A number of startups and early-stage tech companies are in hot pursuit of “hockey-stick growth,” a term denoting not only rapid but also exponential growth of the business.

But given the number of businesses that start every year and a number of companies that are already up and running, standing out can be a real challenge.

Certainly, a compelling and creative marketing strategy is necessary in order to know which customers fit what you offer and to avoid those of course who do not.  However, while this can give you a guideline as to where to start,  it is even more imperative to have a more specific idea as to what to do in order to build off of this strategy, Ultimately, having such perspective can help to achieve the supercharged and sustainable growth that businesses need to both survive and stand out.

That is where a powerful approach called growth marketing can help. 

Growth marketing is a long-term, strategic methodology that works to help brands achieve sustainable, measurable growth. It is a holistic, data-driven approach that leverages end-to-end funnel optimization to find, attract, convert, retain, and grow buyers into loyal brand advocates and evangelists.

 Growth marketing takes the traditional marketing model and adds layers such as A/B testing, value-additive blog posts, data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, creative ad copy, and technical analysis of every aspect of a user’s experience. The insights gained from these strategies are quickly implemented in order to achieve robust and sustainable growth.   

As mentioned, growth marketing goes way beyond the approach of traditional marketing by attracting users, engaging them (ex; with content), getting them to become members or try your services or make a purchase, getting them to keep their subscription or make another purchase, and ultimately if all goes well, getting them to make a testimonial or in other ways become a brand ambassador or champion of your brand.

So in a nutshell, growth marketing is an evidence-based approach that centers around focusing on the entire business process or customer journey in order to achieve sustainable business growth.

Now that we have established more firmly what growth marketing is, it is important to recognize that there are a number of terms that are used almost interchangeably with growth marketing, that many assume to be synonymous or the same.  This is not the case. Since the difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing should now be fairly obvious, let us now go into detail about a few terms that are harder to differentiate from growth marketing, and specifically just how they are different.

Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking

As mentioned, there is considerable confusion as to what the difference is between growth marketing and growth hacking.   Before diving into some key differences, a quick way to recognize the difference is simply to state that growth marketing is a strategy, and growth hacking is a tactic. A growth marketing strategy encompasses all facets of marketing your brand and is centered around achieving consistent long-term growth. Growth hacking, on the other hand, is one of many possible tactics employed to reach that growth through short-term bursts designed to spike growth in as low-cost and efficient a manner as possible.

Besides the duration though, there are a few key differences between growth hacking and growth marketing that are worth noting. 

1.  Growth hacking is a brand-agnostic practice, which means that growth marketing focuses on building the brand, and as such, it is difficult to attach data to tactics connected to branded marketing.

2. Growth hacking aims for rapid growth, whereas growth marketing aims for sustainable growth

3. Growth hacking involves tactics in isolation, which can be very effective once but are not not necessarily effective thereafter.

So it is fair to say that growth hacking aims to get quick results and rapid growth while growth marketing relies on deeper research and needs a relatively long period of time to conclude while aiming for sustainable growth.

Growth Marketing vs Lead Generation

Growth marketing and lead generation both focus heavily on the concept of the customer acquisition funnel or pipeline.

The “pipeline” refers to the journey a stranger takes on their path to becoming a customer. From a business perspective, it represents the flow of potential revenue. 

Lead generation or demand generation tends to focus on fueling the pipeline. That means earlier stages like Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation get most of the attention.

 

Growth marketing takes a holistic view of the entire pipeline. Every stage, from Awareness to Referral, plays a role in impacting revenue growth.

Growth Marketing vs Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is a term to refer to online marketing and advertising programs where advertisers pay only when a specific action occurs. This action may be a generated lead, a product purchase, a click on an article, or any number of user-driven actions. 

In contrast to growth marketing, the goal is to obtain new customers. Performance marketing is all about impressions, clicks, and leads. There is little to no focus on activation, and revenue, retention, and referrals are a consideration for another individual or team in the marketing department.

Growth Marketing vs Product Marketing

Growth marketing focuses on creating value for the customers before and after the sales process to create loyalty and increase revenue. Product marketing works on offering value to potential customers before their purchase process and consideration.

Product marketing works for the pre-acquisition phase, whereas the growth marketing goals can arise all the way through to acquisition and retention. Their roles are complementary. One helps the other to generate revenue consistently, one in terms of generating interest and the other in terms of retaining customers by consistently generating interest in your product offering.

A Concrete Example of Growth Marketing

Now that we have a better idea of the context in which growth marketing exists and how it differs from other practices out there,  what we have below is an example to illustrate how it operates in action.

Growth Marketing Spotlight:  Kettle & Fire

If there is truly an example of a fast-growing business with a growth marketing approach, Kettle & Fire would be it. For those who are not aware, Kettle & Fire is a company that creates high-quality bone broths, all coming from 100% grass-fed beef.  According to CEO Justin Mares, the company’s mission is to create a product that is all about positively impacting people’s lives and the environment.

Really, the core of its strategy is using product development and focus as a way of creating differentiation and ultimately its own clear niche.  One clear way of doing this is by demonstrating the high-quality nature of its products by being super transparent about the products the animals eat.  Beyond, this they have used partnerships with the Regenerative Agriculture community to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and biodiversity by promoting natural processes of preserving and cultivating the land

In addition, Kettle & Fire vigorously promotes this commitment, as well as offers, sales, promos, and giveaways on social media.  Moreover, the company has a referral rewards program that gives both existing and referred customers discounts that they can use to make purchases.  

This is a sustainable growth strategy because everything works hand in hand.  The unique products give them credibility to stand out, which in turn gives them extremely loyal customers who have no problem telling those in their network about it, something that is amplified by social media promotion.  All of this becomes a sustainable but self-perpetuating cycle, that has resulted in annual revenues of $35 million in 2020, a mere 5 years after being launched in 2015.

Growth marketing Tactics  to Consider in 2023

So now that we have established a full context for growth marketing, how to distinguish it from other similar marketing concepts, as well as illustrate a concrete actual business example, let us look at 25 growth marketing strategies for your business to consider in 2023, and demonstrate how they can be used to generate sustainable long term growth in any business, including yours.

1) Content Marketing: Creating a content marketing strategy is essentially about generating leads via blog posts, ebooks, online courses, videos, and more that inform, educate, and interest your audience. This essentially establishes thought leadership and does this by demonstrating your business’ expertise, providing authentication for it, building trust with your audience, driving traffic to your website, and via repeatedly showing up for an assortment of topic-related search queries of interest, helping to grow brand recognition over time.    Doing this helps establish, among other things, consistent traffic, which eventually incites curiosity about your business, which ultimately allows these interested prospects to possibly and eventually convert into leads, customers, and sales.

2) Chatbots/Video Chats: Beyond the simple fact that customer support is one of the most important aspects of user experience not just for UX, but also for your business as a whole, automating the sales and support process allows you to optimize communication with your leads and customers. Chatbots and video chat tools are great options for doing so.  Essentially this focuses on engaging with your visitors to ensure that you retain your prospects, which helps to improve your business's overall lead conversion rate as a way of consistently boosting overall revenues over time.

3) Referral Programs:  As mentioned earlier with the Kettle & Fire example, the key here is to leverage your loyal customer base by getting them to refer their friends, family, colleagues, and other members of their social circle to try your products/services.  The key here is to provide the right incentive,  which when combined with the credibility of those that are referring the products/service to them, will help to provide opportunities to expand your business growth base.

4) Leveraging Your Early Adopters: This relates and works in concert with the previous tactic of creating referral programs. Some of your earliest users or customers can act as the best marketers for your product or service. Your early adopters are the risk-takers who align themselves with your brand for its core values. Beyond that, they are likely to be extremely passionate about the impact of your business’s products or services  Certainly your business would be wise to leverage their belief in your product or service to market the brand effectively and create awareness.

5) Creating a Free Tool:   Offering them something they either need or at the very least, provides value to them at the moment,  will naturally increase their interest in your product or service. At the very least, it helps to provide an association and build up brand recall.  Key examples like this include Hubspot’s website grader or WordStream’s free Google Ads Performance Grader.  Both of these tools help to establish a businesses’ association and favorable perception specifically as it pertains to certain areas of expertise, such as Marketing Automation/SEO and Search Engine Marketing respectively.  This helps not only to draw in traffic to your website but also with lead generation and nurturing by making prospects more amenable to free trials and making your services/software part of their consideration set to help various aspects of their business operations.

6) Partnerships:  Although riskier than the other growth types, mergers, partnerships, and acquisitions can come with high rewards. There’s strength in numbers and a well-executed merger, partnership, or acquisition can help your business break into a new market, expand your customer base, or increase your products and services on offer.  An example of this is JustReachout, a PR and Backlink Outreach Software that leveraged partnerships in the form of communities, publications, podcasts and other venues to grow to 5000 clients since being launched in 2014.  The keys here in leveraging profitable partnerships by creating actionable how-to content for communities that are heavily engaged in areas that complement those of your business,  and adding a call to action or a discount that makes it worthwhile for a brand or a community to promote you in a way that adds value to them.

7)  Conversion Rate Optimization:  While there are a lot of growth marketing tactics out there, CRO might be one of those that is possibly the most overlooked.  However, it might also be the one that is the most paramount to instilling a true growth marketing strategy. Companies with real growth potential need conversion rate optimization to increase their desire for their products, remove friction, build traction, and improve ROI. CRO helps to address this, by working to continuously improve on those campaigns that you have underway.    The key here is recognizing that numerous lever points can be emphasized as places of improvement, such as ad copy, landing page, images, etc both singularly as well as in combination (A/B vs multivariate testing) to continuously and sustainably increase revenue growth rates.

8) Personalized Email Marketing:  Hyper-personalizing your email campaigns to create more meaningful communication with your customers—from onboarding and welcome emails to feature announcements, product updates,  and feedback emails that segment prospects or existing customers by what they have previously expressed interest in.  This allows your business the opportunity to look for repeat business or upsells with existing customers or to try to reach existing prospects who may not have decided to subscribe or make a purchase.  The level of personalization is becoming increasingly personalized, something demonstrated for example, by Hyperise. Hyperise enables businesses to increase the engagement of outreach efforts by inserting images in order to tailor their interactions with people.

9) Freemium:  The idea of using a free version of your product or software service is nothing new.  However, there is really no better illustration of this than what Slack did. Founder Stewart Butterfield used widespread media coverage to invite organizations to request access to the platform and try it out—landing them 8,000 signups in 24 hours and reaching 15,000 signups in two weeks.  This growth in trial signups was then used to test and refine the product by leveraging user feedback, while at the same time relying on more conventional tactics to increase the paid subscriber base (currently over 3 million.  

10) Market Disruption:   There are numerous examples to illustrate this, but none better in recent times than that of Netflix, whose online streaming service helped not only displace video rental stores but is also in the process of doing the same with conventional cable subscriptions.  While most disruptions do not occur on this level of scale, disruptions even at a smaller level can provide considerable revenues for startups or organizations at any level of growth or establishment.

11) Market Segmentation:  Certainly, setting yourself apart in terms of what you offer compared to other comparable offerings on the market not only allows businesses to stand out and make their differences apparent to customers.  It can also allow in some cases your business to charge a premium, depending on the market need.  A prime example of using marketing segmentation as a way of establishing a distinct market is Square provides an affordable digital payment solution for independent shops, markets, and street carts.   With simple, affordable transaction fees, even the smallest of businesses could offer card payments to customers and simple hardware provided an all-in-one POS and card machine system – everything a small store needs to manage stock, take payments, print receipts, and keep the queues moving. (Ex; Square focusing on smaller businesses).  This flexibility and clear differentiation are a big part of what have allowed Square’s revenues to reach $54 billion in annual revenues in 2022.

12)  Marketing Automation:  From welcome emails to reminder emails to survey/feedback emails to VIP emails, marketing automation not only provides additional ways to get in touch with existing customers and prospects in the funnel, but it also provides additional revenue opportunities by providing offers that capitalize on people’s interest in certain product/service segments or applications. Since of course, it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain them,  optimizing the onboarding process reduces churn and gives your business more opportunities to grow its revenues with no additional effort.

13) Optimizing Onboarding Processes:  Beyond showing a more personalized approach by keeping email contact with your customers and prospects, having an onboarding process allows your business to eliminate unnecessary signup friction that increases the possibility of prospects eventually becoming paid customers.  

14) Youtube:  Research by the Aberdeen Group shows that companies that use video for their B2C and B2B marketing strategy experience an annual 49% growth in revenue compared to those without video.  Employing videos is an effective way to share content in a way that promotes your product or service with your audience while demonstrating that you solve a key problem of concern for them. Besides, who doesn’t like to watch a video? It’s engaging and informative at the same time, just like this video from Hello Fresh.

15) Reengagement Campaigns: Similar to the importance of optimizing your customer or prospect onboarding process, a company with a 2.5% churn rate can become 50% larger in five years than a company with a 5% churn rate. That’s how much of a difference churn rate can make.  Methods to reduce churn rates using targeted emails that focus on behavioral segmentation in order to identify people who have gone dormant and send targeted emails to identify and solve their pain points. Groove did this for their help desk software and reduced their churn rate to 1.6%.

16)Event Marketing:  Event marketing is the promotion of a brand, product, or service through in-person interactions, such as conferences, seminars, exhibitions, and more. This makes it a great growth marketing strategy that you must consider investing more in because it helps you engage and interact directly with potential leads and clients, as well as existing ones. Moreover,  having a physical tangible presence such as a recurring event allows your business to present a face to both existing and potential customers which gives them a human presence.

17) Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns:  Cross-channel marketing focuses on connecting with customers via different communication channels, such as SMS messaging, direct email, push notifications, in-app messages, social media, and other channels. By understanding their preferences and their behavior across each communication platform, you can effectively incorporate cross-channel marketing into your campaigns and connect with your target audience. This strategy can help increase leads and boost conversions quickly.

18) Blogging:  Businesses with a blog receive 67% more leads than those who do not and marketers that put out valuable content are 13 times more likely to receive positive ROI. This makes blogging and creating informative content potentially a crucial part of any growth-focused marketing strategy With a business blog, businesses can add a personality to the content that they create. It also provides content that leads back to your site, thus generating and increasing traffic to your website.

19) Linkedin Ads:  As a B2B brand, you can make turn LinkedIn into a lead generation machine by optimizing your company page, building a hyper-engaged network, creating value-packed content, and through targeted outreach. You can even make a sales pipeline through video nurturing campaigns.

20) Adwords:   Beyond reaching those that are searching for the products or services that your business offers, investing in Google Adwords allows businesses to stand out above the clutter in terms of information related to what is offered in the industry or market segment that your business fits into.   However, beyond hitting on the right keywords, Adwords is part of the interconnected Google Universe, including Maps, Discover, Shopping, and other apps that allow your business to stand out by focusing on the aspect of Google that most apply to your business and its aims.

21)  Pinterest:  Beyond the straight visual nature of a platform with 400 million members that is centered towards women, Pinterest allows your business to post content in a way that is not overtly sales-obsessed, but is perfect on a platform where members peruse content to discover new products, possibilities, and ideas. Beyond this, the fact that the costs of advertising on Pinterest via promoted pins are considerably lower than on any other platform makes the cost of acquisition much more attractive for businesses looking to scale their revenues as part of an efficient growth marketing strategy.

22) Facebook: Beyond the fact that Facebook reaches 2.85 billion people and 60%of all internet surfers, 51% of these users check in on Facebook 2 or more times a day.  The fact that the 3rd world largest website/platform is not just part of the same family as Instagram not only allows advertisers to extend their reach even further, but the plethora of advertising options from remarketing to Lookalike and custom audiences to carousel ads and more allows growth-focused businesses to tailor their messages to address potential customers as part of an effective, growth-marketing strategy.  

23) SEO:  A majority of people search for products and services online before making a purchase, so if your website doesn’t show up in their search results, this is problematic for you. That’s why it is crucial to have a well-executed SEO strategy for your website. Search engine optimization helps your online traffic to grow and rank your website grow and rank your website higher resulting in users being directed to the content on your website or blog.  Some key practices to make SEO work for your website include making your website mobile-friendly, ensuring fast site loading, testing links and buttons, getting backlinks to your website, and writing well-researched content with a focus on the right keywords and titles that appeal to those that buy your products or services.

24) Hosting Webinars: Webinar marketing is a growth marketing strategy where you conduct an online seminar to connect with an audience and promote business. It is climbing up the ladder to become highly relevant in the current business environment. Hosting webinars offer a platform to handle pre-sales objections face-to-face, helps boost traffic and brand awareness and generates leads. It is also a great way to share knowledge and convert leads into customers.

25) Product Development as a form of Diversification:  While it is important to continuously improve your products as a way to better service your existing customers, such improvements can often be a springboard for new products and service offerings for new markets.   This can occur either by surveying your existing customers in order to better understand what they are looking for or by doing marketing research to seek out new opportunities.   

There is a growth marketing tactic for your particular business, regardless of the stage it is currently at

While these 25 growth marketing tactics are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible as part of a larger growth marketing-focused strategy, there are a couple of points worth keeping in mind. First, growth marketing tactics can span the entire lifetime of the customer, not just the campaigns used to acquire them in the first place.  Secondly, tactics can be long-lasting and repetitive but they can also be iterative, experimental, and momentary as well.  With some of these 25 growth-oriented tactics as part of a long-range sustainable growth marketing strategy, you may very well be on your way to establishing the foundation needed for sustainable growth. But that being said, if you are looking for growth marketing experts to help you decide on the appropriate growth marketing tactics for your business, why not reach out to us today for a growth marketing consultation?