Growth marketing continues to become more popular as an effective way to attract, engage, and retain customers. Inspired by growth hacking in Silicon Valley, this marketing approach is ideal for organizations that are comfortable with taking risks, experimenting, and seeing great results from optimizing the way they market.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at what growth marketing is, why it’s so valuable, and how to add some popular growth marketing tactics to your strategy this year.
What Is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing (also known as growth hacking) is a relatively new term, but it’s already cemented itself as a strong alternative to more traditional marketing approaches like account-based marketing. With growth marketing, the goal is to become highly customer focused and experiment, innovate, and challenge the way you attract, retain, and engage customers.
Growth marketers are relentlessly curious. They’re constantly experimenting to find a better way to make the customer experience better, in turn delivering benefits like higher customer retention, lower churn, and improvements across the whole customer journey.
While growth marketing is more of an overall approach to marketing, there are some strategies and techniques favored more closely by growth hackers. These include:
- Digital PR and search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Referral marketing
- Content marketing
With a focus on customer experience, optimization, and digital marketing, growth hackers are popular with startups, ecommerce companies, and SaaS companies. The nimble, experimentation-focused approach helps marketers in these organizations uncover new, exciting, and more effective ways to bring leads into their ecosystem — then convert them into loyal customers.
Benefits of Growth Marketing
If your goal is growth and you’re open to a marketing approach that focuses on data and experimentation, growth hacking is the way to go. Here are some key benefits of this approach (and reasons to invest in building your own growth marketing team).
Increased Brand Awareness
The goal is for your brand to be seen in more places than ever before — whether that’s through influencer partnerships, digital advertising, guest posting, or another marketing strategy. Growth marketing is all about trying and testing new approaches so you can see what works.
With growth marketing, you have multiple avenues to share messaging around who you are, what you do, and how you create value. Once potential customers, the press, and industry professionals know who you are, it’s easier to secure deals, convert customers, and attract investors. It’s all about being seen, making an impact, and watching that deliver benefits to you right through the customer lifecycle.
Improved Return on Investment
Growth marketing doesn’t just focus on the top of the funnel. It’s about making tweaks and improvements at all stages of the process. If done right, these changes can deliver an improved return on investment across multiple channels.
Unlike more traditional marketing approaches, optimizing your marketing campaigns through growth hacking offers a more scientific way to measure improvements. There’s a strong focus on data, metrics, and A/B testing with growth marketing. It’s not just enough to run an experiment — your growth hacker wants to know the exact outcome and whether making that change will improve your ad spend ROI, lower customer acquisition costs, or help increase the customer lifetime value.
Easier Customer Acquisition
Growth hacking involves a constant desire to improve, optimize, and make things better for customers. This makes it easier than ever to bring interested leads into your ecosystem and convert them.
A great growth marketer will keep customer experience at the heart of what they do. After all, the action a lead or customer takes determines whether a marketing campaign or optimization is effective or not. Ask your growth marketer to optimize your website, onboarding experience, customer support messaging, marketing automation messaging, and more. Focus on removing potential barriers to converting, and make it effortless instead.
6 Effective Growth Marketing Strategies
We know how valuable growth hacking can be if you want your business to be in front of the right people and convert leads into paying customers. Here are some useful growth hacks to help you do just that.
1. Grow Your Email List
One of the best ways to connect with leads and customers is to start and grow an email list. It gives you a unique way to stay in touch on a one-to-one basis, with plenty of room for personalization.
Email marketing continues to reign as one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Take a growth hacking approach to your email list and A/B test everything from your signup pop ups and lead generation forms, to the content and frequency at which it’s delivered. Don’t forget to invest in great copywriting too — using the right words can make all the difference.
2. Use Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is a great way to grow your audience base. With referral marketing, your customers are incentivized to recommend friends and family to sign up with you. They get a discount or promotional offer, and you get the opportunity to convert someone new into a loyal customer.
Referral programs are a popular way to increase customer acquisition and often work well. People trust the opinions of those close to them, so it’s an affordable and effective way to grow your user base, reputation, and monthly revenue. Focus your growth marketing efforts on getting your referral marketing program just right — understand exactly what benefits or discounts your customer wants, then deliver them to get the best out of your program.
3. Get Featured in the Press
While traditional PR and marketing efforts are still effective, add some growth hacking spirit and transition these age-old tactics into a strong digital PR strategy. Getting featured in the press — especially online — can deliver a great ROI in multiple areas.
Look for traditional press mentions where you can, but adopt new approaches to PR too. Try Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to seek out opportunities for features in news articles, stories, or thought leadership pieces for key media websites.
4. Create a Guest Posting Strategy
If your growth marketer is working on your content marketing, ask them to make guest posting a priority. Not only does this increase brand awareness and reputation, but it can provide you with a valuable backlink to support your SEO and content marketing strategy.
Using HARO for press mentions, it can also be a helpful companion to seeking potential guest posts. Build a relationship with the media this way and you could ask to contribute a guest post on a topic that fits their own content goals. Don’t forget to leverage your personal network too. Creating great content is hard and takes time, so often people are more than happy to hear your thoughtful, interesting, and valuable insights.
5. Partner With Influencers
Working with social media influencers can be a really effective way to bring new people to your brand. Influencer marketing is a popular tactic with growth marketers — it helps you reach a fresh audience, combined with plenty of ways to test, tweak, and optimize your campaign.
There are so many influencers that it can be hard to know who to work with, how to structure your campaign, and how much to budget for the partnership. A great growth marketer will know how to analyze the influencer’s reach and metrics. They can find you someone with exactly the right audience with the right level of interest and curiosity about your product. Then, they’ll develop a personalized link or code that lets you track how successful the campaign was.
6. Optimize Your Website Experience
A big part of any growth marketer’s role will be focused on your website if you run a SaaS or ecommerce company. It’s the premier place where people discover you, buy products, or enter your sales funnel — so it often pays to optimize it as much as possible.
By taking a growth marketing approach to your website optimization, you can experiment, A/B test, and run different copy or media placements to see how they affect conversion rates. Through this you can optimize your homepage, landing pages, product descriptions, shopping cart experience, and more.
While your growth marketer is optimizing your website, make sure they focus heavily on user experience. Create a seamless transition between landing on your website and taking a desired action — whether that’s to ask a question, buy a product, or sign up to your email list.
A great way to enhance the user experience on your website is to add live video chat with ServiceBell. Our easy to use tool means your customers can engage with you without leaving the page — making sales, support, and co-browsing a breeze.
Make Growth Marketing a Priority This Year
Growth marketing gives you multiple opportunities to refine how you interact with leads and customers. This helps you further your goals and optimize the experience for everyone. It’s the perfect blend of science and creativity that gives your marketing team permission to experiment to achieve a better end result.
If you want to add a useful tool to your growth marketer’s kit, try ServiceBell. Our innovative, live video chat product gives you a new way to engage with customers without leaving your website — introducing a personalized way for them to access your sales or support team.