Every small business owner has ambitions to grow their business. However, only 65% of American businesses do not last past the 10 year mark.  Despite the tremendous amount of entrepreneurial zeal, even the best business idea can fail. 

While there is a perception of growth as being only relevant to startups, it is important to realize that the struggles of growing a business do not apply uniquely to startups.  The risks are even greater for companies that are in the midst of growing rapidly. If not managed carefully, their growth can actually be their downfall. Cash flow issues are common as monthly expenses can frequently exceed revenues. With so much focus on pursuing growth, day-to-day processes can easily become unwieldy. Basic systems and manual processes that work for a small company won’t support you the same way as you add more customers, products, sales channels, employees etc. 

Something that people often overlook in the midst of trying to grow revenues within a business is how easy it is for the existing members of your business to burn out while going through these activities . Higher work loads that arise out of inefficient processes take a toll pretty quickly. 

With all of this going on, it is easy to see why it can be so difficult to become a fast-growing company.  However, in this article, we will put forward the argument that getting past these difficulties comes down to (ideally) proactively establishing these processes that  when implemented in a timely fashion help to establish growth.  Key to this is understanding not just the various reasons why  businesses struggle, but examining the various phases where these struggles can occur as part of an ongoing growth marketing process.               

 That is what this article will examine in greater detail.  Specifically, how to go about establishing the processes that foster a growth-focused marketing approach within any business, including yours.

The Importance of Establishing Solid Growth Marketing Fundamentals Is Important:  Understanding Why Businesses Struggle to Grow

 Identifying the reasons your business might not be growing is the first step towards unlocking its potential. Let's dive into some common barriers to business growth and how to navigate them.

1. Insufficient Financing and Poor Cash Flow Management

This is common for startups.  Trying to stretch your finances at the beginning may mean that your business never gets off the ground.   However, this is a problem not just for startups but also for business trying to scale their businesses as they try to expand their business or their customer base in a way that is profitable and does not impact cash flow.

More generally, mismanagement of funds, lack of budgeting, and inadequate financial planning can stunt your business's growth. Ensuring you have a solid financial foundation and a clear focus on your business’ cash flow, expenses, and investment opportunities is critical for sustainable growth.

2. Not Prioritizing Data as a Fundamental Business Resource

Data is the lifeblood of successful companies. Timely overarching data can help to make better business decisions, understand customers and their needs/pain points, incoming market trends, create smarter products and services, and improve their business processes.

But all this data comes with a huge responsibility. Companies must keep information safe and comply with all applicable security legislation. The companies that succeed in the future will need to have a solid strategy in place that makes the most of their data while protecting partners and customers.

3. Not Being Sufficiently Customer-Centric 

Everything a company offers must provide value to customers and make things easier for them. Putting customers first also means not being afraid of letting go of existing products and services and getting rid of anything that doesn't add value to customers.  But more importantly, being customer-centric allows businesses to not only build better and more tailored products, boost customer loyalty, and become more efficient.  Key to becoming customer-centric is becoming more data centric, which alludes to the previous point.

4. Not Having a Sufficiently Comprehensive Online Presence

Having an online presence is a non-negotiable for businesses these day. If potential customers can't find you online, or your digital platforms don't reflect the quality of your offerings, you're missing out on significant growth opportunities. Investing in a robust online strategy, including a comprehensive and intuitive website, active social media channels, and effective online marketing, is key. These digital avenues are essential tools to helping your businesses grow They allow your business to promote itself in a cost effective manner with specific and timely promotions and offerings that reach very specific audience, without sacrificing broader reach. 

5. Severely Underestimating the Importance, Impact and Potential Scope of Marketing as a Business Function

Many businesses underestimate the power of marketing. With the assumption that a good product or service will sell itself or that generating revenues is about focusing on person to person selling, they allocate minimal resources to marketing efforts. However, even the best offerings need the support of strong marketing to reach potential customers and communicate value. Diversifying your marketing strategies, from SEO, SEM, email marketing, social media to influencer marketing strategies to traditional advertising, can significantly boost your business’ visibility and growth potential.

6. Not Scaling or Adjusting Their Operational Framework In Line With Business Growth

As your business grows, your operations need to adjust. Many businesses struggle because their operational processes and systems can't handle increased demand or expansion. This includes everything from supply chain management to customer service. Assessing and scaling your operations to accommodate growth as part of an overall change management strategy is optimal to prevent bottlenecks while maintaining quality as you expand.

7.  Neglecting Leadership Development As a Part of the Strategy Involved in Growing Your Business

Your employees are the backbone of your business, and neglecting their development can impede growth. However, as much as investing in training, providing clear career paths, and fostering a positive company culture are an important part of fostering employee development, (can motivate your team and enhance their productivity) it goes much further than that.  Identifying (or prioritizing the hiring of) those employees that bring something extra in terms of importance to driving progress to your business (be it on account of specialized knowledge, or experience within your business or industry, or both) is severely underrated by many businesses in terms of importance.  It is in fact a key driving factor.   Having people that are empowered with true responsibility and oversight over key areas of a business operations helps out the business in 2 key ways. 

 First, it allows the business owner/CEO or operator to focus on the high level business priorities, such as the overarching strategy and business positioning, Secondly, since there are multiple individuals focused on particular areas of a business operations allows for concerted mental and physical energy being directed towards these specific areas.  When combined in multiple areas of the organization and over an extended period time, this allows for greater progress in these different areas that drive progress in business would otherwise happen.  This in turn, drives far greater revenue growth in these organizations than in those where prioritization of autonomous, specialized leadership is not prioritized as much, or at all. 

8. Not Relentlessly Innovating As a Business

Our world is moving incredibly quickly, and new and innovative ways to deliver products and services are emerging every day. Companies must relentlessly innovate so they can keep their competitive edge. Many companies are hesitant to change established products, services, or processes.  However, if they don't, there will be plenty of innovative businesses in their sphere who can potentially outflank them. 

9. Remaining Rigid

This relates to the previous points.  Once you've done the planning, established your business, and gained a customer base, it’s easy to start to think that focusing on this type of customer base is the only way to go.  Or that the business processes or practices that you are used to are what is tried and true, and that no other alternatives should even considered . The thing is, the need that your business is currently fulfilling may not always be there or be the best fit for your business. By monitoring the market and being on top of key trends will allow you lots of time to adjust your strategy so that you can continuously progress. More often that not, realizing that you need to adjust or level up your strategy and implement a change management framework in the process will require you to adjust many of the business practices that your business has become used to.

10. Expanding Too Fast

 If you're expanding the reach of your business, make sure that you understand the areas and markets into which you'll now be reaching. If you're expanding the scope and focus of your business, make sure you understand your new products, service and intended consumer as much as you do with your current successful business.

When a business expands too fast and doesn't take the same care with research, strategy, and planning, the financial drain of the failing business(es) arising out from a lack of in depth analysis and planning can severely strain a business’s operations and financial resources in the long run.

11. Complacency

Arrogance is a company killer. As soon as leaders become complacent, their companies begin to fall behind. To succeed, companies need humble leaders who still maintain a smidge of fear that motivates them into action. Leaders should be aware that they can't afford to cling to any past or current successes because sitting back on their heels will cause their companies to fall behind.

12. Failing to attract and keep talent

Recruiting and keeping top talent is a challenge for today’s organizations.  To our previous point about prioritizing leadership development, great people are at the core of every company. Having a progressive culture that prioritizes requires people/leadership identification and development as being central to this.  A reason for this is employees such environments implicitly and or eventually start to realize that there is actually room for real growth and advancement. Not only does this keep employees motivated and engaged in your day to day business activities, but the fact that it does allows for greater business growth helps to generate awareness of the business.  This in turn, helps attract the interest of other potential employees.  Essentially, priortizing attracting and developing exceptional people as central to business progress helps draw in other similarly motivated people, basically reinforcing a favorable cycle of progress.

13. Not developing future skills

A key part of employee development is making sure their skills are up  to date. The skills required to succeed at work are evolving faster than ever, and the shelf life of today’s skills is rapidly decreasing. Every organization needs to ensure its people are continually developing the right skills, or they will simply be left behind.

What is Growth Marketing?

Now that we have established the main factors that prevent businesses from achieving noticeable growth, we need to get into drilling into the fine points of establishing the processes that help to create steady, consistent revenue growth. Essentially, we need to understand what helps to generate growth, or fosters a growth marketing approach within a business,  Before we do this, let’s first delve a little more into what growth marketing actually is.

Using a growth marketing approach involves attracting, engaging, and retaining customers in a way that's focused on relentless experimentation.  As a part of this, there is an intense focus on the unique, changing motives and preferences of your customers. By building and delivering highly tailored, individualized messaging aligned to your customers needs, you are able to quickly optimize your business’ growth rapidly through a multitude of channels, especially the ones that matter most to your customers.

Growth marketing uses a full-funnel, data-driven approach.  Analytics are used to track progress and make decisions about where to focus their efforts. This data-focused approach requires growth marketers to be nimble and experiment with different growth marketing tactics to find the ones that work best for their business.  

Growth marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it prioritizes small hypotheses, fast experimentation, and rapid iteration over large, long-term campaigns.

 Growth marketing supports the marketing flywheel mode.  This represents an update to the traditional marketing funnel model, which essentially takes an ongoing and cyclical view of marketing for growth rather than a one-off campaign approach.

 Growth marketing teams need to mix creative and technical expertise, spanning the entire growth marketing framework in order to adopt growth marketing best practices in a systematic and repeatable fashion, and which ultimately facilitates quick growth. 

These experiments that run within this framework typically help teams focus on the lifetime value of a customer, rather than simply increasing the number of buyers. In other words, growth marketing considers which tactics can increase not only sales as one-off opportunities but also prioritizes the value of entrenched and increasingly solid customer relationships.

How Does Growth Marketing Differ from Traditional Marketing

While traditional marketing is all about selling a company's products and services, growth marketing operates far more holistically. 

Unlike traditional marketing, which prioritizes brand awareness, growth marketing emphasizes acquisition, retention, and repeat purchases or revenue entrenchment, essentially a full funnel approach.

Traditional Marketing:  Setting aside the differences in tactics

• Brand Awareness: Traditional marketing aims to build and maintain a long-term brand reputation. Campaigns are often designed to create a lasting impression in the minds of consumers.

• Big Picture Focus: Strategies typically focus on sustained brand presence and customer loyalty. The goal is to develop a strong, recognisable brand with similar or at least consistent messaging over time.

• Broad Audience: Efforts generally target a wide demographic, using broad messaging to reach as many people as possible.

Example (Apple Shot on iPhone) :   Apple launched its “Shot on iPhone” marketing campaign in 2014 with the purpose of showcasing the phone’s camera. While the campaign highlighted the iPhone’s high-tech features, it turned to billboards, an old-school medium to share how photographers around the world were using its advanced camera system

Relying on user-generated content, Apple invited its customers to share photos taken with iPhones on social media using the hashtag #ShotoniPhone. Since its launch, the company has received millions of submissions on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).

The best photos have been blown up and displayed on billboards, buildings, and other large-scale, outdoor public spaces across the globe to tout iPhone’s technology

Growth Marketing:

• User Acquisition and Retention: Growth marketing focuses on attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. It aims to rapidly expand the customer base while ensuring existing customers remain loyal.

• Short and Long-Term Goals: It seeks both rapid growth through continuous experiments and sustainable strategies that ensure long-term success.

• Targeted Audience: Growth marketing targets specific customer segments, optimizing campaigns for higher conversion rates.

Example: It took Spotify just six years to reach a $10 billion evaluation and build a user base of more than 50 million people, 12.5 million of whom were already paying for the service. Now, the music streaming application has more than 299 million active monthly users with 138 million of them paying for Spotify Premium.

The company is now worth more than $15 billion, little more than a decade after it was first launched in 2008.

Spotify’s story has seen the company take on music piracy while subsequently bringing free, legal music to millions of people around the world .  These are two achievements that seem to be completely at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

The company’s success is thanks to a rich mix of unrivalled product design, smart growth marketing strategies, data-driven technology and one incredible offer: providing users access to almost all of the music in the world for only $10 per month.

User engagement and retention are crucial to Spotify’s business model, which ultimately relies on turning free users into paying subscribers. The freemium model has worked wonders for Spotify but in terms of grabbing users’ initial attention but this would mean nothing if the quality of its product was sub-par.

Users become so invested in the Spotify experience that it becomes almost impossible to leave, especially when you’re paying for ad-free listening.

The Main Benefits of Instilling a Growth Marketing Approach in Your Business

1. Your Business Becomes Results-Focused and Driven

This specific strategy is premised on factual data and information to yield competitive results. Practitioners test and modify every channel, tactic, or hypothesis to figure out which works best.

Through this digital marketing growth process, you can eliminate strategies that would yield poor outcomes. It also keeps the company from making decisions based on either instinct and/or what has been done in the past. 

2. The Focus is Squarely on Customers

A sound growth marketing strategy forges a long-term relationship with the clientele. Instead of luring people in to make their first purchase, this strategy is optimized to encourage engagement, retention, and added value after the initial purchase or subscription.  All of these help to solidify the relationship between your business and its customers, resulting in a better customer lifetime value (CLTV).

3) Regular Experimentation and Ideation Allow for Quick Turnarounds 

 Even if it focuses on long-term benefits,  growth hacking is a major part of what makes a successful growth marketing strategy. 

Marketers conduct rapid iteration and testing and consistently check the data for optimization. When you can fairly quickly realize what works and what doesn’t, making good business decisions quickly and in succession provides for a solid foundation for sustained business growth.

4) Growth Marketing Allows for Solid Brand Building

As much as traditional marketing is seen about building  brand awareness, growth marketing also touches on this in its own way.

What’s different with growth marketing is that it realizes that you don’t need to win over everyone. Instead, it focuses on finding people who are genuinely interested in what you offer.  By doing so,  you focus your marketing tactics on the data you get from your customers, and from repeatedly engaging with them. The more you understand your target audience, the better you can educate, inform, and serve them.

Flowing from these 4 main benefits arises a plethora of other benefits, including:

1. You build brand awareness...which starts and continues crescendo

Once you have a brand with enough people addicted to it, word-of-mouth content marketing kicks in. So do brand recognition and regular PR hits. Overall, it will start helping you win out in in many different quarters and essentially help you own your industry.

2. Your SEO snowballs

Over time, steady growth marketing will boost your SEO or search engine optimization. Constant experimentation and analytics lead you to format your content marketing in ways that algorithms adore.

This means you'll have more articles ranking on certain topics. It becomes easier to interlink your content, and as that happens, content gradually appears higher in search rankings.

3. Credibility comes to stay.

When you have a thin website with barely any information, don't expect investors, potential customers, or anyone else to think you're an authority in your space.

Continual, data-tested additions to your content marketing stable will keep you high on the authority meter. Creating helpful, educational content that hits on all stages of the buyer's journey piques the interest of people searching for what you offer.  This in turn creates credibility.  Create linkable content so the earned media mentions come to you.

It takes time, but building authority is a key to establishing awareness and steady, solid revenue growth.

4. You understand your target audience better.

Keep in mind that you're not trying to win everyone over with your content marketing.

Instead, you're trying to find the people who really and truly want what you have to offer. The ones who will love your SaaS/nutritional supplements or anything so much they'll shout your name from the rooftops.

People-oriented, data-backed strategies help you do that. The more you know about your audience, the better you can educate, inform, and serve them.

5. Your content accrues interest.

The longer content is alive, the more it earns backlinks. As it matures, you generate more and more inter-site links you create within your own content as well. The longer it's around, the more search engines trust it.

Content can also help keep existing customers on board. It's great to attract new leads, but if you lose them right away, you're swimming upstream.

Make sure your blog posts, articles, and sales guides aren't just geared toward the top of the funnel but instead hit on every stage of the buyer journey. Not just lead nurturing, but propagating and nurturing leads. Begin building customer satisfaction and brand loyalty at every step along the road, before they get rushed immediately over to your sales team.

6. With time, your content marketing becomes increasingly effortless to generate

The name of the content marketing game these days is increased automation, which comes at its core from being data driven. Yes, adjusting your creatives to serve an increasingly digital audience might take some doing, but you have to do what is necessary to keep the eyeballs that land on your website engaged.

Once you begin to embrace the benefits of marketing that are increasingly to be found in the digital realm, you'll hit your stride and be able to automate in no time.

What Are The Instances When a Growth Marketing Approach Can Be Beneficial

The Ansoff matrix is often used as a tool for helping leaders identify opportunities for business growth. It’s a straightforward template, developed by applied mathematician and business manager H. Igor Ansoff, 

• Market penetration
  Identified as the lowest risk of the four strategies, market penetration is about growing the distribution of existing products within existing markets. In other words, you sell more of what you have to your existing ideal customer.
  
  This can be achieved by decreasing prices, increasing promotion and advertising, or acquiring another business in the same market. Alternatively, partnering with a company targeting the same market as your brand, but offering a different product or service, can be a way forward. An example of this would be a B2B SaaS company partnering with a B2B agency with each referring the other’s business to their customers.
  
  
  

• Product development

This involves developing new products that cater to your existing market. One of the advantages of this approach is that you can use your existing customer base to identify the problem a new product could solve, market the solution directly to them, and accurately forecast the adoption of the new product to a wider market base.

In the best case scenario, the appearance of a a new viable product opportunity makes itself apparent . For example, you might notice that your existing customers are using another product in conjunction with your own and you have an opportunity to build something similar (but more tailored to your customers’ needs). Or your customers could be actively requesting you bring something to the market.  Either way, internal product development can serve as a tremendous, potential growth market.

• Market development
  With market development, a business will expand into a new market. For example, you could market your existing product in a new country or adjust your marketing strategy to appeal to a wider audience.
  
  Reaching a new market can be tricky, especially if your products and marketing initiatives have been developed with a specific market in mind. One key thing to kep in mind is not to steer too far from your existing market, as doing so could result in such a drastic change in tactics and core messaging that you lose some of your existing, main market.

• Diversification 

This is closely related to the previous point about market development. To succeed at diversification, it’s important to explore related products and markets. Again this involves taking what you know and applying it to something new. It’s also best to consider how you can use your existing business structure, process, and team in your diversification efforts. In other words, if you’re a B2B SaaS, diversifying with a physical, consumer-focused product is unwise.

A growth marketing plan may involve one of these possibilities identified by the different quadrants in the Ansoff matrix, along with a number of smaller opportunities that can arise within the existing marketing funnel.

 Setting aside general external competitive scenarios, there are a number of stages in a business’ development where establishing growth marketing-focused processes make sense.

1. Startups:  Establishing a growth marketing process is tailor made for startups.  Just the very aspect of being a startup business where either capital is limited, or where time to reflect or examine your business strategically is limited, in and of itself makes establishing growth marketing processes very important here. 

   Startups typically do not have much in the way of dedicated marketing personnel, largely because they are focused on trying to deal with selling or procuring business deals that allow them to survive while dealing with the in the moment operational aspect of dealing with existing prospects and clients.  Due to the extreme focus on day to day operations, the time to actually ascertain a proper marketing strategy is limited and it becomes de-prioritized.

2. Growing Businesses:  Now many of the same pains that exist in startups, still exist in businesses that are expanding.  These include a lack of time, lack of analysis and a lack of dedicated resources to do these things.  Couple that with the fact that in these growing business, since they are often not profitable in the way that they operate, revenue growth only serves to put a strain on them in terms of their survival.   Establishing proper processes that form the foundation of a growth marketing strategy are especially paramount for businesses that are in fact in the midst of experiencing rapid growth.

3. Established Businesses:  With businesses that have lasted for a considerable period of time, there tends to be a perception that establishing growth marketing is not for them. Or that these businesses are so established that there are no barriers to progress for them.  However, this is simply untrue.  In fact, the real problem is that such a perception not only exists in the minds of people in general, but even more troublesome is the fact that this perception often exists internally.  Complacency tends to set in within these businesses often due to an inherent lack of self examination and/or the discomfort that comes from realizing that shifting from a routine can be beneficial, but requires challenging adjustments in the way a business operates or is used to operating.    Establishing growth marketing processes within such businesses can certainly help to potentially prevent such scenarios from happening, but also work to reverse this ingrained complacency when it happens.

How to Establish a Growth Marketing Framework: 

Now that we have established what growth marketing is, and potential scenarios where a growth marketing framework can be beneficial , it’s time now to look into how to establish the growth-focused marketing processes that make up this framework from within your business.  Doing this not only helps you understand the steps that make up the growth marketing framework, it also helps determine the growth marketing processes that potentially could be beneficial at each of these steps.  

A growth marketing framework is a defined, data-driven process for achieving real growth as a business. It focuses on every aspect of the customer journey, from acquisition to retention.

A proper growth marketing framework improves decision-making, guides future experiments, and helps to focus your marketing efforts.

What Are Key Criterion  Needed to Guide a Growth Marketing Framework

1. Before we establish what makes up a growth marketing framework, it is important to realize what you need to pay particularly close attention to when examining the various points of the framework, and the growth marketing processes that comprise it. With that in mind is a list of criterion that need to be inherent within a proper growth marketing framework.

2. Define Your Goals and Metrics: The first step in building a growth marketing framework is to clearly define your business objectives. Are you looking to increase revenue, expand your customer base, or improve customer retention? Once your goals are defined, it is important to identify the key metrics that will measure your progress. Common metrics include customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rates, and churn rate.

3. Customer Feedback and Engagement: Actively seek feedback from your customers to understand their satisfaction levels and areas for improvement. Engage with prospects on social media, respond to reviews, and build a community around your brand that showcases your responsiveness and in some instances, your proactivity to customers.

4. Understand Your Audience By Creating Customer Personas: To effectively reach your target audience, you must understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. This is where creating detailed buyer personas that encompass demographics, psychographics, and behaviors comes into play. This knowledge will guide your messaging, content, and marketing channels and of course, the strategy behind it.  One of the more optimal ways to create a customer persona is to gather insights about customer behavior from website traffic, and campaign performance. 

5. Content Strategy: Develop a robust content strategy that aligns with your audience's interests and needs. Create high-quality, valuable content across various formats, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or podcasts. Consistency is key, so establish a content calendar to maintain a steady flow of content.

   
   
   

6. Optimize User Experience: Ensure that your website and landing pages provide a seamless and user-friendly experience. Load times, mobile responsiveness, and intuitive navigation are critical factors that can impact conversion rates and user satisfaction.

   
   
   

7. Multi-Channel Marketing: Employ a multi-channel marketing approach to reach your audience where they spend their time. Utilize social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, and other channels that align with your audience's behavior.

8. Conversion Rate Optimization Via A/B Testing and Experimentation: Embrace a culture of experimentation within your marketing team. Conduct A/B tests to refine your messaging, design, and calls-to-action. Continuously iterate and optimize your marketing campaigns based on the results.

   
   
   

9. Marketing Automation: Implement marketing automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks, nurture leads, and personalize interactions. Automation can save time and enhance the scalability of your growth marketing efforts.

   
   
   

10. Analytics and Reporting: Regularly monitor and analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs). Use these insights to make data-driven decisions and adjust your strategy as needed. Create comprehensive reports that showcase your progress toward your goals.

Examining the Growth Marketing Framework

Now that we have established the elements that need to be considered when establishing growth marketing processes as part of an overall framework, let’s now look at one of the more tried and true growth marketing frameworks out there, the AAARRR funnel.

AAARRR stands for Awareness, Activation, Adoption, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.  This growth marketing model attempts to follow the various stages that a prospect is likely to follow before, while and after they show interest in and purchase a product or service that your business offers.  

1. Awareness

The first stage in the funnel, awareness, is the first stage that your customers discover you and know that you exist.  

 This creates a cycle where new customers/users, interacting with a company for the first time, pass through each of the funnel stages, and as they exit, they recommend other people to your company to start the cycle over.

Key ways that one can measure awareness includes

• Number of visitors (traffic)

• Social Media Impressions

• Click-through rates

• Session length

Finding the right growth marketing channels involves understanding the target audience in the initial awareness stage.  Key to this is understanding why they might be looking for what your business offers, whether they currently use an offering or service comparable to what your business offers, and why they are looking to switch to or purchase/procure what your business offers.

Key tactics to consider at this stage 

Content Marketing: Churn out valuable articles, videos, podcasts and other content features to attract the attention of your prospective audience. The key here is to demonstrate expertise relative to the pain points or interests of your potential prospects in order to demonstrate that you sufficiently empathize with why they are looking for what you offer.

Email Marketing can also allow you to use the interest that the customer showed in their first interaction  as a launching point.  This allows them to either get them to purchase what your business offers or to get them to a point where you are having a targeted conversation.  The idea here with email funnels is getting them to engage with you in a targeted way that brings them closer to potentially purchasing your products/servies.

 2. Acquisition

The second phase of the consumer life cycle is acquisition and it’s about making potential customers engage with you and your service. 

The key to acquisition is to find the right customers, not just as many as possible.  

 As alluded to earlier, one can be helped to accomplish this by clearly defining your customers by establishing clear buyer personas. It’s much easier to ideate and create growth experiments by  focusing on the right marketing channels once we know exactly who we should be talking to, in terms of our audience. 

Metrics to measure in the acquisition phase

• Customer acquisition cost (per channel)

• Conversion rate

• Traffic driven to the website (per channel)

• Click-through rate

• Cost per click

• Dwell time on the website

• Bounce rates

Key Tactics to Consider At This Stage of this Acquisition

Remarketing Display or Text Ads: After customers engage with your content or marketing material online, remarketing ads serve to remind them not only of this fact, but also of their potential interest in the products or services that your business offers.

Social media campaigns: Building a presence on relevant social media channels allows you to connect with your target audience more directly.

3. Activation

Think of activation as the moment when a potential customer becomes truly interested in your product. This stage is about their first meaningful interaction — the "aha!" moment where they realize the value you offer. 

Essentially, this is where you guide users from simply being aware of your product to actually starting to use it.

Key metrics to watch

Here are some of the most important metrics to focus on during the activation stage:

• Activation rate: This metric measures the percentage of users who successfully reach your defined point of activation (which could be completing onboarding, using a core feature, or another action that signifies true value realization).
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• Time to activation: How long does it take on average for users to experience that lightbulb moment? Tracking this helps identify potential friction points within the onboarding process.
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• User engagement levels: Look at metrics that show how deeply users interact with your product, like session duration or the number of pages viewed. This gives a sense of how deeply they are engaging with what you offer.

Strategies for success at this stage:

Activating users is where the magic starts to happen. Here are some tactics to make this stage effective:

• Simplifying user onboarding: Remove any unnecessary steps or hurdles in the initial signup and setup process. Make it as easy as possible for users to get started.
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• Offering tutorials and guidance: Provide clear walkthroughs, in-app tips, or short videos to help users quickly understand the basic functionalities of your product.
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• Optimizing the first user experience: Pay close attention to the user interface and immediate flow within the product. Is it intuitive? Do users quickly find what they likely need first? A positive initial experience is crucial for activation and retention.

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• Checklists can be employed to nudge users forward. In-app messaging can serve as a tool to help them unlock value, while comprehensive step-by-step guides can illustrate how features function, and providing support options can assist in problem-solving.

 4. Retention

Perhaps one of the key metrics for analyzing your growth marketing strategy is retention, a pivotal metric in the growth marketing framework.

 Retention is mainly analyzed by looking at a company’s customer churn rate.

 In short, customer churn is how many people stop using your products or services within a given timeframe, for example, a month or a quarter, or buying your products only once in the event of an ecommerce store.

 As marketers, we know that the cost per acquisition can be up to 5x as much as selling to existing ones. This places a heavy focus on customer retention strategies.

 Ex;  To bolster retention and slim down the churn rate, focus must be channeled into pursuits that spark user engagement. Regular data gathering through in-app surveys and promptly addressing the feedback can enhance the customer experience and stave off any frustrations.

The end game here is to successfully reel back those customers on the brink of churning recognizing and mending the roots of their dissatisfaction before they choose to sever ties. It’s an essential part of growth marketing that paves the way towardby s a successful and scalable business.

Here are essential metrics to track when focusing on retention:

Churn rate: This metric reveals the percentage of users who stop using your product over a specific time period. A high churn rate indicates you need to focus on improving customer satisfaction and engagement.

‍Repeat usage rates: How frequently do users return to your product? A higher repeat usage rate suggests users are finding it consistently valuable.

‍Session intervals: Tracking the time between a user's sessions helps identify usage patterns. Long intervals between sessions could be a sign of declining interest.

Here are key tactics to boost the customer retention rates of your business:

• Gather and act on feedback: Set up feedback loops to capture how users feel about your product. Pay special attention to features they love, find frustrating, or feel are missing, and use these insights to enhance your product.
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• Continuous product improvements: Don't let your product get stale. Regularly release new updates, features, or content. This shows users you're invested in making the product even better over time.
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• Personalized communication: Segment your users and send tailored emails or in-app messages based on their behavior. Personalization, like highlighting features they haven't tried or offering help if they seem stuck, increases user engagement.
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• Build a community: Creating a community for your users can foster a sense of belonging. This can make them more likely to stick with your product, even if they encounter slight hiccups.

 5. Revenue

In the growth marketing framework, this stage tells us how much money is earned from each customer, also known as the ‘customer lifetime value’, or CLTV.

 For customers that continue to spend with a company, the CLTV will be greater. The same works for the reverse.

 The CLTV metric is important because it tells us which types of customers are loyal and continue to produce revenue for the business.

 This data can be used for retargeting customers and tells marketers which channels and which buyer personas they should be marketing to, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Here are key tactics to boost the customer retention rates of your business:

Examples 

• Cross-Selling: Offer related products or services that complement what a customer already purchased.

• Up-Selling: Encourage customers to buy a more expensive version of the product already in their basket.

• Bundling: Package together multiple products or services at a discounted rate to increase order value.

• Loyalty Programs: Reward repeat customers with incentives, fostering increased buying frequency.

 6. Referral

The final stage in the AAARRR framework is rather self-explanatory and it completes the process this one’s about the users who love your product or service so much, that they tell other people about it.

 Some companies have dedicated referral campaigns embedded in their email marketing strategy after a purchase. 

 This feedback can also help to update your customer journey for a seamless customer experience. 

 Other forms of referral include social media sharing buttons, reviews and testimonials, and inviting friends to a service product.

But to coax customers into advocating for your product, they need to be deeply satisfied with it. Hence, the referral stage zeroes in on gauging customer satisfaction to anticipate their likelihood of suggesting your product to others.

Here's how to measure the success of your referral efforts:

• Viral coefficient: This number reveals how many new customers each existing customer brings in through referrals. A viral coefficient above 1 signifies exponential growth.
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• Number of referrals: How many referrals are you receiving overall? A strong referral program will see this number steadily increase over time.
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• Referral conversion rate: What percentage of referred leads turn into paying customers? This helps you understand how effective your recommendations are.

Establishing the Processes that Generate Growth Within Your Business: A Strategic Marketing Approach

Establishing the processes that form the foundation of a  growth marketing strategy is an extremely iterative process.  But putting these processes into place allow businesses to take a consistently proven, data-driven approach to connecting with their audience and generating growth.  Rather than just achieving short-term awareness and results, you develop the foundations for deep relationships with your target audience, which eventually lead to significant revenue and referrals.

Of course, the data-driven nature of growth marketing also means it can be hard to achieve the right results on your own. Moreover, with so many aspects and processes that make up entrenching a growth marketing culture, it can seem overwhelming.

This is where the support of a growth marketing expert can help.  Knowing where to start is key, but trying to determine this can feel  overwhelming to determine in the midst of everything you are currently trying to manage within your business’ operations.  

With that in mind, why not reach out to one of our growth marketing specialists for a free, no-obligation consultation.  We will happy to sit down with you, examine your business, understand what struggles  you may be having and work closely with you to determine what processes we can work on to start to establish a growth marketing mindset and orientation within your business.