What is growth marketing?
With the number of new businesses starting each year, it can be tough to stand out from the crowd. Being seen today requires creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. Growth marketing is a term frequently heard in the startup world that embodies this mindset. Growth marketing and growth marketing companies have grown in popularity in recent years as marketers recognize their role in retaining customers, not just acquiring them.
Growth marketing uses a variety of marketing tactics to help a company scale quickly by focusing on driving revenue & lifetime value across users full customer lifecycle. Traditional marketing is generally thought of as a way to bring people into the funnel through awareness and acquisition, turning the process over to sales and eventually customer support once the person enters the funnel. Growth marketing is different because it focuses on the entire full customer funnel, not just the top where prospective customers enter.
How does growth marketing strategy work?
Growth marketing is not about taking shortcuts. Companies with a growth marketing strategy move quickly, test new ideas, and move on from the ones that do not result in growth. Historical data and knowledge of consumer needs is helpful when implementing tactics designing a campaign. For example, marketers running paid campaigns may discover ads perform better with native advertising, which is more content focused, than traditional online ads, and therefore decide to invest more marketing dollars into native platforms.
Managing this does not have to be a time consuming process. Growth marketers have a variety of tools to choose from for their marketing stack for promoting content, measuring performance, and building out a plan. With a platform like AdRoll (or another growth marketing tool), marketers focus on driving profitable conversions and can easily see how different marketing channels work together. This means more dollars are invested in the channels with highest return. The right tools also allow growth marketers to coordinate campaigns across previously siloed channels, making it easier to monitor performance across their marketing campaigns.
Why is growth marketing so effective?
Because growth marketing is about achieving impactful & fast results, marketers can quickly pivot to the tasks that that result in the highest revenue and customer growth. The approach of constant testing allows these marketers to drive real business growth— allowing them to learn quickly, scale successful campaigns, and rework unsuccessful tests. Typically, growth marketing teams set aside resources specifically for testing new campaigns, tools or methods. While the proportion and formula varies per business, these test resources are a critical key to success and guides growth marketers in making decisions about audience and channels - and where to put the majority of their efforts for the highest return.
Using information from actual users, growth marketers target channels and messaging based on what they learn. As more data comes in, the strategy is modified so acquiring and retaining continues in a positive direction. A solid growth marketing strategy is never static. It constantly changes along with user behavior, industry, channels, and trends.
A good growth marketing strategy builds upon real data, rather than assumptions or opinions. And it considers what users really want, not just what the brand hopes to sell. That is how businesses reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.
Want to learn more on growth marketing strategy? Check out the AdRoll blog
Growth Marketing Strategy Best Practices
- Measure everything you do and do so regularly. If something does not work, find that out quickly and pivot rather than continue to invest resources into a tactic that does not result in revenue. Learn what works and optimize it.
- Know that some things will fail. Move on. It is okay to fail because it will be discovered quickly and is an expected part of the process. Failure is a way to gather information and improve the long-term strategy.
- Realize that tactics that worked for other brands may not work for you. Know your KPIs and build your growth marketing strategy around that rather than attempting to replicate what was successful for other companies.
- Choose marketing tools that can be integrated to free up more time for strategy, rather than wasting time trying to understand inconsistent data across disparate platforms. Siloed tools take up a lot of time and resources that could be better spent on strategy, which is where AdRoll can help your business.
Want to learn more on growth marketing strategy? Check out the AdRoll blog