What Is Growth Marketing And How To Do It The Right Way

In today's highly competitive landscape, businesses need innovative strategies not just to attract and engage new users, but to expand their customer base. From this perspective, growth marketing has been established as a strategy for attaining long term success. 

The essence is based on leveraging data driven insights, experimentation and continuous optimization. 

In this article we will share our expertise on growth marketing meaning, growth marketing components, types of growth marketing, a step by step guide on how to implement growth marketing strategies, and growth marketing examples, among other tips to succeed using this game-changing approach.

What is growth marketing and why it is essential for your success

Growth Marketing is a results-oriented strategy that aims to achieve long term business growth and success.

Unlike marketing methods that rely on fixed strategies, growth marketing tactics are constantly changing and directly linked to the ever evolving customer behavior and industry landscape.

It's about finding sustainable and effective ways to acquire, retain, and monetize customers prioritizing data-driven decision-making, while leveraging channel innovation and market trends.

Growth marketing came to transform the old paradigm of “make a product, then market it” into “make, then market, then analyze, then remake, then remarket.”

Long-term customer relationships are pivotal to business success, and there is no better place to start than a dynamic growth marketing strategy that can help you anticipate their needs and convert a first-time visitor into a loyal client. 

The ultimate goal is to lengthen clients life-cycle as much as possible in order to amortize acquisition cost through recurring revenue. Let’s learn how!

The Six Growth Marketing Components To Thrive

1 - Experimentation: Growth marketers excel in an environment that encourages a ‘trial and error’ philosophy, with room to formulate hypotheses, conduct A/B tests and continuously iterate on strategies to uncover the most effective approaches. Once you have identified the right tactic for the right segment, it’s time to scale-up the budget and optimize investment by market ensuring the right penetration. 

2 - Segmentation: Successful growth marketing relies on deep-dive audience analysis, where customer journeys are a key input to detect opportunities and dead ends. Tailored marketing initiatives require hyper-personalization and advanced segmentation tactics involving first and third-party tactics and integrations. 

3 - User Experience (UX): Providing outstanding user experience is crucial for converting and retaining customers. What was once a perk has become a necessity. Switching from mobile to desktop should be seamless and effortless. Growth marketers focus on optimizing websites, apps and other touchpoints to ensure a smooth journey without obstacles.

4 - Marketing Automation: Automation tools streamline tasks such as email marketing and lead nurturing. By automating these processes businesses save time and money, reducing response time, cart-abandonment rate and a significant reduction of manual errors. This has a direct impact on conversion rate, and allows personalization in ways only dreamed by marketers before. 

5 - Content Marketing: High quality content is the cornerstone of growth marketing success. From 360 creative campaigns to social media strategies, every link in the content chain matters. Paid media has made tremendous advances in terms of content technology, and many catalogs use machine learning and AI that let marketers scale ads like never before.

6 - Analytics and Reporting: Robust analytics and reporting tools are also detrimental. Everything starts with accurate tracking, which often needs advanced data integrations. Once every step of the customer journey can be measured, valued, and optimized; the story begins. Every key performance indicator (KPI) needs to be closely monitored, and an ongoing source for rapid decision-making that prioritizes effectiveness and scalability.

Five Types of Growth Marketing

1 - Acquisition Marketing: This form of growth marketing focuses on acquiring customers through omni-channel campaigns including but not limited to paid advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing and social media.

2 - Activation Marketing: Activation marketing aims to convert users and inactive clients into first-time and recurrent buyers. Strategies often involve optimizing onboarding processes, personalized messages and experiences that stand-out from the crowded space. The surge of artificial intelligence is another aspect of activation marketing that needs to be rapidly incorporated. 

3 - Retention Marketing: A key part of the ecosystem that revolves around keeping existing customers engaged and loyal. From email marketing campaigns, to loyalty programs, every piece of the puzzle of retention needs periodic review and improvement. Measuring NPS score (net promoter score( and seeking feedback has incredible value to boost retention.  

4 - Revenue Marketing: It’s all about maximizing income streams generated from each existing customer. From upselling and cross selling, to optimizing pricing strategies to increase the revenue that can be obtained from a client.

5 - Referral Marketing: We know for a fact that a word-of-mouth recommendation and a credible amount of positive reviews is a gold ticket. Finding tactics to encourage customers to spread the word is an effective way to grow return of investment. Referral programs, influencer campaigns, user generated content, and brand ambassadors are some examples of this area of growth marketing. 

Step by Step Guide to Implement a Growth Marketing Strategy

Let's start by defining SMART goals: These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely objectives that drive awareness, interest, desire and acquisition.

Take the time to understand your target: Do in-depth research to identify their needs, challenges, characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. Detect potential segments, and their sizes.

Stay competitive: Benchmarking is crucial. Keep an eye on new opportunities, learn from your competitors and referents, understand how to differentiate, and also recognize when your product or service has competitive disadvantages that need to be addressed.

Craft the strategy: Develop a comprehensive growth marketing strategy taking into account the six components and the five types of growth marketing mentioned above. Also make room for innovation, and data-driven redistribution. 

Testing is essential: A/B test and experiment with everything, including paid media tactics, channels, messages, and segments. Then narrow it down and refine, but be open for market changes that may require you to pivot rapidly.  

Take a phased approach: Start small and achieve your initial wins before progressing to more ambitious projects. Scale budget once your path is cleared by accurate analytics.

Optimize continuously: The set-and-forget era is gone. Base your upcoming marketing efforts on fresh insights. Be agile in making your targeting and budget adjustments

Embrace the changing seasons: Take into account holidays when budgeting, considering also the increase in costs and aggressive competitors. In case of new trends, be fast enough to leverage them with clever creative.

Be open to explore: Don’t limit yourself to a channel, a message, or segment; keep an open mind when analyzing your results to detect the unexpected patterns. 

Don’t forget  scalability: Concentrate on strategies and metrics that can facilitate the growth of your business and ensure that your budget is allocated accordingly, but don’t oversee awareness and retention efforts to build credibility and loyalty.

Case Study: Streaming VOD Launch 

Our comprehensive campaign for a Direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service client is a growth marketing example of our 360 approach. A true client-agency collaboration that drove significant success.

Let’s review our learnings:

• Identifying optimal investment by market delivers overall costs reduction and ensures adequate penetration in each country.
• Increasing daily budget in top performing channels made performance variance outpace the increase in spending.
• Ads diversification and a multi-channel approach are a must.  
• Key dates, trends and key competitor releases affect cost directly. Planning accordingly is key, but also to have flexibility and react quickly before unplanned events arise.
• Testing new platforms and leveraging the power of AI improved ongoing results substantially.

The Year-over-Year results:

• Blended CPC: -50%-
• Rate of Clicks to Affiliates: +51%
• Budget spend: -34%
• Clicks to Affiliates +44%

Rate of Clicks to Affiliate Evolution: 

Why Choosing a Growth Marketing Expert

Selecting a partner that specializes in growth marketing can accelerate growth significantly. You may wonder why. These are some reasons proving why a growth marketing agency can prove to be a smart move:

Learning curve: Understanding this evolving market with its algorithm changes, new media platform features, and other aspects of this challenging strategy requires a significant investment of time and effort. Hiring a partner that already has a proven methodology and successful track record shortens your company’s learning curve and maximizes ROI.

Cost reduction: Hiring and training an in-house specialist is usually quite expensive, especially if they are highly specialized. 

Team synergy: Growth marketing agencies have multidisciplinary teams that work as a unity covering strategy, tracking integrations, creatives and designers that are trained to deliver result and insight-driven content, campaign implementation, ongoing optimization, and business intelligence analysis to do proper reporting. 

Access to Technology: Agencies that specialize in growth marketing have licenced tools to optimize performance, access quality third-party audiences, measurement and data visualization, and emergent artificial intelligence tools that boost growth in a unique way

Scalability: a perfect growth marketing example in this case involves using tools and data driven strategies to expand your market reach and improve efficiency. Initially we focus on targeted marketing efforts, as well as creating and leveraging existing customer bases. They utilize data analytics to gain insights into your customers needs and fine tune their segmentation. We also streamline scalability by incorporating AI powered tools for content delivery, customer engagement, and overall optimization.

Perspective: As external partners, we can deliver an objective and fresh point of view of your current media efforts, assets, and communication channels. We take your learnings and turn them into new opportunities to expand your business. 

Our Approach to Growth Marketing Strategy

At InPulse Digital growth marketing success is based on five pillars: strategy, experimentation, optimization, analysis, and iteration.

1. Strategy

Our strategies are carefully designed to attend you (and your client’s) needs, with scalability in mind. 

We first start by auditing your current efforts, your current and potential audience, your industry, and your competitors. Keeping an objective eye on competitors and referents provide us insights that fuel our growth marketing efforts. This enables the development and adaptation of strategies that keep our clients ahead in this industry ecosystem.

2. Experimentation

Dynamic testing is at our core. We firmly believe in trying out new methods and testing innovative strategies. By conducting controlled experiments and A/B tests we gain insights that help us identify the effective tactics, and then scale them.

Then we can efficiently expand alongside our clients' businesses by starting small, testing, learning what works, and iterating over time, while ensuring long term success.

3. Optimization

Optimization plays a role in our approach. We continuously refine our strategies by leveraging data driven insights. This allows us to maximize efficiency and effectiveness in reaching our goals. Not only do we have a highly specialized team that does ongoing optimization using the latest tools, but we have audit companies and have detected again and again that the “set and forget” approach is more usual than you may think.

4. Analysis

Analyzing and iterating with data is in our DNA. And it has been since the beginning.

For more than 15 years we have adopted an analytical approach to understand your business, identify and enhance the factors that contribute to your success with advanced analytics, and provide tailored growth marketing solutions for sustainable growth.

At InPulse Digital by collaborating with companies such as Google, Meta, TikTok and Pinterest we make your media buying process more efficient. We utilize top notch tools like GWI, SemRush, Brandwatch Adobe Creative Cloud and Looker Studio to provide you with data insights and competitive analysis. 

With the help of advanced technology we offer a highly specialized understanding of your target audience, and how to convert them into real customers. Our interactive dashboards powered by ChatGPT and Looker Studio allow you to monitor real time performance on Social Media, Paid Social Media and Digital Advertising platforms.

5. Iteration

Ongoing cycles of insight-driven adaptation are crucial. As it is also embracing a channel agnostic mindset. This flexibility enables us to distribute efforts accordingly, boosting the ones that are actually working instead of the usual approach, getting stuck in marketing stagnation and fixed budgets. 

We highly recommend a phased approach that allows interaction. We start by addressing goals gradually before implementing more complex and aggressive initiatives. We also give importance to allocating marketing budgets according to best practices of your specific industry, and then reallocating using smart data analysis to ensure the best returns on investment.

As we all know, leveraging seasonality and trends is key. Our approach is to creat flexible growth marketing strategies that make room for rapid implementation of trendy formats and viral content, as well leveraging the holidays -and understanding marketing dynamics during these pivotal days- throughout the year. This ensures that our clients' campaigns remain relevant and impactful.

BONUS PILLAR

Finally, we strongly believe in the values of transparency, honest communication and collaboration as they form the foundation of building enduring partnerships. The fact that some of our clients have been with us for more than 10 years not only is a reflection of this, but also makes us proud of being true to our brand promise: We win when you win.   

Conclusion

In today's evolving landscape it is crucial for businesses to prioritize growth marketing in order to achieve long term success and maintain competitiveness. As we have explored in this article, this approach plays a vital role for businesses aiming for sustainable growth and maintaining competitiveness.

By incorporating industry best practices, embracing data driven decision making processes, and escalating expertise, companies can attract and retain clients in a sustainable way.

Remember that growth marketing is a process where success is achieved through testing, optimization and adaptation to changing market conditions. With this strategy and approach in place, your business can flourish.

Intrigued?

Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with a top-notch growth marketing specialist to get insights on your strategy or learn more about our FREE media audit report.