No company can sustain itself for a long time if it is not growing constantly. That’s because customer behavior changes, expenses keep increasing, markets keep changing, new competitors entering the market, and other factors that impact a business. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to keep growing your business in terms of customer acquisition, customer retention, revenue, and profit growth. There are a lot of growth marketing strategies available that can be used to grow a business.
Now, if you don’t know what is growth marketing, we will cover everything in detail in this post about growth marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
Unlike other marketing techniques, Growth marketing focuses on customer retention and not just customer acquisition. Of course, customer acquisition is also an important part of growth marketing. The basis of growth marketing is cultivating loyal, repeat customers, because that’s the best and most reliable way to sustain growth.
Growth marketing doesn’t only look at the top of the marketing funnel but also at the entire marketing funnel, it includes the entire customer’s buying journey.
Growth marketing prioritizes getting the customers to make repeat purchases and remain loyal to your brand and business. Retaining the customers is important for every business because the customer acquisition cost is very high in every business. But when you have loyal customers making repeat purchases it is more profitable to your business because for that you don’t have to spend on advertisements and customer acquisition.
A growth marketing strategy is a long-term strategy that focuses on customer retention and inspiring them to make repeat purchases. We will discuss the Growth Marketing Strategies in another post.
How Growth Marketing is different from Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing mainly focuses on customer acquisition and getting them to make their first purchase. Whereas growth marketing focuses on the entire marketing funnel and the entire buyer’s journey. The focus of the growth marketing is customer retention and at the bottom of the marketing funnel, where loyal customers bring more customers through referrals.
How the Growth Marketing Success is Measured?
Like in every marketing campaign there are metrics that help measure the performance of the marketing campaign, Growth marketing also has metrics that help measure the performance.
Since, the five main focus areas of Growth marketing are Acquisition, Repeat purchases, Revenue, Retention, & Referral. If you measure these five metrics you can measure the effectiveness of your Growth marketing campaign. It is also called the Pirate metrics.
Advantages of Growth Marketing
The key advantages of growth marketing are speed to market, a greater return on investment, and the ability to quickly scale marketing activity that produces positive results. Now as we discussed earlier that the focus area of the Growth marketing is customer retention. So, that’s one of the biggest advantages of Growth marketing. Customer retention has many benefits for the company, such as:
- You Don’t Need to Play Catch-up: Attrition is bad for any company and it is a reality of every business. But if the attrition rate is high then it is really worrisome. For instance, if your attrition rate is 2% per month, you need to acquire 25-30% more customers to maintain the same revenue. But if you want to grow your business and profits then you need to acquire even more customers annually than your attrition rate. But if you plan to retain your customers you won’t have to play catch-up.
- Cuts Your Customer Acquisition Costs: If you retain your old customers you will have to spend lesser on the new customer acquisitions. That way you will save your money on other things.
- More Opportunities for Referral: The loyal customers are satisfied customers and they do recommend your brand to their friends and family. That you get customers for free. According to a study, 83% of people actually trust recommendations more if they come from friends and family.
- Lesser Spends in Marketing: In Growth marketing, you spend less money to acquire customers, offer discounts, and retain them. Whereas in other marketing methods your spends are comparatively very higher.
Is Growth Hacking the same as Growth Marketing?
Now there is some sort of confusion in the two terms “Growth Marketing” and “Growth Hacking.” Even these terms are used interchangeably. But in reality, there are some key differences between both terms. Let’s see those differences to understand these terms better.
Growth Marketing | Growth Hacking |
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Growth Marketing best Practices
It is always the best practices in any discipline that makes it a success. So, is the growth marketing. Regardless of what strategy you choose for your growth marketing but these best practices are important for the success of it.
Keep a Data-driven Approach
You may have heard people saying the data is the new oil. Well, that’s true in almost every field and especially in marketing and sales. If you set specific and measurable goals for your Growth Marketing campaign you will surely get better perspective and insights on each element i.e., acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral.
To do that and gather correct data you should always pay attention to the Key Performance Indicators. This will help you make your decision based on the real data and not only on guess and gut feeling. Also, you can tweak methods, messaging and strategies based on data, not randomly.
You can also take customer surveys and find out from the customer’s responses what you need to do to retain them. You should be focusing on the long-term strategies rather than wasting your efforts on fixing temporary issues. And it doesn’t mean that you should completely overlook the temporary and short-term problems. But, you should not dedicate all your time and efforts to resolving the short-term temporary issues.
Always keep in mind that nothing is permanent and it is true for both success and failure. So, if one of the strategies doesn’t work or fails, learn from it and move ahead quickly.
Be Amazingly Efficient
It is important for growth marketers to be very efficient in every possible way. The most efficient Growth marketers find and utilize every possible opportunity to get their brand name out at very little to almost no cost.
Growth marketers focus on SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, PR, etc., to make their brand name out quicker. This also helps them make their brand found quickly on the search engines. Email marketing is another way Growth Marketers use to make their brand reach their audience quickly. For this they offer freebies etc., to collect the emails of their interested and prospective customers.
Creating viral content is another way for Growth Marketer to make their brand name out quickly. It is no-cost publicity for a brand. The videos and pictures that go viral are shared millions of times and reach a lot of people. The viral videos also convey the brand messages in a very effective way.
Adapt Quickly
Usually, Growth marketers have a diverse set of skills. They know every aspect and form of marketing and they know when and what to adapt to achieve their goals.
They trust the data but also don’t ignore the human sentiments. Technically the growth marketers keep their eyes on everything and quickly change what is not working and adapt what is working.
Be niche-focused
Content is the king and drives more targeted users than all other marketing methods. Growth marketers focus on creating content from their niche which is effective, informative, engaging yet unique. Interested people read that content and begin to trust the brand. This trust helps the growth marketers influence the customers to keep moving from one stage to the other in their marketing funnels.
The objective of the content shouldn’t be to attract customers but to provide them real value. You can choose the platforms for publishing and distributing your content based on your industry and niche.
Show Proof
Growth marketers use social proof to their advantage. Existing customers when sharing their experience and feedback are read by others and it is a fact that people trust people. In social proof, it includes social media discussion, forum discussions, reviews, testimonials, and User-Generated Content. This helps you acquire more customers. Encourage your customers to share their experience, feedback, testimonials, and word-of-mouth referrals for your brand.
Make sure that you show your social proof on your social media channels, website, mobile applications, etc. It is a social currency and you can encash on it.
Think Outside the Box
Growth marketers need to think outside the box and find out innovative ways to spread their brand awareness and brand messaging. When everyone in your industry is doing the same thing and the same way you won’t have a good chance to stand out of the crowd.
The most creative marketing strategies will become associated with the brand that uses them. For instance, think of the Vodafone zoozoos, or the kids acting like adults in the Flipkart commercials. Those were innovative ideas. So, try to think outside the box when it comes to your Growth Marketing strategies!
Create the ‘WOW’ Moment
Try to create the wow moment for your customers as soon as you can. A wow moment is when your customers and audience understand the value of your product or service. This is the moment where you can move your users easily to the next stage in your marketing funnel.
The best way to do that is to take your existing customer’s testimonial, bites, and tell it in form of a story that resonates with your audience.
Summary
Now as you understand that the Growth Marketing focuses on retention and have a lot of advantages. It not only helps you increase your customer lifetime value, reduce acquisition costs, but also brings in new customers through referrals. The point here is to keep a holistic approach to everything and focus on retention and referrals. A strong and well-thought-out growth marketing strategy will give you a better return on investment in the long run.
