What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is the discipline of applying growth hacking principles to marketing. Growth hacking focuses on the full product or service lifecycle and sales funnel. Choose a metric of your business you’d like to expand whether it is lead generation, retention, visibility, brand awareness, you name it, growth marketing can be the answer. Product or service development, design, user experience, customer on-boarding and experience, marketing, sales processes and referral.
Growth marketing focuses on a dynamic, experimental and data led approach to marketing tactics where the ultimate goal of any ‘growth marketing’ action is business growth through customer acquisition or retention. This is achieved by building tactics around specific metrics across the whole funnel, in growth terms these are called ‘pirate metrics’ (see diagram below, Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics)
Growth is the sum of small, tactical activities that are user focused, experimental and constantly evolving.
The key advantages of growth marketing are speed to market, a greater return on investment and the ability to quickly scale marketing activity that’s producing positive results.
How the role differs from traditional marketing
Growth marketing is different from traditional marketing because it focuses on the whole funnel to identify, convert and engage loyal repeat customers as opposed to focusing only on top of the funnel branding and attraction activity.
Growth marketers work cross-funnel
Rather than focusing 100% of efforts on top of the funnel strategies, they will focus efforts on various parts of the funnel. One campaign may focus on increasing acquisition while another focuses on increasing client retention. Again, through the use of monitoring actions and metrics with live data analytics dashboards and smart reporting, the growth marketer can make specific and bespoke adjustments.
B2B growth marketing uses the same marketing tactics, but with a totally different mindset and energy to traditional B2B marketing approaches
Growth marketers work across departments
Building successful revenue engines requires collaboration with marketing, product teams, sales teams, finance and more. A savvy growth marketer understands marketing needs to involve the entire business. They will use automation tools, streamline communication, and build internal relationships to make collaboration quick and easy.
Growth marketers have a clear singular goal
A good growth marketer has total focus on one ‘North Star’ goal. Meaning every time or resource investment they make is solely focused on the achievement of that north star goal. The cumulative effect of this approach is a key differentiator for growth marketers. Where traditionally the marketing team may be stretched across a number of objectives and responsibilities, this laser focus on one goal makes marketing activity highly effective.
How a growth marketer could benefit your B2B business
Building and optimising a revenue engine is critical to long term business growth.
Revenue engines only work if cross functional teams work closely together towards the same goal, and tactical and strategic marketing decisions are made based on data and testing. This is exactly how a growth marketer operates.
A growth marketer will bring a new way of thinking, an agile approach and a revenue driven focus. We know more and more CMOs who are passionate about turning marketing into a revenue generator, rather than a cost centre. Employing a growth marketer with relevant experience is a critical first step to achieving that goal.
In the same vein, if you’re looking to accelerate growth within your company and lead generation infrastructure, head over to read our guide to revenue engines. It explains what a chief revenue officer is, job description, difference between that role and the CMO, and much more!