What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing builds on the traditional online marketing model and adds layers with more modern and disruptive initiatives such as A/B testing, value-added blog posts, ultra-segmented and data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, creative copy for paid media and technical analysis of every aspect of the user experience.

The lessons learned from these initiatives, whether positive or negative, are quickly applied to achieve solid and sustainable growth.

It is a set of digital marketing techniques that uses creativity, analytical thinking and technology with the goal of increasing business sales and profitability.

There is no secret formula to implement Growth Marketing, but it is the result of trying and testing many actions that are always oriented to growth.

What makes growth marketing different?

Traditional marketing consists of “set it and forget it” strategies that consume a fixed budget and hope for the best.

Think Google Adwords and display campaigns with some basic ads.

These strategies can be a good way to generate traffic to the top of the sales funnel, helping to increase brand awareness and user acquisition, but that’s where the value diminishes.

Growth marketing goes beyond the top of the funnel.

When implemented correctly, it adds value throughout the entire sales funnel, attracting users, retaining them and ultimately converting them into advocates of your brand.

These growth marketing initiatives are always data-driven in the development of a strategy, trying new experiments and failing fast to find what works and what doesn’t.

In any Growth Marketing adoption process there is an element of randomness in the strategies that might work. The only way to be sure which path will be the best is to start testing against the market and validate the different improvement hypotheses.

Objectives and most important metrics for Growth Marketing

Objective 1: to get traffic to your website

One of the main objectives of any growth marketer will be to increase traffic figures.

This can be done in several ways.

Organic traffic

These are users who come to your website after performing a search on a major search engine.

To optimize organic traffic, it is necessary to implement all actions that will help you position yourself near the top of the search results.

This includes sharing quality content on a recurring basis to provide value while building inbound links. This content must be implemented in an optimized way so that search engines understand it and index it quickly.

An example of an organic growth trick is to try to rank for keywords with high search volumes but little Keyword difficulty. In this way we can find areas of content that are less relevant in terms of traffic but much more attractive because they can quickly reach the top positions.

Paid traffic

These are users who come to your website through paid advertising channels.

The use of paid campaigns is of vital importance since they can be segmented in such a way that we only attract users that are part of our target.

Organic traffic does not always attract users that are part of our target but the use of paid campaigns either in Google Ads, Meta ads or Linkedin ads allows us to impact the ideal user at the precise moment of the purchase process.

Reference traffic

This is all traffic that comes from third party websites that are not search engines. Therefore, traffic from social networks, as well as all other websites that link to your content.

If you’re doing things right, people will start sharing and talking about your content simply because you’ve brought them value and they want to. This is the most basic definition of viral content. Tracking the volume and source of all referral traffic will help you optimize in this regard and detect those links that are most interesting for your business.

Web Metrics

It is always essential to know what is happening on your website. It is important to know where visitors come from, what actions they take and how long they spend on each page. Another important figure to monitor is the bounce rate, as it is a great indicator of the relevance of your content or landing page. And finally, the most important metric is the conversion rate, which we will see later on.

Objective 2: to acquire leads and improve conversion rate

All the visitors in the world mean nothing if they don’t convert into new customers.

These are the key areas to optimize to better convert traffic to customers.

Conversion rate

What is the overall conversion rate of people coming to your website through the different acquisition channels, device, country…?

You should pay special attention to pages that have a significant drop-off compared to other parts of your website.

Hubspot experimented with A/B testing different layouts of the same page and found an interface design that doubled their overall conversion rates.

Landing page conversion rates

What is the conversion rate of users arriving at your main landing page?

There are many ways to optimize this aspect, such as modifying texts, the layout of CTAs, adding conversion catalysts such as testimonials and many others.

An interesting area to experiment with is the length of the title you display on a landing page. For example, it has been shown that shorter, punchier headlines tend to perform better.

To optimize a landing page with A/B tests, we must first make sure that the traffic it receives is sufficient to be able to obtain statistically validated results.

On the other hand, what we recommend is to make use of tools such as Hotjar to understand possible user frictions and to propose improvement hypotheses based on this analysis.

It is not a matter of testing for the sake of testing, but of questioning those parts of the website that generate problems or difficulties for users and prevent them from achieving their conversion goals.

Blog/email subscribers

Do you produce valuable content that people actually want to read? That should be your first priority.

For an example of a company blog that people really love and get a lot of value from, I recommend exploring the blog of SEO company Moz. They produce high-value content that many people would pay for, but Moz offers it for free.

If you’re already creating good content, then you want to make sure that it’s driving the actions you want…. You can find out by analyzing metrics such as click-through rate, subscriber growth and open rates of your mailing campaigns.

Increasing free trials to paid plans

If you have a freemium product, you ultimately want to convert free trial users into paying customers.

A great example is how DocuSign’s growth marketers leveraged tracking technology to expose certain premium features to only a unique subset of users. Their testing allowed them to know exactly which features to show, and their experiment resulted in a 5% increase in conversions.

Objective 3: Retain customers

Reduce customer churn

The churn rate refers to the percentage of users who sign up for your service but then stop using it.

This is a particularly critical metric for SaaS companies in the growth phase, as churn is the arch enemy of exponential growth.

If you lose a significant portion of your customers, you simply won’t be able to reach the critical mass of users you need to start earning high revenues.

It analyzes all aspects of why users stop using the service and iterates mercilessly to plug the holes. An area that could be an obstacle? The user interface. Make sure it’s smooth and seamless, or people will leave.

Increase average ticket

By tracking and analyzing users’ shopping and browsing patterns, you can start targeting them with specific communications to increase their average ticket.

These communications may be discounts, offers of complementary products or notices of the need to restock in the case of consumables. There are many initiatives that you can apply for this purpose, but the most important thing is that you have all the behavioral and purchase data of your customers in order to plan personalized and meaningful initiatives that will have a real impact on your sales.

Increasing the LTV or Life time value

Once you have gained a customer, how do you maximize the value you get from them? Strategies may include conducting surveys to find new features they want, encouraging customers to switch to an annual billing cycle, or providing targeted, quality customer service.

Objective 4: to build a brand

Once you have all the levers discussed above in place, you can say that you have a brand that is reliable and offers a great user experience. That’s when you should take advantage of it to build a real brand.

It all starts with the creation of an entrepreneurial culture. Next, the brand-building process can be aided by a smart PR campaign, influencer marketing, positive word-of-mouth and affiliate programs.

But all this without forgetting the initiatives we mentioned above that will impact all parts of the sales funnel as well as your brand reputation.

Qualities of Growth Marketing

Based on data

The days of making decisions based on intuition are over. The same is true for decision making based solely on the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) strategy. The modern growth marketer dives deep into the data to find out what strategies are working and is comfortable using all the tools that enable such analysis.

Creative

The best growth marketers are willing to think creatively. They never say “it’s never been done before, so why try?”.

If that was Airbnb’s attitude when they were trying to grow, they would never have come up with the idea of offering free professional photography services to each and every person who advertised on their site. What some thought was crazy or unnecessary turned out to be a fantastic engine to drive their growth.

Focused on the product

An axiom of the sales world is that you can’t sell a product you don’t understand. Since growth marketers are also in the business of sales and evangelism, the same rule applies. Your goal is not to trick people into buying something they don’t want, but to project the many benefits of a valuable product that you really believe will help people.

Possesses a hacker mentality

A growth marketer must be an expert in almost every vertical of the digital ecosystem. On any given day you can be creating a video, optimizing ad copy, implementing an A/B test or even doing some programming. The more and more varied your skills, the more you can bring to the company (especially at an early stage).

No fear of failure

Successful growth marketers believe that a failed experiment is not a bad thing. In fact, failure is the fastest way to learn valuable lessons.

No growth marketer is a seer. And therefore it must be open to test any hypothesis of improvement in order to identify what really works. Over time, you will detect initiatives that have positive results, and then you will implement them and continue the process.

Can tell a story

All the data in the world won’t help you know how to really connect with your users. You must have the ability to synthesize quantitative and qualitative information into a compelling story that resonates with your prospects.

Conclusion

Any Growth Marketing team must have an obsession for details, but with a global vision. It is also vital that you are results-oriented, but comfortable with ambiguity. Measure everything and rely on data, but also value human intuition.