“Growth” has diverse interpretations for various businesses. For some companies, where it is all about increasing their customer base, for others, it could be about boosting their revenue, getting more clients, adding more staff, and more. However, with time, the lack of growth makes it difficult for small businesses to survive.
The need for consistent and sustainable growth in the business gave birth to the concept of growth marketing.
The concept of “Growth Marketing” and “Growth Hacking” is often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences in them. Although both of them work on the complete sales-funnel described as awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referrals, but the role of a growth hacker is quite different from that of a growth marketer.
A growth hacker is a specialist brought on to solve a specific problem. They give creative solutions to the issue and get results quickly. On the other hand, a growth marketer works on a contractual basis with an organization and create long-term strategies to scale business growth.
One major difference I can outrightly point out is that for a growth hacker, everything is about speed. But for a growth marketer, it is all about sustainable and continuous growth.
Let me give you a quick introduction here!
What is Growth Marketing?
It is not a quick hack; instead, it is a long-term plan. It is a process of attracting users, engaging them, retaining them, and finally, turning them into brand followers.
A growth marketer does activities like A/B testing, value-additive blog postings, doing data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, writing creative ad copies, analyzing every aspect of a user’s experience, and more to achieve sustainable growth.
Growth marketing is a more in-depth marketing approach than traditional marketing.
While traditional marketing focuses on the awareness and acquisition part, growth marketing goes all-the-way down the funnel. It aims at increasing customer retention rates and expanding the customer base.
6 Steps to apply growth marketing strategies to your business
To apply a growth marketing strategy to your business, you need an experienced digital/content marketing expert who understands the intricacies of growth marketing. They know the industry and continuously experiment with unconventional growth strategies, measure the effectiveness, and keep on refining it for better future results. However, if you want to experiment yourself, you can get started by following these six steps:
1. Identify the areas that need the most attention
Before you begin, make sure you have a reporting system in place to track the changes you plan. Once you have that in place, start by analyzing your business performance as per the Pirate Metrics, and identify the areas that need your attention.
The best way is to start from the top of the funnel. As you distinguish the focus areas, break it into micro areas of opportunities.
For Example: To enhance business awareness, you can pick ‘website optimization‘ as a part of a growth marketing experiment. Instead of doing a complete overhaul of your website, break it into the micro area of opportunities like ‘optimizing your landing page’ first.
2. Develop a framework and create guidelines
Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing is entirely a data-driven marketing approach. You need to develop a framework and create guidelines for the complete ideation process. The framework/guidelines should include the directives:
- Brainstorming of ideas with your team
- Prioritizing of ideas
- Executing an idea
- Measuring techniques for the outcomes
- Filtering the good ideas
- Scraping the bad ones
3. Develop a hypothesis around the designated focus area
In this step, you need to develop a hypothesis to improve the designated focus area. It must be prepared as per the SMART Goal framework so that the outcome can be easily measured.
For Example: To optimize a landing page, a growth marketer tests the idea of – ‘faster loading of the landing page.’ He develops the hypothesis using the A/B testing technique, comparing it to the old version, and whether the new release ‘makes the website more user-friendly and contributes toward your brand’s awareness.’ Based on the hypothesis, the idea is crystallized and decided for implementation.
4. Implement the experiment
As per the pre-decided framework, the idea is executed. If there are multiple ideas, then it must be implemented one-at-a-time. If you are already running one experiment in a focused area, wait until it is over before you start with another one. Too many changes will make it challenging to identify the reason for the results you see conclusively.
5. Analyze the result
It means to compare your results to your initial hypothesis and check whether you have achieved your set goal. The results can be positive or negative.
For Example: The initial hypothesis was – ‘faster loading of the landing page will make the website more user-friendly and increase the brand awareness.’ A growth marketer will analyze the aspects of a user’s experience to compare the result as per the hypothesis and check whether it has achieved the set goal or not.
6. Refine the growth marketing strategy
Refining is the most crucial step. It is a process of testing continuously one idea after the other until an experiment sufficiently improves your startup’s performance in that focused area. A growth marketer’s job is to continually refine growth strategies and attain sustainable growth for a company.
You need to follow the steps mentioned above to apply growth strategies successfully and cover each segment of the growth marketing funnel. Through this continuous process, you can attain the goal of increasing the retention rate of your customers – which is vital for a small business or a startup.
The Social Media Boost
Further, a growth marketer can also use social media marketing to skyrocket the growth efforts via posting content around your product on social media or facilitating broad-scale sharing of content through a viral loop. This word-of-mouth marketing can be successfully leveraged through growth marketing to generate referral business as well.
Learn how to create an effective social media strategy here!
Conclusion
Growth Marketing is not a quick fix to get spontaneous growth but a methodical data-driven way to improve the performance in focused areas of your business. It can also be considered a system of tactfully applying growth hacking principles within your company.
So, if your business is not growing fast enough, then take a step back and have a broad look at how activities like lead generation, retention, visibility, and brand awareness can be revamped. Growth marketing is the key to your business growth. An experienced growth marketer can bring a new way of thinking and approach in your business and can accelerate the growth of your company.
Want a quick consult on how to scale your business and sustain it? Get in touch with me at Contact@SanjayB.com.