In Mexico there are more than 5 million companies of all types and sizes, according to INEGI data. And, although there are no official figures, it is natural to think that there are more and more companies investing in digital marketing and, therefore, greater competition.
So, to break through, it is very important to have a marketing strategy that is creative, iterative and compelling. A strategy that not only helps you get customers, but is conducive to gaining brand popularity, word of mouth recommendations, and organic growth.
This new way of building a loyal customer base has a name: Growth Marketing.
In this article, based on information published by UseProof , we take a look at what Growth Marketing entails and what you need to become a successful growth marketer .
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth Marketing is known as Marketing 2.0. It is based on the traditional marketing model but adding high-level tactics such as A/B testing, value-added blog articles, data -driven Email Marketing campaigns , SEO optimization, creative copy of advertisements and technical analysis in all aspects related to the user experience. The insights gained from these tactics are quickly implemented to achieve strong and sustainable growth.
What differentiates Growth Marketing from traditional marketing?
Growth Marketing focuses on the entire funnel – while traditional marketing usually focuses on the top of the funnel (Top of Funnel).
Traditional marketing tends to use strategies where “set and forget tasks after completing them”, burning the budget and hoping for the best to happen without following up on the results obtained. Let’s think, for example, of Google Ads and display campaigns with basic advertising texts. These tactics can be a good way to drive traffic to the top of the sales funnel , helping to increase brand awareness and user acquisition, but right at this point in the funnel is where the value drops off.
Growth Marketing goes beyond the Top of the Funnel
When you do it right, Growth Marketing adds value to the entire marketing funnel because it attracts users, engages them, retains them, and ultimately converts them into fans of your brand.
Data-driven marketers are too involved in forming strategies, trying new experiments, and failing to quickly zero in on what works . However, Growth Marketing is also a stochastic process, like biological evolution. This means that growth strategies have an element of randomness where things might just work out . The only way to be sure of the best path forward is to start executing tactics and see which ones work.
Qualities of successful growth marketers
It is known that the best specialists in Growth Marketing are:
Data Driven _
Gone are the days of making decisions based on instinct. The same goes for making decisions based solely on the HiPPO ( Highest Paid Person’s Opinion ) strategy. The modern growth marketer digs into the data to find out which strategies are working and is comfortable using all the tools that enable such analysis .
creatives
The best growth marketers are willing to think outside the box. They never say “it’s never been done before, so why even try?”
If that had been the attitude of Airbnb when they were trying to grow, they would never have thought of providing free, professional photography services to everyone who is listed on their site. What some thought was crazy or an unnecessary action turned out to be a fantastic engine of growth.
Product Focused
A dogma of the world of sales is that you can’t sell a product you don’t understand. Since these marketers are also in the “sell and evangelize” business, the same rule applies. Your goal is not to trick people into buying something they don’t want, but rather to clarify the multiple benefits of a valuable product that can really help them.
They have a hacker mentality
A growth marketer must be a jack of all trades. On any given day, he could be creating a video, optimizing ad copy, implementing a new A/B test, or even doing some programming. The larger and more varied her skill set, the more she can bring to an organization (especially at an early stage).
They are not afraid to fail
Successful marketers believe that a failed experiment is not always bad. In fact, failure is the fastest way to learn valuable things.
No Growth Marketing specialist is clairvoyant. You must be open to experimenting to see what works. Eventually you will hit on actions that are successful and then optimize them and continue the process of constant evolution.
They know how to tell stories
Having all the data in the world won’t help you figure out how to genuinely connect with your audience. You must have the ability to synthesize both quantitative and qualitative information into a compelling story that resonates with your potential customers.
Consider the case of TOMS. Their Growth team was able to effectively communicate how social wellness is a key element to their business.
They can handle multiple responsibilities
Yes, this type of professional must be a kind of “contradiction”. Obsessed with the details, but considering the big picture; results oriented, but comfortable with ambiguity. He measures everything and trusts the data, but he also values human intuition.
What companies hire experts in Growth Marketing?
Many types of companies have growth marketing teams, but most of the opportunities are in technology companies, whether established or emerging.
If we look at some job offers, we can see the type of candidate that companies are looking for in each of their stages. For example, here are the responsibilities sought for the Head of Audience Growth and Digital Marketing role at VICE Media:
Responsibilities:
- Develop data-driven, multi-channel marketing strategies to acquire and retain audiences/customers for VICE Digital offerings, including editorial, video, consumer-facing products and real-life experiences.
- Identify, cultivate and monitor the audiences most inclined towards VICE brands, with a strategic focus on the right audiences to develop and acquire.
- Grow the scale and engagement of VICE’s audience across all platforms, and create and measure OKRs against monthly, quarterly and annual goals for audience growth and loyalty.
- Supervise the marketing, architecture and positioning of the brand.
- Work across all departments to ensure brand voice is consistent across all initiatives, including building close collaboration between product, editorial, multimedia and video teams, to inform and help define a roadmap.
- Lead and nurture an effective audience growth organization, including audience development and consumer marketing functions.
Typically, Growth Marketing job descriptions have more similarities than differences. In the examples described, both companies want candidates to have strategic skills and a passion for data analysis.
The difference is that the smaller company is looking for someone to launch and grow something from scratch. From the publication it can be interpreted that the professional will have a little less resources, but probably more freedom.
Growth Marketing versus Growth Hacking
While the terms “growth marketing” and “growth hacking” are often used interchangeably, there are some subtle differences between these roles.
Growth hackers are more like expert consultants, hired to solve a specific problem quickly. They are tasked, often on a shoestring budget, with finding creative solutions to difficult problems. For a growth hacker , speed is everything and problems need to be solved “yesterday”.
Growth marketers tend to take a long-term approach. They must be strategic in order to scale many different SaaS metrics, across many different dimensions, and sustainably.
Growth hacks can be thought of as similar to day trading on the stock market. You can make money from them, but they won’t necessarily be a long-term, stable source of income.
An effective Growth Marketing process takes the best attributes of Growth Hacking (i.e. thinking “outside the box” to gain traction) to become a sustainable practice based on sound principles. In that way, Growth Marketing is the opposite of day trading: you are investing for the long term based on data-driven metrics that are always optimized.
Important Goals and Measurements for a Growth Marketer
Goal: Generate traffic to your site
One of the main objectives of Growth Marketing managers is to increase web traffic. This is done in various ways.
organic traffic
These are the users who come to your website after performing a search on a search engine. To optimize for organic traffic, you should do everything you can to rank at the top of search results. This includes tactics like sharing quality content with other pages to build inbound links , or producing content that has been deeply optimized for search engines.
An example of an organic growth hack is the way Nerdwallet used an emotional spending survey to drive organic traffic to their site, as well as invite other sites to include backlinks to the post.
Ultimately, they successfully managed to secure links from relevant sites like The Simple Dollar, QuickenLoans, Yahoo, and Fidelity.
paid traffic
These are the users who come to your site through advertising channels. It’s where you keep track of how much you’re spending, the number of impressions your ads are generating, and Cost Per Acquisition.
Lately, more and more companies have been experimenting with native advertising, which involves placing non-traditional ads made to look like editorial content.
Referred traffic
This is all the traffic that is not coming from a popular search engine. Therefore, it is the traffic from social networks and all other sites that link to your content.
If you do it right, people will start sharing and talking about your content simply because they feel like doing it. That is the definition of viral content. In this regard, tracking the volume and source of all referral traffic will help you optimize your content.
You can use competitive analysis to gain a competitive advantage, with things like monitoring your competitors’ engagement spikes on social media and then trying to reverse engineer their success.
Posting guest blog articles can also be a great way to generate referral traffic.
On-site metrics
It is always critical to know what is really happening on your site. Surely you want to know where visitors are coming from, what actions they are taking and how much time they spend browsing. Another important metric to monitor is bounce rate, as it is a great indicator of the relevance of your content or landing page .
Objective: get leads and improve the conversion rate
Receiving all the visitors in the world means nothing if they are not converting into new users. These are the most important areas to optimize.
Conversion rate
What is the overall conversion rate of people coming to your site through any avenue? You should closely examine any pages that have significant drops compared to other sections of the site.
For example, HubSpot experimented with different website designs and found one that doubled their overall conversion rates.
Conversion rate of a landing page
What is the conversion rate of users who reach your main landing page? There are many ways to optimize it, especially by playing around with the text, layout, and design.
An interesting section to experiment with is the length of the title. For example, it’s been shown that shorter, punchier titles tend to perform better.
See how Doordash communicates effectively to get drivers to sign up on their landing page , using the short and catchy title “ Bring home the bacon ”.
Blog/Email Subscribers
Are you producing compelling content that people actually want to read? That should be your priority. To see an example of a business blog that people love and get a lot of value from, you can explore the Moz blog that specializes in SEO. Surely many people would pay for the extensive content that they share for free, but its fair value is in “giving away” the knowledge so that you can apply it on your paid platform.
If you’re already creating great content, then you need to make sure it drives the actions you want your visitors to take. You can figure this out by looking at metrics like click-through rate , subscriber growth , and shares .
Increase free trials of paid plans
If you have a freemium product , you ultimately want to convert free trial users into regular paying customers.
A great example is how DocuSign’s growth marketers leveraged tracking technology to offer certain premium features to a unique subset of users. Their tests let them know exactly which features to show, and their experiment resulted in a 5% increase in upgrade conversions from the freemium to the paid version.
Objective: retain customers
Reduce the abandon rate
Churn rate refers to the percentage of users who sign up, but then stop using the service. This is an especially critical metric for growing SaaS companies because churn prevents exponential growth . Keep in mind that if you are losing a significant part of your customers, you simply will not be able to achieve the minimum number of users you need to start generating relevant income.
Analyze every aspect behind why users stop using your service. Is there an area that is causing you to stumble? Think about the user interface. Make sure it’s smooth and simple, or people will leave your page.
Increase average order value
By tracking and analyzing user behavior, you can start targeting them in ways that increase their average order value. Areas to consider include: bundling , targeting customers based on their past behavior, and upselling .
Increases customer lifetime value
Once you have a customer hooked, how can you maximize the value you get from them? You might consider strategies like conducting surveys to find new features users want, encouraging customers to choose the annual billing cycle, or providing premium customer service.
Objective: build a brand
Once you have a company that is established, trustworthy and provides a great user experience, you can leverage it to build a true brand. That is, your name can become synonymous with quality in your industry.
Start by building a good company culture. Then, build your brand by helping it with smart PR campaigns, influencer marketing , word of mouth recommendations, and referral programs.
Toolkit for Growth Marketing Professionals
To grow with the best, you will surely want to take advantage of some of these services:
- Leadpages – Helps create custom landing pages.
- Adroll – Track people who visit your site through digital ads.
- Sumo – Build an amazing email list.
- Ahrefs – Industry leader in creating quality keywordlists.
- Proof – Increase conversions by allowing the customer to make the sale.
- Buzzsumo – Analyze in detail the content of any of your URLs.
- Voila Norbert – Build relationships with top marketers with this email search tool.
- Amplitude – Helps you find your most popular features.
- Apptimize – A/B test your mobile app.
How to get into Growth Marketing?
Learn from the best specialists in Growth Marketing:
- Brian Balfour – Former Vice President of Growth at HubSpot, shares many insider details about Growth Marketing on his blog.
- Danielle Morrill – Former Chief Growth Officer at Mattermark, nowVenture Capitalistwho blogs with great wit and depth on sales and marketing.
- Neil Patel – His eponymous Growth Marketing site has thousands of followers. He stands out because he has easy to read guides and is a thought leader when it comes to SEO and Content Marketing.
- Anum Hussain – Another HubSpot alumna, she now has an MBA from MIT and her Growth Marketing videos have garnered over 1 million views.
Companies recognized for their excellence in Growth Marketing
Hub Spot
They are quite recognized in the world of digital marketing, as they have more than 40 thousand satisfied customers. They offer tools to do everything from blogging to Marketing Automation to Lead Management .
Intercom
They are the instant messaging experts, skillfully using bots and live chat to engage users from the moment they land on your website. Like HubSpot, they are happy to present their Growth Marketing strategies in various manuals.
Customer.io
They’re creating compelling blog posts for all you email junkies . They have excellent posts detailing how to do Email Marketing strategies with a special focus on growth. They cover specialized topics like “How to write upgrade emails that convert”.
Forums and communities that you can consult
GrowthHackers
This site is run by growth marketer Sean Ellis, and it’s a place to talk strategy, brainstorm new marketing ideas, and even look for a job.
BAMF
It is the acronym for Bad Ass Marketers and Founders. As its name implies, it is a group for Growth Marketing enthusiasts to chat, exchange information and support each other.
As long as you continue to learn, tirelessly test, and focus on telling compelling stories through data, you will succeed with growth marketing.
