Unlocking Growth: What is Growth Marketing?

Do you want to grow your business? If you're one of the eight out of ten small business owners without employees, odds are that your answer is "Did the Kool-Aid man break through brick walls?"

Business growth means having more resources that you can use to add more staff, serve more customers, and generate more revenue.

But, how can you grow revenue so you have those additional resources you need to hire more people and take your business to the next level? One solution is to leverage growth marketing techniques to build customer loyalty and increase your customer lifetime value (CLV) from your existing customers/clients.

Let's dive into the dynamic world of growth marketing, where strategy meets innovation to skyrocket business success.

What Is Growth Marketing? Going Beyond "Traditional Marketing"

Growth marketing is a marketing methodology where organizations focus not on simply marketing and selling products and services, but on generating customer loyalty. 

Why does growth marketing focus on customer loyalty? It's because customer loyalty provides ongoing benefits for a business such as:

• Improved Customer Retention. Loyal customers will stick with a brand for longer. This helps a business maintain its bottom line moving forward by securing a strong customer base.
• Increased Customer Lifetime Value. In addition to staying longer, loyal customers are likely to spend more with a brand than new customers. According to Invesp, "existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, when compared to new customers."
• Higher Net Promoter Score (NPS). When you've earned a customer's loyalty, that customer is more likely to recommend your brand to their friends, family, followers, etc. This helps you naturally grow your customer base. This benefit compounds if you can earn the loyalty of these additional converts.
• Reduced Spend On Customer Acquisition. If you have a solid, reliable base of loyal customers, you don't need to put as much time and effort into acquiring new customers. It's frequently said that the cost of acquiring a new customer is five times higher than retaining an existing one. 

Growth marketing that drives loyalty helps businesses reduce costs and increase revenue—which helps the business grow.

It's also an integrated approach to marketing that requires business owners and marketing team leads to meticulously analyze data, experiment relentlessly, and optimize strategies across multiple channels. Not just traditional "marketing" channels like social media, email, and web pages, but everyday customer interactions involving sales reps, service reps, and others in the organization.

Unlike traditional marketing, which often focuses on top-of-the-funnel activities to increase brand awareness, growth marketing dives deeper. It's about understanding the customer journey at every touchpoint and leveraging insights to foster sustainable growth.

Key Elements of Growth Marketing: A Toolkit for Success

So, what are the key elements of a growth marketing strategy? These include:

• Cross-Channel Marketing Mastery: Growth marketers deploy campaigns across multiple platforms to ensure a cohesive brand experience. This can be a challenge since the marketer needs to master and track communications across multiple channels.
• Data Analysis & Insight Mining: Using data to drive decisions, growth marketers need to be constantly "tuned in" to what the numbers are saying.
• User Experience Optimization: Growth marketers constantly refine the user experience to ensure it aligns with customer expectations and needs. This may require collaboration with other teams to ensure they are following brand voice guidelines and best practices.
• Creative Content & Storytelling: Engaging content is the key to capturing interest and fostering brand loyalty. Mastering the art of storytelling is key to creating content that converts customers and drives loyalty.
• Experimentation & A/B Testing: Growth marketers live by the mantra 'test, learn, and adapt' to find what resonates best with the audience. A/B testing helps marketers identify what does or doesn't work in their growth marketing strategy to refine their future efforts.
• Community Building & Engagement: They focus on creating a community around the brand, encouraging interaction and feedback. A strong community helps to foster customer loyalty and brand evangelism—fueling business growth.
• Technical SEO & Organic Search: Enhancing visibility in search engines is a cornerstone of long-term growth efforts. Part of any successful customer loyalty and retention strategy is optimizing your SEO to attract the best-fit customers who are the most likely to become loyal brand evangelists.

Exploring Basic Strategies for Effective Growth Marketing

Content Marketing: Fueling Growth with Words and Wisdom

Content is the currency of the digital realm, and growth marketers are the mint. By crafting valuable, relevant, and consistent content, marketers can attract and acquire a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action.

Product-Led Growth: The Product as the Pied Piper

A strategy where the product itself is the main driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. It's about creating an experience so compelling that the product virtually markets itself.

Virality and Referral Programs: The Power of the People

Growth marketers tap into the power of word-of-mouth by designing referral programs that incentivize users to become brand ambassadors. It's about turning customers into a sales force.

Performance Marketing: Paying for Precision

A tactic that ensures every dollar spent is trackable and tied to specific outcomes. Performance marketing involves paying only when a desired action, such as a click or conversion, is completed.

Measuring Success in Growth Marketing: Metrics that Matter

Growth marketing strategies require extensive data analysis. If you don't measure the results of your marketing efforts, it's impossible to make informed decisions on how to improve them. 

Here are a few of the metrics that marketers should track when implementing a growth marketing strategy:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer. This is vital for understanding the return on investment from your marketing efforts.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship. A high CLV to CAC ratio indicates a sustainable growth model.
• Conversion Rates: This metric tracks the percentage of users who take a desired action and helps gauge the effectiveness of conversion strategies.
• Retention Rate: A measure of how well a business keeps its customers over time, which is crucial for long-term growth. Businesses focusing on growth marketing strategies will want as high a customer retention rate as possible.
• Engagement Metrics: These include active users, session length, and frequency of use, which provide insight into user behavior and product stickiness.

One way to track these (and other) metrics is to use HubSpot's dashboard feature. In a dashboard, you can use either stock or custom reports to track metrics like website traffic, conversion rates for each phase of your sales funnel, email engagement rates, and more.

Need help creating HubSpot dashboards or implementing other HubSpot tools to fuel your growth marketing strategy? Book a meeting with Bluleadz to discuss our HubSpot training, implementation, and management services!