates to business evolution and growth. However, there is still a great deal of mystery about what it actually means. Therefore, many business owners and non-marketers are wondering: what is growth marketing?

While it may initially seem overwhelming and complicated with its various components, growth marketing does not have to intimidate you. It's an incredibly powerful business tool when used in concert with the correct type of goals. Today, we'll break down the different facets of a growth marketing strategy and tackle how to incorporate it into your own business.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing, sometimes better known as growth hacking, is an umbrella term used to describe marketing activities requiring few resources and leveraging efficiencies to help grow your user base, sell products or services, and improve brand awareness. The key difference here from normal marketing is the use of optimization. Essentially, all growth marketing activities are intended to minimize resource use while maximizing results.

Not surprisingly, growth marketing agencies exist just for this purpose. They help businesses meet their various goals. They create custom strategies that leverage optimized marketing tactics and often focus on individualized messaging. These agencies do this by using small hypotheses, fast experimentation, and rapid iteration. This is in lieu of more traditional, long-running, and resource-intensive campaigns. With this, they heavily exploit data to make decisions and select tactics that are the most likely to be successful for a given result. Likewise, they focus their tactics towards very specific customers in order to grow their base rapidly.

The Components of a Growth Marketing Strategy

Growth marketing is individualized based on the specific account and associated goals. Each strategy will generally consist of three main components: A/B testing, cross-channel marketing, and customer lifecycle. Keep in mind that the intent of growth marketing is not to replace traditional marketing but rather that it acts as a complement to it. In fact, growth marketing is about finding repeatable and scalable campaigns that will continue to drive outcomes. Here is how each of the three components plays into an effective growth marketing strategy.

A/B Testing 

A/B testing tests different versions of a landing page, email, or other forms of content (with only slight differentiation) to see what performs better with a target audience. This is a key component of growth marketing as it helps the marketers optimize every facet of content that they present to prospects and existing customers alike. You're more likely to drive more conversions every time by optimizing your content.

Cross-Channel Marketing

The intent of cross-channel marketing, or sharing content across multiple channels, is to maximize the amount of engagement that you get with your content. This is a great way to ensure that you are exposing yourself to a multitude of different people. It also helps you to test what is working on which channel. When you understand what content is effective on what platform, you can optimize your content for different channels, or at minimum, optimize your content for what works consistently across most of your channels.

Customer Lifecycle

The customer lifecycle is a fundamental part of all marketing. It denotes the different steps that a customer passes through in purchasing a product or service (and potentially becoming a return customer). Each step of the process represents different problems or opportunities that the company may face with getting a customer to convert. By breaking the lifecycle down into steps and focusing on hypotheses that orient on these steps, growth marketers work to optimize the process from that specific step to conversion through testing. Based on the following data, marketers will apply tactics that appeal to customers at each step of the process (or the step with the greatest potential efficiencies).

By layering these three components into an effective growth marketing strategy, you'll be ready to implement your tactics.

Strategy precedes tactics. So you can't be effective with your marketing tactics if you don't have a strong strategy as your foundation.

The Key to Success in Growth Marketing

There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to building a growth marketing strategy. But one thing is key to finding success with growth marketing: testing. By testing early and often, you and your team will have the data and metrics available to help you alter your tactics in ways that are cost and resource-effective, but that also create results. In order to best tackle testing, here are the basic steps to consider.

• Use SMART Goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals are key. It is important to ensure that you have clear items for both testing and measurement. In many cases, the more specific and data-driven the goal is, the better. It will help you build up to larger, more nebulous goals.

• Be consistent with your testing methodology. Don't take shortcuts to try and save time. Put proper emphasis on the methodology that you use for testing throughout your growth hacking strategy. This ensures that you will get actionable data-driven results that you can use to identify and apply proper tactics.

• Don't neglect traditional marketing. Remember, growth marketing is just a component of a larger marketing strategy, and it exists for very specific purposes. Traditional marketing is important to ensure that your brand is getting the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, growth marketing will help you hit more aggressive goals with fewer resources. 

Conclusion 

Hopefully, you've now got a more thorough understanding of growth marketing and what it can potentially provide to grow your business and enhance its overarching marketing strategy. Remember its requirement for continuous and regular experimentation, optimization, and minimal use of resources to maximize results. This can be highly effective when utilized at the proper time and place. But it should not be expected to replace your traditional marketing strategy. Uncertain about where to start with growth hacking? Growth agencies are a valuable external asset that can help you define, build, and execute an impactful growth marketing strategy to meet your business needs. Contact us today for a free marketing audit!