What is Growth Marketing?

"There’s no hacking involved in growth hacking. In reality, it is just data-driven marketing used to optimize demand generation, and as a result growth marketing is a better name."

Growth marketing is about looking at your entire customer lifecycle and using those insights to create compounding returns that drive more engaged customers. Marketers who specialize in growth marketing work tirelessly to acquire new customers, keep them engaged, retain them, and ultimately get them to refer others. They are master experimenters at every stage of the funnel. Working closely with the whole business to gain better insights and optimize around them.

SaaS growth strategies

Today's best SaaS marketers are using data-driven marketing strategies and tools to gauge the impact of campaigns and experiments across every stage of the user journey. Revenue is the primary metric and data is the basis for all decisions, so growth marketers must transcend traditional tactics to drive results. Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on the top of the funnel, growth marketing takes a data-driven approach across the entire product funnel to formulate insights into a strategy that drives acquisition and bolsters customer lifetime value.

Growth marketers need to change the way we think about marketing to find innovative ways of engaging and retaining customers. For good reason the rules will change for privacy and security, growth marketers must change the rules to stay competitive and continue to drive real growth.

Top of the funnel engagement

Activating and iterating on campaigns that generate qualified leads and strengthen sales pipeline. Improving the quality of visitors to your website, narrowing the audiences you are targeting, lowering cost per lead, and most importantly have a great flow of content and communications.

Bottom of the funnel activities

Partnering closely with sales is critical to dialing in and optimizing the activity down funnel. A string partnership with sales will accelerate growth and provide better predictability when forecasting ARR or pipeline.

Align Content and Tactics to the Customer Journey

Post-funnel (advocacy): Satisfied customers become advocates for the business, recommending it to others and potentially providing testimonials or case studies

Understand growth frameworks

Growth frameworks provide structure. They help you set goals, prioritize experiments, and apply the learnings in a way that makes sense.

The product-led growth flywheel is a framework for growing your business that focuses on a product-first user experience. The goal is to generate higher user satisfaction and increased advocacy, which in turn drives growth.

High tempo testing (also called high velocity testing) framework, requires launching new experiments at a high frequency in order to gather insights and create a repeatable process.

Then there is our friend the pirate, or sometimes referred to as pirate metrics. AAARRR - will highlight your growth marketing strengths and weaknesses at the different stages of the funnel.

Growth marketers are cross-functional Chameleons

Growth marketing includes all the pillars of an effective marketing strategy: setting goals, forming a hypothesis, gathering and analyzing data and the customer journey, from acquisition to retention.

Following agile development principles, growth marketing is a data-driven process that operates on a cyclical sprint model where performance is constantly tracked, tweaked and optimized. Successful growth efforts are part of a well-developed plan that starts with an end goal or definition of done.