While traditional marketing is all about selling a company's products and services, growth marketing is a more holistic function. Growth marketing does not just focus on sales, they focus on finding the most efficient way to drive revenue and growth in a business environment.

What is the origin behind growth marketing?

Growth marketing was born out of a high-pressure startup environment. Startups often have minuscule marketing budgets and are dependent on growth for survival. Over the last decade, these pressures forced many companies to take more innovative approaches, often harnessing the power of technology to find new ways to grow without spending massively on advertising. 

There’s no denying there is some overlap between traditional marketing and growth hacking. While growth marketing and traditional marketing share some common strategies, their end goals tend to differ.  Traditional marketers aim to engage and ultimately sell to their customer base, growth marketing's only goal is to grow a business as quickly as possible.  Beyond this overarching difference though there are some key differences between growth marketing and traditional marketing, that implicitly highlight the limitations of traditional marketing.

1. Growth Marketing Has a Big Picture Focus

While traditional marketers don’t tend to look beyond the realms of marketing, modern-day growth marketing explores every avenue to generate growth for a business. This may include traditional marketing strategies but is just as likely to involve research and development and product testing.

2. Growth Marketing Is Measurement Focused and Iterative

Growth marketing, on the other hand, tends to necessitate being more digital-savvy, making the most of smaller budgets and other constraints to find hacks and shortcuts wherever they can. Rather than concerning themselves with reaching the highest number of people, growth marketing uses the metrics of previous digital activities to judge what has worked and what hasn’t to help them target the people that are most likely to convert, ultimately enabling their campaigns to become more effective moving forward.

3. Growth Marketing Is Analytics Oriented

One of the biggest differences between traditional marketers and growth marketing is their tendency (and ability) to use data to inform their approach.

While some marketers have been known to base their strategies on historical performance data and best-practice tips, growth marketing continuously evaluates each campaign on a daily basis, using their access to essential metrics to ensure their tactics are resulting in the maximum amount of growth in the most cost-effective way possible.

4. Growth Marketing Is Both Product and Customer Focused

While traditional marketers tend to operate separately from a business’s design team, growth marketing has a  more holistic perspective, which entails regular involvement themselves with every facet of the business, ensuring they have a high-level understanding of the businesses, and all-new features that are being developed.

For this reason, traditional marketing teams are often tasked with finding an audience to buy an already-developed product — a tactic that we now understand is flawed. Growth marketing, on the other hand, uses access to greater data insights to understand the needs and wants of the market.

5. Growth Marketing Considers the Full Business Funnel

One major criticism directed at traditional marketers is that they are only interested in attracting new customers. Some say that once this (admittedly valuable) part of the process is done, marketers move on to their next acquisition and leave the job of retaining those customers to a different department. Out of necessity due to both budgetary constraints and an innate need for growth, technology companies have been forced to place a greater focus on customer retention, realizing the value of existing customers and the lower cost of keeping a current customer compared to attracting a new one.

For this reason, growth marketing focuses on the complete customer journey. Just as it is for traditional marketing, attracting new customers is important for growth marketing. The main difference is what happens next.  While marketers drop off to focus on the next win, growth marketing aims to optimize the customer journey to ensure that they have a smooth onboarding process, keeping them satisfied to ensure they continue to purchase, and ‘wowing’ them at every touchpoint in their journey to help make them advocates for your business and essentially making existing customers your salesforce.

What are some Growth Marketing Fundamentals?

Now that we have established the context for growth marketing, its origins, and what sort of limitations of traditional marketing that growth marketing helps to move past, it is necessary to establish what some growth marketing fundamentals or essentials are. 

At its core, growth marketing fundamentals involve being crystal clear on purpose and what your ultimate aims are.  So clearly metrics are at the heart of the essentials of growth marketing.  But let us look at this more concretely, in order to establish just what it entails specifically, as well as examine what else is part of what makes up solid growth marketing fundamentals.  

7 Growth Marketing Fundamentals Every Growth-Focused Business Needs

1) Your entire business should be aligned in terms of  mission and purpose

A clear mission that connects to your marketing efforts helps to inform decision-making and set priorities. It also unites all parts of your business together, ensuring that everyone works as a part of a holistic system, even if individual departments have their own distinct function and expertise.

Though some businesses fail to connect their goal-planning efforts with their growth marketing efforts, you need to know what you want to achieve and why. Then you’ll create a strategy that aligns with your goals.

Once you have a strategy, of course, you need a growth marketing plan complete with the requisite growth marketing tactics. A strategy without an execution plan is like a Ferrari race car without an engine – cool to look at but useless.

2) Your data capturing & reporting process needs to be continuously strengthened.

 Your data-capturing methods should paint a clear picture of consumer behavior, business operations, and test results. It’s crucial to know what you are capturing and how you translate data into insights.  This can be as basic as starting out with Google Analytics, or its privacy-friendlier counterpart Plausible Analytics, or more robust options like SEM Rush and Ahrefs. The point is that if you want to make the best use of your data, you need to have the tools that support it.

As part of these efforts, your transactional data at all steps of your growth marketing funnel should also be thoroughly tracked. Why is it essential to understand transactional data? It shows everything about how much, what’s popular, who’s buying, and how frequently. This information is the foundation of one of the most critical growth marketing metrics – CLV (customer lifetime value).

Especially for digital brands that rely on a global audience, online marketing is an inseparable part of daily interaction with customers as well as other members of your target audience. So now, there is no wonder that many founders rely on using this data to inform decisions and help the business reach its goals.

But data means nothing just on its own. Its real value becomes obvious when you draw actionable insights from it. Not just some random conclusions and vanity metrics but ideas that can be implemented and used to drive results for your business.

Strength of insight refers to the quality of actionable conclusions drawn from the collected data. As a business owner, you always are the decision-maker and the person to sign off on the strategy, but you don’t always grasp everything that your business data can illustrate.

This is where a second pair of experienced sets of eyes can come in.  Our experts, for instance at eCommerce Made Simpler can definitely help you examine your analytics, in order to help you make better decisions and or understand your customers/segments themselves.

3) A Culture of Experimentation Helps Create a Feedback Loop Necessary to Enable Growth Marketing:

The ‘how’ is crucial to a business's growth marketing fundamentals.   Not all tactics are the same, and choosing the right one can make a significant difference in reaching your goals faster. If you are not sure of the optimal way of getting there, you can use marketing experiments to know for sure. They eliminate all the guesswork and help you find the best options, and support your decisions with data.

The great thing is that as part of your growth marketing fundamentals, it is essential to realize that your business has data to explain how the tactics you choose will bring you closer to these objectives.  This is essentially a feedback loop that makes you ask yourself: what do these insights say about where we are, how we can go further, and how we can help customers better, and how can we use these answers to increase our success?

This is where the experimentation side of growth marketing that we alluded to comes in. The easiest way to lower your acquisition costs is to increase the rate you convert window shoppers into purchasers.  As a result, A/B testing is a core practice for successful growth marketing implementation. 

4) Customer acquisition

If you want to acquire customers in a short period of time, you’ll have to pay for it. Organic Search is a great tool but it takes a while to build up authority on a given topic, whereas Paid Search and Paid Social Media are much more immediate.

Businesses measure their ability to acquire customers into a metric called Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC. The CAC represents the dollar value it takes to acquire new users, and growth marketers are (rightfully) obsessed with CAC.

But now that you’ve acquired those customers, you have to also ensure that they stay.  This is where churn comes into play.

5) Reducing Churn

Having paid users sign-up for your product is great, but you can’t abandon them after they give you money. You have to teach them how to use your product to solve their problem, otherwise, you risk them churning. Churn is a metric that shows the rate at which customers stop using, and stop paying for, your product. All that time and money spent acquiring new customers is worthless if you can’t get them to stick around.

This is where onboarding and activation sit in a growth marketers tool belt. . A good onboarding experience walks your new user through their first stages of using your product, and if done correctly gets them to complete the significant hurdles to using, and ultimately seeing value in your product.

Successful onboarding leads to user activation, which means the user has completed all the steps they need to actually use your product. 

The specific goals for Onboarding & Activation will be different for every business. Ask yourself what are the major steps a user needs to take before they can actually use your product?

6) Customer Retention

Also related to churn Churn.  There are many reasons users churn. Sometimes the product doesn’t live up to their expectations, or they found a better way to solve their initial problem, or they had a poor experience with your support team, or they just didn’t like your product. Whatever the reason, growth marketers need to understand the why behind user churn.

One way to do that is to offer an exit survey when a user cancels their account. Asking them a simple question of “Why are you canceling your account?” with a few pre-written options for them to select is a great way to start understanding the drivers behind churn.

An exit survey can help you understand why users who have decided to cancel are leaving,. Another indicator is NPS, or Net Promoter Score.  Whatever way you decide to measure customer happiness, it’s important to track it regularly so you can stay ahead of future churn. Give users an avenue to provide feedback on your product and you can start making improvements to retain more of your customers each month and create a better user experience.

7) Referrals

Referrals don’t have to cost you anything. In fact, if you have a really great product then users will want to talk about you. Users will write blog posts, and how-to guides, and create Youtube videos if they love your product. These are often made by power users, users that are digitally shouting your product from the rooftops. Growth marketers will identify those folks and start building relationships with them. Anything from something small such as sending them swag like company t-shirts, mugs, or even full-fledged partnerships that allow them to extend their brand awareness at the same time as they are helping you.  

Dropbox revolutionized referral programs with a 2-way referral. Invite someone to Dropbox and they’ll get extra cloud storage, and the person referring them will also get extra storage. It's a win for both parties and t helped propel Dropbox to be the leading provider of personal cloud storage.

The important lesson to growth marketers there is that incentives can be a powerful motivator to grow your business. Plus, word-of-mouth is often a more convincing type of marketing campaign.  After all, a close friend saying that you should really check a new product out is easily just as convincing as being constantly bombarded with Facebook ads.

Growth Marketing is All About the Fundamentals

To help achieve growth in your business, one needs to nail the fundamentals. Some of the things that were mentioned, included requiring consistent sources of traffic, ideally from free channels like Google Search to help drive your CAC down, ensuring customer onboarding and activation and customer experience is excellent (and that these customers talk to those that they know about your mentioned) may seem inherently obvious but bear repeating as being fundamentally important.

 

Optimizing every step of the user funnel is key to establishing a solid growth marketing strategy, as well as growth marketing fundamentals. Starting with customer acquisition, user onboarding, and activation, retention, and referrals, they take a broad approach to marketing. Growth marketers need to relentlessly test and tweak new ideas until something sticks,  and when it does, they will push it as far and as often as they can.

With these 7 growth marketing fundamentals, your business is on its way to having all the bases covered for achieving the massive growth that will allow it to set itself apart from the other players in your industry.  If you think you might need some help in addressing any or all of these issues in terms of establishing a firm growth-oriented footing in your organization, please don't hesitate to reach out to our expert growth marketing consultants for a free no no-obligation assessment and consultation.