Growth Marketing

Growth Marketing focuses on the entirety of the marketing process, from raising awareness to driving traffic and creating engagement to converting users and driving referrals. This holistic approach demonstrates the ambition and importance of growth marketing, as its success is directly linked to revenue generation.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is designed to help ensure your target market gets to know you, buys from you multiple times and recommends you. This allows start-ups to scale to revenue, profit and exponential growth.

Growth Marketing is a long-term strategy using innovative, data-driven techniques to nurture the brand-customer relationship at every funnel stage. In essence, you’re looking to acquire many new customers, retain them and turn them into brand advocates. Growth Marketing is consumer-centric; strategy-first; focused on acquisition, retention and up-selling; evidence-based (data-driven); and utilises agile marketing operations. In comparison, traditional marketing is typically company-centric, tactical and campaign-driven; acquisition only; opinion based; and uses annual planning cycles.

Growth marketing isn’t just for early-stage companies. As your start-up grows, your strategic business objectives will evolve. Growth marketing can continue the growth trajectory, for example, by identifying and testing new marketing channels and expanding into new verticals, adjacent markets and geographies.

Growth marketing is, therefore, a strategic practice for any growth-oriented and ambitious start-up.

Why is Growth Marketing essential for start-ups?

Internet companies are evaluated on Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) vs Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), e.g. how much money am I paying to acquire customers and how much do I get back from customers. Customer ROI (CLV/CAC) measures marketing efficiency, and growth marketing involves minimising customer acquisition costs while maximising customer lifetime value.

The most significant benefits of growth marketing for early-stage companies are its ability to minimise costs and increase customer lifetime value. For example, it’s well known that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one. Hence why growth marketing also focuses on up-selling existing customers.

Compared to more established businesses, start-ups may need more critical information about their customers and the markets within which they operate. For example, communication channels, effective messaging, marketing cost, customer insights (buying processes, buying considerations, decision-makers etc.), competitors’ value propositions, pricing strategies and revenue models. For early-stage start-ups, all of the above information is critical for finding your product-market fit, gaining customer traction and building a scalable business model for growth.

How do I develop a Growth Marketing strategy?

North Star

Start by mapping out your strategy into a “North Star”, which defines your Manifesto (what your company provides to customers, from a high-level business standpoint), your ‘What’ (what your product(s) provide to customers, from a user-level perspective), and your ‘Why’ (the problem that your company is solving and the impact it has on your customers). This will enable you to nail your value proposition, competitive advantage and moat and develop the plan for long-term sustainable growth.

Growth Framework

Growth frameworks provide structure, help you set SMART goals and build processes. For example, the ‘Start-up Pyramid’ is one growth framework focusing on product/market fit, value proposition and growth. Another common growth framework is ‘Pirate Metrics’, which breaks down the whole customer journey - acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral.

Customer Personas

Developing Ideal Customer Profiles lets you quickly understand your target audience to help with engagement and retention. Ideal Customer Profiles (or customer personas) are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on market research and actual search engine intent data, designed to represent a group with similar characters, values and behaviours.

Accurate customer personas provide a path to personalise and target your marketing to different segments. Three to four customer personas typically account for 90% of a brand’s sales and are sufficient for most businesses.

Keyword research lets you base your growth marketing on actual search engine intent data to develop valuable insight into the queries your target audience is searching for on Google. It’s one of the best ways to truly understand what type of messaging and content appeals to your target audience. Knowing which keywords your audience is searching for lets, you fine-tune your messaging and content to meet the most common search intents.

Paths to purchase

Customer journey mapping enables you to own the user intent rather than merely targeting keywords, covers the whole customer journey (offsite and onsite) and helps you target users early in the journey, making them remember you later on. You can think of your content as stepping stones that form a path to purchase. By customer journey mapping, you can understand the following:

What are the major topics potential customers are querying on Google;
What the search intent is behind potential customers’ queries with Google that might match your USPs;
Where the “peak ends” are, in terms of the most critical conversion touchpoints onsite and offsite, that can win or lose a customer; and
What is the timeline of search intent so you can prioritise content development

Big Idea Development

The big idea is a powerful, surprising idea that grabs customer attention, which is typically your why. A big idea is an idea that is instantly comprehended as important, exciting and beneficial. It also leads to an inevitable conclusion that makes it easier to sell your products. A unifying idea is essential to a cohesive growth marketing strategy. Still, you must also identify the most critical supporting cornerstone ideas. These will become the most common themes of your messaging and content.

Cornerstone content design

A good growth marketing strategy recommends turning your cornerstone ideas into strategic content. First, you must express themes in specific, easy-to-consume content with a call to action. Then, when you create your most evergreen and helpful content around your cornerstones, you’ll naturally guide your prospects to the following step you’d like them to take.

You must also understand each piece of content’s role in the buying journey. For example, some content exists to stand out and capture the audience’s attention. Some content exists to educate those tuned in, so they’re in a great position to move forward with their goals. And some content exists to get the audience to take a particular action.

You can then organise your content assets into a logical, customer-centric and natural journey, which ensures you’re using the right content, format, media and messages at the right time.

Optimise the Funnel

Growth marketing is about the entire sales funnel. Hence, every stage must be optimised for customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Your website should offer a user-friendly experience, with an intuitive landing page and a clear call-to-action.

Top-of-funnel content should seek to answer questions and demonstrate your thought leadership, with bottom-of-funnel content should be more detailed and focused on facilitating a purchase decision. You will achieve a more significant strategic impact by solving problems at the top of the funnel before solving problems further down the funnel.

Fresh, relevant content helps keep the customer’s interest, while visuals like photos and videos enhance brand awareness. The keywords and meta tags you use are also crucial for generating organic traffic from search engines – which has no upfront cost and helps you build trust and authority.

Know your key conversion goals for growth.

It is critical to focus on conversion milestones that attract prospects and turn them into high-paying, repeat customers. Here are a few conversion goals to consider:

Turn blog readers into subscribers to continually share your content with a dedicated audience.
Leverage video to turn viewers into customers - over 80% of people say watching a video convinced them to make a purchase, so convert researchers into customers with videos that give them deeper insights into your products.
Leverage free-to-paid freemium offerings to advance prospects through the marketing funnel.
Focus on new customer onboarding to showcase your product’s value and reinforce the wisdom of their purchase decision.
Retention is a focus for growth marketing. This includes deploying pricing models based on the amount of usage so that as a customer’s usage increases, so does the value they gain and the price they’re paying.

What are the different types of Growth Marketing campaigns?

While growth marketing focuses on low-cost strategies, paid digital marketing can still prove a valuable investment for start-up companies. The key paid marketing platforms for start-up growth to focus on are likely to be Facebook Advertising, Google Ads, LinkedIn Advertising, Native Advertising (e.g. Taboola), and various social media platforms like Instagram.

But if you want to be clever, here are some additional ingredients to add to the mix.

Pre-launch emails to create hype.
Product hints for sneak previews to create anticipation.
Referral marketing - is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics for start-ups.
Guest posts on industry news sites or adjacent brands’ sites demonstrate thought leadership to gain awareness.
Leverage social media by creating spaces for audiences to engage with your brand and keep them updated on products and offers.
Repurpose positive customer feedback as social proof.
You can use influencers who align with your brand and leverage affiliate marketing.
Gifts and freebies, such as discount codes, in return for email addresses.

Growth Accelerator Model

Once your vision is defined and your product validated, I can help you go to market by designing and executing the Growth Accelerator Model, which includes these vital elements.

Ideal Customer Profiles.
Developing target markets, core messages and the media to reach your ideal customers.
Commercial support for your pricing strategy and investment case.
Developing your sales prospect lists.
Designing your personalised content matrix for content that sells.
Copywriting and content development - brand & product straplines, product landing pages, thought leadership content.
Designing and implementing the optimum sales CRM system and content to capture, nurture and convert leads into sales.
Developing and executing Account Based Management campaigns on LinkedIn.
Designing and implementing the optimum customer value management system to deliver a world-class experience, increase lifetime value and orchestrate referrals