What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a practice that focuses on creating a larger customer base as quickly as possible using modern digital tools and resources. Traditional marketing aims to create brand awareness to attract customers, make sales, and foster long-term customer loyalty. On the other hand, growth marketing uses data and strategies like A/B testing to determine the best way to reach customers and keep them engaged with the brand long after their first purchase. 

Explore growth marketing more, including key components of a campaign, examples of growth marketing, and careers in the field. 

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing uses data and audience testing to personalize marketing to each customer segment to increase their engagement and lifetime relationship with the brand or product. As you might have guessed, growth marketing focuses on rapid growth and includes customer retention. Using data, growth marketers determine effective ways to reach their customers and engage with them meaningfully to build loyalty and unique customer experiences. In addition to growing faster, growth marketing also fosters greater customer retention by offering experiences tailored to the customer's needs, emphasizing understanding the customer’s journey. 

Read more: What Is a Customer Relationship? Definition + Business Strategies

How is growth marketing different from traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing efforts focus on creating brand awareness and making more sales. In contrast, growth marketing focuses on growing as quickly as possible by understanding what customers want, delivering it to them, and finding ways to keep them engaged and satisfied with the brand. When customers are highly satisfied with a brand or company, they become brand evangelists who tell their friends about their great experience, helping the company build momentum in marketing efforts. 

Traditional marketing focuses on finding leads and turning them into sales. After the initial sale, retaining the customer and following up are tasks that can belong to a different team, such as the sales team or customer service team. Growth marketing follows the customer at each stage of their journey, focusing on keeping the customer coming back for more sales and engaging in a relationship with the brand. 

Growth marketing campaign components

Growth marketing campaigns require an all-hands approach to collecting data and responding creatively to customer needs. Along with customer-centricity, some key components of a growth marketing campaign are data, A/B testing, experimentation, flexibility, and cross-channel marketing to understand and respond to the customer experience. 

Data

The core of any growth marketing campaign comes from data. Growth marketers want to know how customers learn about their brand, how they use it, what problems it solves for them, and what the customer journey looks like from when they learn about the product to when they purchase it. As a growth marketer, you collect and analyze this data for insight into when and how to best reach their customers in new and engaging ways. 

A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as multivariate testing, allows you to see which strategies will have the best chance to engage your audience. You might test an “A” strategy and a “B” strategy, then go forward with whichever result was the most engaging for customers. A/B testing can go beyond two variables, and you could also test a “C’ strategy, a “D’ strategy, and so on. To gain an even more personalized result, cater your A/B testing to specific segments of your customer base. 

Experimentation, responsiveness, flexibility 

Growth marketing means responding quickly and flexibly as new data comes in. After a round of audience testing or new data to consider, growth marketers quickly pivot where needed to hone in on a strategy that works. For example, a software company finds that its free trial isn’t effectively converting free memberships to paid memberships. Instead of focusing on expanding its product, it might use the data to determine the better course of action: improving the user’s experience with the current software. Growth marketers can monitor new data as the team makes changes to measure how successful the strategy is. 

Cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing is a plan that reaches your customers wherever they are more likely to engage with you, whether by email, social media, SMS messages, push notifications, or some other method. The key to cross-channel marketing is to make your outreach match your customers' preferences instead of using a one-channel-fits-all-method. Every customer responds to marketing outreach differently, so cross-channel marketing allows you to connect with them according to their preferences. 

Read more: What Is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

Growth marketing strategy tools

Growth marketers reach customers at every sales funnel stage to understand their experiences and deliver personalized marketing messages. Some of the tools that growth marketers use include: 

• Paid advertising channels: Paid advertising offers tools for growth marketers, such as geo-targeting and ad sequencing, and robust tools for understanding and segmenting audiences for a personalized approach. As a growth marketer, the more paid advertising channels you are familiar with, the more resources you have to reach your audience. 

• Customized content and copy: One way to personalize your customer experience is to provide helpful content that is relevant to them. With customized content, you can tailor your message to your audience based on their interests, location, or where they are in the customer journey. You can also use customized copy in email marketing, social media, or on a blog to attract and educate your audience. 

• Referral programs: Growth marketers seek to improve the customer experience so that customers want to tell their friends and family about the brand. A referral program is another way to incentivize customers to spread the word through word-of-mouth advertising, which can be a powerful marketing message. 

Benefits and challenges of growth marketing 

Growth marketing can benefit your company, but you'll also want to consider some potential challenges. Some growth marketing benefits include: 

• Constant feedback and measurements of success: As you remain flexible and ready to pivot your strategy based on feedback, you can focus on your customers' feedback and offer them the products they need in a manner that includes metrics you can measure to gauge success. 

• High-quality leads: By focusing on strategies that work and letting go of strategies that don’t serve your goals, you can find better-quality leads and save time on closing sales. 

• Rewards creativity and innovation: Growth marketing rewards innovation by making it faster to go from idea to reality, and you will gain the benefits of being a first mover when you implement new ideas in your industry. 

It’s also important to understand the challenges of growth marketing to increase performance, including the following aspects: 

• Unproven innovative ideas: Innovative ideas that haven’t been tried before can provide you with a leg up against your competition if they are successful. However, this could be an obstacle as well. Overcoming this challenge means staying the course and consistently implementing change based on customer feedback.

• Constant change: Staying responsive and flexible in an uncertain market can be a lot of work. You can overcome this challenge by working in cycles of innovation and change that become a natural part of your business process. 

To overcome these challenges, you need to stay close to your data. The data you collect is the best clue to how your audience responds to growth marketing strategies. Use the data to make informed strategic decisions, then continue monitoring the data to see the results of your campaign. 

Careers in growth marketing 

To launch a career in growth marketing, you can pursue a degree in marketing, business, advertising, or a related field. You can also gain experience from entry-level jobs, such as a marketing assistant, media assistant, marketing analyst, or sales representative. Since growth marketing relies heavily on data, you'll want to thoroughly understand data analytics and how it applies to business operations and marketing. Two roles you can pursue within the growth marketing field include a growth marketing manager and director of growth marketing.

Growth marketing manager

Average annual US salary (Glassdoor): $101,231 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2023): 6 percent [2]

As a growth marketing manager, you'll work with a team of professionals to collect and analyze customer data to look for opportunities to improve contact at all stages of the sales funnel. You will focus on customer acquisition, brand recognition, customer satisfaction, and personalized customer experiences. 

Read more: What Does a Growth Marketing Manager Do?

Director of growth marketing

Average annual US salary (Glassdoor): $119,751 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2023): 6 percent [2]

As a director of growth marketing, you will work alongside senior executives to create and oversee growth marketing strategy. At this level, you may have one or more teams working under you, potentially including a content and copy team, a demand generation team, a brand or creative team, or a product marketing team. 

Learn more on Coursera.

Growth marketing can help you find more and better quality leads while creating customers who are fans of your company and continue to return to your brand. Using tools like A/B testing, data, and experimentation, you can use growth marketing to find innovative ways to connect with your customers and meet your company goals. 

If you’re ready to start a career in marketing, consider earning your Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate on Coursera. This course can help you prepare for jobs such as marketing coordinator, e-commerce associate, or paid search specialist in as little as six months. You’ll gain skills such as customer awareness, customer loyalty, search engine marketing, email marketing, marketing analytics, and customer outreach.