What is Growth Marketing?

We have a fundamental problem as marketers. We spend so much time on top of funnel brand awareness and getting prospects to opt into our nurturing programs. After that, they go into the abyss, never to be heard of again. 

As a result, we’re left frustrated by the disconnect between marketing efforts and bottom-line results. Not to mention that once the sale is made, marketing doesn’t touch the customer ever again.

It’s time to change how we think about marketing. Marketing is no longer merely interested in visits and leads; it’s about securing revenue and sustainable growth for your company.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a framework for building sustainable growth. The framework focuses on data-driven decisions to acquire, activate, and retain customers and ultimately turn them into referral sources for your brand.

If you’re thinking, “How do I add this in with inbound marketing, account-based marketing, etc.?” take a pause. Growth marketing is about asking the “why” before you get to the “what” or “how.” 

Growth marketing is the framework to know where you need to apply the tools of inbound marketing, account-based marketing, and other strategies.

Growth marketing is based on the Growth Hacking framework. This framework's three foundational components help us get in the right headspace to propel rapid growth. 

1. Cross-functional teamwork

The top problem we run into is the lack of organizational alignment towards the same end goal. For example, if you were to ask your Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer Success departments what the company's goal is, would you get four separate answers? It’s challenging to build momentum towards your goals if everyone has a different idea of their primary goals.

Growth marketing breaks down the silos and gets everyone rowing in the same direction. Everyone has to work in tandem toward the same goals for the business's success. The more you push to get a cohesive environment for growth marketing, the more success you can generate as a team. 

This means that marketing is more concerned about customer retention than just lead generation. With a truly cross-functional team, there will be a smooth journey through every customer lifecycle stage and an improved experience for your existing customers.

2. Research and Data

There is so much data that we can look at, but what do we need to focus on to understand if we’re successful or not? To think about your marketing as more than just visits and leads, we need to expand our view to the entire experience. We do that by identifying our metrics that align with the stages of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness: Building and growing your brand reach. Think of this as the stage before you know specific information about who you’re interacting with. 

Sample Awareness Focus Metrics: 

• Website Visits
• Brand Search Engine Queries
• Ad-impressions 
• Engaged Accounts 

Acquisition: Identifying potential customers. 

Sample Acquisition Focus Metrics: 

• New Leads
• MQL
• SQL 
• Opportunities
• Pipeline Growth 

Activation: Guiding the potential customer to their final decision and onboarding. 

Sample Activation Focus Metrics: 

• Close Rate 
• Onboarding Touch Point Evaluation 

Retention: Creating a fantastic Customer Experience throughout the time your customer is engaged with your brand.

Sample Retention Focus Metrics: 

• Retention Rate 
• NPS
• Client Feedback Surveys 

Referral: Turning your customers into brand champions. 

Sample Referral Focus Metrics: 

• New customers from customer referral programs 

Revenue: Calculating and increasing a customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV). 

Sample Revenue Focus Metrics: 

• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) compared to LTV 

Once you have these stages mapped out, you can figure out where you’re stuck and how to improve.

For example, if you have great retention within a certain industry you serve but you don’t currently have many accounts from that industry,  you should likely build out specific marketing campaigns to target and attract more accounts. 

Once you’ve started attracting, if you aren’t converting into sales conservations, you can focus your efforts on conversation rate optimization on your landing pages. 

Now that they are in pipeline, you need to create more sales enablement content to highlight the success of your products or services. 

As they are onboarded, you may see you need to improve the overall onboarding process to speed up time to value. So you aid in the creation of an LMS that guides implementation.

And finally, you have a happy customer you have retained for years and need to figure out how to start incorporating more of a referral network.

3. Experimentation

How do we get to the data needed to make decisions? Experimentation is key. With experimentation, we can start generating data that leads us to what is and isn’t working as fast as possible.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett 

The best growth marketing teams build an environment where failure is celebrated because they’ve learned something. They’ve learned what not to do again.

A Growth Mindset

By taking a more holistic marketing approach, we can drive revenue and sustainable long-term growth. But to take a proper growth marketing approach, you need to shift your mindset from an exclusive awareness mindset to a comprehensive growth mindset. 

A growth marketing mindset starts by thinking through the entire buying experience and creating cross-functional teams within your organization. These teams share the same set of focus metrics — AAARRR — and use these data points together. Finally, teams will gain momentum through experimentation and data-driven decisions. 

Start by mapping out where your company currently stands related to awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. Do you know your average deal size, average customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost? If you don’t have these metrics, that’s a great place to start.

And know this process is far from easy. First, you need to have the right tracking and reporting in place to get a full and accurate picture of your entire customer journey. Additionally, you need to have marketing, sales, success, and product working together as a unified team. Again, that’s no easy feat.

But when you have the data of AAARRR mapped out and can accurately tell the story of company growth, you’ll start to see more people buying in.

If you see the benefits of a Growth Marketing Strategy but aren’t sure how to get started, you aren’t alone. Mojo Media Labs uses a proven process to help our clients drive business growth and get ridiculous results. If you want help implementing growth marketing, please schedule a call today!

Listen to our podcast episode on this topic:

Listen to "60: What is Growth Marketing?" on Spreaker.