Growth Marketing: Why Do You Need It?

In today’s competitive business environment, having an arsenal of digital marketing tactics is essential for any brand to succeed. Most brands can come up with a few catchy marketing campaigns. Few, however, will be cost-effective or sustainable in the long run. An effective growth marketing strategy must achieve your short-term goals. It should also allow your brand to grow consistently under a sustainable marketing budget over the long term.

In APAC, marketers spent approximately 208.7 billion U.S. dollars on marketing in 2021. Was it well spent? Did it give marketers the ROI they wanted? Probably not. In this article, we will share why growth marketing is the key to uplifting your marketing to new heights.

Growth Marketing: What is it?

Growth marketing includes a wide range of digital marketing tactics, such as:

Utilizing these digital marketing tactics effectively is key to creating strong, long-term growth for your brand.

Buffer has illustrated the strategies and abilities needed for effective growth marketing:

Growth marketing with Buffer
Buffer’s growth marketing skills framework.

A well-developed growth marketing strategy should be a combination of philosophy and technical execution. Moreover, concepts from behavior psychology, for example, can be used to enhance customer experience and assist with data analytics.

Accordingly, If you would like to learn more about digital marketing, you can also read:

How is Growth Marketing different from a traditional approach?

Traditional marketing usually employs “set it and forget it” tactics. These tactics can generate traffic at the top of your sales funnel. Moreover, they help to boost brand recognition and user acquisition, but the usefulness stops there.

The top of the funnel (awareness and acquisition) is only one part of growth marketing. When executed well, it delivers value at every stage of the digital marketing funnel. The tactics lure customers in and keep them interested. Best of all, it eventually converts them into brand advocates.

Traditional vs. growth marketing funnels
How traditional marketing differs from a growth approach

Growth approaches in marketing are data-driven. Iterations based on data are key to a growth strategy. You develop a plan, try new things, and fail rapidly. This is a process of constant improvement that continually improves your performance.

Growth marketing, like biological evolution, is a stochastic process. This implies some element of chance in the possible winning tactics. You try many tactics and learn what motivates your customers to convert. It is a constant learning curve to realize what combination of tactics will lead to success.

How can a growth marketing strategy succeed?

If you want your digital marketing tactics to beat the competition, remember these tips below:

Driven by Data

Using intuition in marketing is old school. The same applies to basing choices only on the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) method. Today’s growth marketing strategy deep dives into data and insights to determine which techniques are effective.

Creative and outside-the-box thinking

The greatest growth marketers are open to new ideas. If the data points out that even a crazy idea may work, they’ll experiment on it.

Product Oriented

You can’t sell a product you don’t understand, according to a sales adage. The same principle holds true with growth marketing strategy. Why? Because these digital marketing tactics engage in selling. The messaging in your marketing needs to solve customers’ pain points. You should explain the pros of a product that can benefit your customer. Do not deceive them into purchasing something they don’t want.

Embrace the mindset of a growth hacker

Good growth strategies have a broad range of tactics. The tactics in your funnel may use video, PPC, A/B testing, or more. Using many tactics is wise. It will be more likely that you can engage your prospective customer in their buyer’s journey. In this engagement, you will build trust and loyalty with the customers.

Failure is an option

A failed outcome is not always a negative thing. Growth marketers are not clairvoyants. To find out what works, you must be willing to try anything. You will come across successful ideas, which you may then optimize and use as a starting point for new ideas.

Storytelling is a key part of growth marketing strategy
Storytelling is key to creating a narrative to gain the trust of customers.

Be a storyteller

One needs a story to connect with your customers. Try to use quantitative and qualitative data to create an engaging narrative. The story mush appeal to your target audience. Use all the digital marketing tactics to empower your audience to action with your storytelling.

A great example of this is Warby Parker. When Warby Parker made designer eyeglasses accessible, more eco-friendly, and simple to try at home, they revolutionized the entire business. Their brand has a compelling origin story, too. One of its founders had to go through the first semester of graduate school sans glasses. This was because he lost them while trekking and couldn’t afford to get new ones. He and his team decided to address the issue and use an environmentally friendly, plant-based frame structure.

Storytelling with Warby Parker
Warby Parky use storytelling to build trust with their customers.

Is growth hacking the same as growth marketing?

Yes and no. “Growth marketing” and “Growth hacking” are frequently used interchangeably. Yet, remember there are some minor distinctions between them. They are related, like cousins in a family.

Growth hacking is more akin to quickly and efficiently handling a particular challenge. Speed is vital to growth hacking. Issues are usually resolved immediately.

A growth strategy adopts a longer-term strategy. It must plan how to scale several growth KPIs at once. These can also be across numerous dimensions. Scaling must also be efficient and sustainable.

Growth hacking is comparable to day trading Bitcoin. Yes, you can generate money this way. However, it won’t always be a reliable source of revenue in the long run.

The urge to think outside the box to get traction is one of growth hacking’s strongest qualities. A good growth marketing strategy distills this into a long-term sustainable framework. As such, a growth marketing strategy is thus similar to but opposite of hacking. Why? It focuses on making long-term marketing investments based on continuously improved data-driven KPIs.

Accordingly, If you would like to learn more about digital marketing, you can also read:

How can you measure the success of your marketing growth strategy?

The secret to successful strategy revisions is knowing what metrics to measure. You can determine what your consumers desire if you use the correct data points from your funnel. This holds true with any digital marketing tactics you use in the funnel.

The following are some key objectives and metrics to watch:

What are the metrics for measuring website traffic?

Here are some core metrics that we recommend you track:

Organic Traffic

This metric measures website visitors who enter your site via one of the main search engines. Use all the tactics in your arsenal to rank well. Try to ensure your website is on page one of Google to maximize organic traffic.

This entails great SEO execution. Consequently, SEO tactics would be both on-page and off-page. Additionally, you can also utilize backlinking. This is the practice of placing your high-quality content on other websites. Doing so increases inbound traffic.

Paid Traffic

These visitors come to your website through your paid advertisements. You should keep an eye on your expenditure or ad spend. Keep an eye on the number of impressions your ads produce. Most importantly, manage your cost per acquisition (CPA) (cost per acquisition).

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is any traffic that does not originate from a major search engine. Traffic from social media is an example of referral traffic.

What you need to get good results is engaging and helpful content. People will begin sharing and discussing it. If you can optimize your content, excellent results are sure to happen.

Track keywords, especially those of competitors. In addition, Social listening tools are a good resource here. You can get the edge over your rivals by tracking their social media engagement peaks. Finally, you learn and replicate their tactics.

What are the metrics for measuring leads and conversion?

All the visitors in the world are meaningless if they don’t turn into customers. Listed below are major areas to optimize:

Conversion Rate

How many visitors really convert after visiting your site? This is the question we all want to be answered when we employ digital marketing tactics.

Here, you should look for any pages that exhibit notable drop-offs. Above all, this situation is a cause for concern. However, if there is an increase, this is a good sign.

Conversion rates for landing pages

What percentage of visitors to your primary landing page convert? Therefore, we suggest several methods to improve this include playing around with the copy, design, and layout.

Finally, the length of the page title you display on a landing page is an intriguing topic to experiment with. As well, snappy and catchy headlines typically perform better.

Email and Blog Subscribers

Do you create articles that readers genuinely want to read? That should be your top focus.

So, are you providing awesome content as part of your digital marketing tactics? Then you want to make sure it is driving the behaviors you desire. We recommend analyzing metrics like the click-through rate, subscription growth, and shares.

Lastly, these metrics can help you determine if your content is helping conversions or not.

The goal with digital marketing is always to retain customers
The use of digital marketing tactics strives to retain customers.

What if my goal is to retain customers?

If you are aiming to retain customers, please consider these metics:

Lower churn rates

The churn rate is the percentage of people that sign up for your service but later stop using it. Churn is the nemesis of exponential growth.

If you are in super growth mode, you need to pay particular attention to this statistic. If not, you will suffer. Why? You won’t be able to reach the critical mass of users to make money.

To solve this, consider all potential reasons why people drop off. You need to find the gaps. Finally, iterate to close any gaps.

Average order value

If you are in eCommerce, you know that you want your average order value to go up.

To do so, start focusing your digital marketing tactics on users in ways that will raise the average order value.

Track and analyze buyer activity. For that reason, you can then assess if bundling or upselling are things to consider. Each order will then be bigger in size.

Boost Lifetime Value

How can you make the most of a customer after you have them loyal?

You can do customer surveys. Above all, this is a solid way to determine what new features they would want.

Lastly, one can also look at discounts for yearly billing or by offering a premium loyalty program. Many airlines do this.

FAQs

Is growth marketing hard?

Excelling at executing and maintaining a growth marketing strategy is hard. Another key point is that it is worthwhile and can provide long-term ROI through a solid and loyal customer base.

Why is growth marketing the next frontier of marketing?

Digital marketing tactics within growth marketing change the focus of the marketing dialogue. It changes from “how can we attract our customers?” to “how can we keep our customers longer?”. In keeping your customers longer, it is possible to improve lifetime customer value and referrals.

What are growth marketing channels?

A growth channel in marketing is a channel by which you bring in new customers and keep them.

Final thoughts

Growth marketing is becoming more and more well-liked as a powerful strategy. You can use this strategy to lure new clients and keep existing ones.

Its roots come from growth hacking. And it is best suited for businesses that don’t mind experimenting and learning. Using a growth marketing strategy is a long-term activity and can achieve excellent ROI.

We hope that we have convinced you to improve your marketing efforts with these ideas on executing digital marketing tactics.

There are a lot of great ways to learn more about the tactics of growth marketing. Here are some great blog articles that we recommend you read:

It is likely that you are a busy business owner or leader. You may not have the time to put in place solid growth plans. If this is the case, we invite you to review some of our strategic growth marketing services:

Of course, more than anything, we would love to help you succeed. If you have any questions, please get in touch with one of our expert digital strategists for a free consultation.