What is Growth Marketing?

You’ve probably heard the term “growth marketing” a lot lately.  You may also have noticed more marketing folks claiming to be “growth marketers”.  The term has definitely become trendy, hyped, and lost most of its true meaning through overuse, misuse, and a lack of understanding. 

I’m going to help restore the true meaning and answer what growth marketing is and what it is not.  Ready?  Let’s do it.

If I had to define growth marketing in a single sentence, this is it:

Growth marketing is a full-funnel, data-driven approach to marketing that focuses on revenue instead of lead generation and relies on deep customer and data insights to identify growth opportunities and uses experimentation to optimize engagement at every step in the buyer’s journey. 

Growth marketing is a full-funnel, data-driven approach to marketing that focuses on revenue instead of lead generation and relies on deep customer and data insights to identify growth opportunities and uses experimentation to optimize engagement at every step in the buyer’s journey. 

Okay, I can hear all of my past English teachers telling me that should have been  broken up into multiple concise sentences, but that was not the goal.  For clarity (and to appease my past English teachers), let’s unpack the key elements.

Full-Funnel

Perhaps the most significant difference between traditional marketing and growth marketing is that growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey and marketing funnel rather than just the top.  Traditional marketing is concentrated on brand awareness and lead acquisition.  In growth marketing, this funnel is often referred to as the Pirate Funnel.

Traditional marketers are typically known (and often despised by their Sales counterparts) for jumping up and down and claiming victory when they increase traffic to the website, see a bump in leads (regardless of quality), and turn them over to Sales.  Growth marketers, however, are loved by Sales as they share the same goal - happy customers.

Growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey and marketing funnel rather than just the top.

They understand that the goal of any business is not to generate traffic or leads but to generate more revenue.  Leads must convert into customers or they are simply an expense.   Paying customers must become satisfied customers returning year-after-year and satisfied customers must turn into raving fans telling their friends and colleagues about your company and products.  The growth marketer looks at all stages of the funnel (awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral) and recognizes each as a lever of growth.

Data-Driven

So if “growth marketing” is a buzzword, “data-driven” is a super buzzword.  Let’s be clear.  Just because you have access to your Google Analytics account and have reported your monthly unique visitor count does not make you a data-driven marketer.

A data-driven approach is one that involves the analysis of data to make informed decisions.  It is having a clear understanding of what questions need to be asked and what metrics will help answer them.  It is knowing how to interpret the metrics and take the appropriate action.

Being data-driven is not simply reporting metrics.  A data-driven approach is one that involves the analysis of data to make informed decisions.  It is having a clear understanding of what questions need to be asked and what metrics will help answer them.  It is knowing how to interpret the metrics and take the appropriate action.

• What funnel stages are performing above/below average?
• What channels and sources are producing leads that convert into booked meetings, pipeline, and paying customers?
• Are prospects connecting with our value statements?

Growth marketers ensure they possess a deep understanding of the customer’s needs, challenges, and goals.  This is a foundational step in the data-collection process and a driver of all future marketing efforts. 

Defining funnel stages and knowing the conversion metrics from stage-to-stage is critical to understanding where the biggest growth opportunities lie.  Lead attribution and understanding which channels and sources are driving revenue profitably allows you to properly direct your marketing budget and scale quickly.  Disregarding gut feelings and allowing data to drive your decisions is what it means to be “data-driven”. 

Revenue-Focused

Have you heard of having a “North Star” metric?  It’s basically the one thing you can track that determines whether your business is moving in the right direction.  It's metric that can be directly associated with value you are delivering to customers.  As a marketer, what should your North Star metric be?  What should you measure to ensure you are delivering value to your company?  Well, if you’re a growth marketer, it should be revenue and profitability.

You might be asking, “How does that help me in the acquisition stage where I am focused on lead generation?”  Well, I’m glad you asked.  

Again, leads are worthless unless they convert into customers.  Actually, it’s worse, they are an expense.  You must ensure your lead channels and sources are producing leads that convert to customers with a positive return on investment.

I once worked for a company that tried to boost lead gen efforts by leveraging several content syndication partners.  If you are unfamiliar with what a content syndication partner is, it is a platform that will host your content (eBook, white paper, webinar, etc.) and help extend your reach beyond your organic efforts.  Sounds great, especially if you expect to get the same conversion metrics all the way down the funnel.

Early results of that program saw a huge spike in leads and the party began.  The confetti was still mid-air when I addressed a concern that these leads did not seem to be converting to MQLs at the same rate as organic leads.  “Give it some more time.  Maybe the nurture cycle is just a little slower.” I was told.

In the following quarter, even though top-of-funnel conversion rates remained extremely low and no sales had yet been attributed to these efforts, we increased our spend on content syndication and expanded our network of vendors.  It was too late, we had become addicted to celebrating the vanity lead metric.

It was not until after over a year of investing huge amounts of money into these content syndication programs and never seeing a positive return did we finally come to our senses and terminate these contracts.  We had committed a growth marketing sin.  We had been lead-focused instead of revenue-focused.

Experimentation

Another key aspect of growth marketing is experimentation.  It’s about identifying areas in your funnel that need help, coming up with ideas to address the problem, testing an idea by implementing an experiment, analyzing your results, and iterating based on what you’ve learned.  

Let's say you've already defined your funnel stages, evaluating the conversion rates between each stage, and determined that your biggest opportunity is in your acquisition stage.  You've concluded that you are getting traffic but struggling to convert those visitors into leads.

What next?  This is where you get creative, come up with possible reasons your traffic is not converting, and propose how you might address the problem.  We'll assume you have CTAs on the pages you're expecting visitors to convert on.  That's a huge assumption by the way.  You would be surprised how many marketers skip over this critical step and fail to add CTAs.  I'll step down off my soapbox now and write myself a note to dedicate an entire blog to the subject. 

 So you have CTAs, but are not converting your traffic.  You might ask yourself:

• Should I add additional CTAs?  You don't want to be pushy and intrusive, but you need to ask for the conversion more than once and not be shy about it.
• Are my CTAs getting noticed?  You may have more than one CTA on the page, but are visitors seeing them?  Perhaps your CTA is too small or not positioned where the visitor will naturally see it or is in a spot the visitor has been trained to recognize as an ad placement.
• Is the message/offer connecting?  Maybe your visitors are see and reading your CTAs, but simply not interested in what you are offering.  You may have a disconnect between your blog topic and your offer.  It's fairly common to see bottom-of-funnel CTAs presented on top-of-funnel blog posts.  Your visitor may simply not be ready for your offer yet.

So that's it, start suggesting what might be preventing your visitors from converting and ways you can fix it.  When you break things up into steps like this, it becomes a fun exercise and you'll surprise yourself with how many great ideas you can come up with.

This is where you have to be careful not to run off and implement all of your ideas at scale.  That would be bypassing the experiment and not allowing the results to confirm or reject your hypothesis.   Okay, whose ready to start solving problems through experimentation? 

Conclusion

So now you know the difference between the buzzword and what it really means to be a growth marketer and practice growth marketing. You know that it requires taking a full-funnel, data-driven approach and focusing on revenue and profitability instead of just lead generation.  It relies on deep customer and data insights to identify growth opportunities and extensive experimentation to optimize engagement at every step in the buyer’s journey.

It’s not easy.  In fact, it can be very challenging but the reward is reliable and consistent growth and well worth the effort.  This article has just scratched the surface of growth marketing, so feel free to explore further and learn more about growing your business.