Most people know what digital marketing is and its importance in driving business growth online and offline, but few understand how it has evolved given advancements in marketing technology driven by machine learning.

Simply put, it is now easier than ever to measure and attribute your digital marketing efforts to business outcomes such as revenue or profits in a cost-efficient way. This is, in part, due to the sheer amount of data that websites, apps, devices, and organizations collect about their users and how that data is leveraged within marketing strategies to target users at just the right moment.

Recently, the term growth marketing has grown in popularity to describe this form of marketing, but what exactly is it and why should you care? Read on to find out.

Focused On The Entire Customer Journey

“Growth marketing is a data-driven approach that combines marketing strategy, technology, and talent to drive user acquisition, activation, and retention in a scalable way for businesses.” — Hakim Garuba

While traditional marketing is primarily concerned with raising awareness and driving user acquisition, growth marketing cares about the entire customer journey and requires the right mix of technology, talent, and strategy to drive success. 

Driven By A Culture of Experimentation

Growth marketing involves a culture of iterative experimentation. Yes, I’m talking about the good-old holding something constant (a control) and changing other things (one or multiple variables), then observing the results. There are many different types, but the most commonly used method in marketing is A/B or multivariate testing. Generally speaking though, the growth marketing process involves: 

1. Developing a hypothesis about your target audience or market

2. Conducting experiments and running marketing campaigns to test your hypothesis

3. Documenting lessons learned and prioritizing them by impact

4. Refining your marketing strategy using prioritized lessons learned

5. Repeating until a business or marketing objective has been achieved. 

By repeating the testing process, businesses are able to quickly identify high impact activities, campaigns, audience segments, or marketing channels that drive growth and prioritize them by re-allocating resources as necessary. 

Requires Good Marketing Technology

It’s no secret that growth marketing requires harnessing marketing data so it should be no surprise that a good strategy requires the right marketing technology to collect, measure, analyze, and transform that data into actionable insights. The average advertiser is however plagued with decision paralysis as the marketing technology landscape is vast with over 8,000 tools as of 2020 and steadily growing. 

But what if you’re an individual, startup, or small and medium business? Do you really need all of those things? Not necessarily! You can easily get started by first measuring your customer journey through free and powerful tools such as Google Analytics and then leveraging the insights to create testable hypotheses.

Requires Specific Marketing Expertise

With all the tools, tech, and data in the world, your business would still struggle to grow if it didn’t have the talent required to unlock powerful insights from them. A growth marketing team often requires expertise in digital marketing, project management, and data analysis. Growth marketers should be able to liaise with product, sales, and data teams as well as end-users in order to identify growth opportunities along every aspect of the customer journey. They should be empathetic as well as good story-tellers, able to place themselves in the customer’s shoes and craft compelling narratives that drive desired actions. 

Should You Be Doing It?

In short, yes, but if you are reading this and still unsure about whether growth marketing is right for you, please book a free Discovery Call with Stallion Marketing Inc. today and we will happily perform a needs assessment to determine fit!