What is Growth Marketing? (with Examples)

Whatever industry you are in, I can assure you that the competition has never been so fierce.

Global brands and small businesses are constantly struggling to outstrip their competitors by finding new ways to acquire and retain customers. Growth marketing is a child that is born from this struggle.

Compared to traditional marketing methods, growth marketing aims to make your marketing campaigns much more accurate and efficient by the power of experimentation.

What exactly is Growth Marketing?

You’ve heard of the marketing funnel, right? If not, here’s what it looks like:

You probably are aware that in traditional marketing the awareness and consideration are the focus, too. A marketer is expected to bring a high number of people into these two parts.

Now I want you to forget all of that because that is NOT what Growth Marketing is.

Definition of Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is coming up with new and better ideas to improve the whole funnel and constantly experimenting to achieve the best results possible. After all, there is no way to know for certain if that “crazy idea” will be your growth hack or not.

Is it Growth Hacking then?

Yes, but no. 

Most of the time “Growth Hacking” is used as a way to find an idea that will turn your startup into Apple overnight, which is not likely. Growth hacking and growth marketing are the same if they refer to eliminating obstacles in your funnel using experimentation and data to achieve the best results possible.

With hard data at their side, growth marketers are supposed to find what works the best for the business.

So, what does a Growth Marketer do?

A growth marketer is similar to a guided missile, they will not rest until they find their target metric and destroy it; well in our case, improve it.

This metric can be from any part of the funnel. It can be:

• The number of website visitors,
• The visitor to signup ratio,
• Signup to subscriber ratio,

And many other metrics that play a role in a company’s growth. After they are given their target, they are expected to come with various ideas to improve it.

Now how do they select the idea to implement among all of them?

They don’t. 

Although they initially eliminate a few of these ideas because they will not be cost or time-efficient, most of them remain. A growth marketer’s best friend is data from real users, so they continue to test the ideas one by one; optimizing parts, experimenting fonts, and all kinds of elements to achieve the best result.

After weeks of A/B testing and experimenting a growth marketer is required to analyze the data they have present. There are 2 paths available after this phase:

1. Apply the best performing improvement and move on,
2. Keep experimenting and testing new ideas until the best improvement is found.

Now, does my summary of a growth marketer’s day-to-day duties sound just like a scientist’s, or is it just me? They have to input an idea and rely on the output they get to help in their business’ growth.

Growth Marketing Examples

I’ll try to give a simple example to make this subject more comprehensible.

If you are looking for real examples of growth marketing done by the most iconic tech companies, check out our Growth Strategy Examples article.

Growth Marketer in an Online Clothing Store

Our first growth marketer is Matt.

Matt has been working on Clothing Store Online(totally made up) which is experiencing a low visitor to buyer rate since it has been launched and Matt is expected to fix this.

As usual, Matt has many growth hacking tools on his arsenal which will help him.

From the top of the funnel, Matt starts and asks himself “Are we getting enough visitors?”. The answer is yes, Clothing Store Online receives the same if not more visitors than its competitors.

As Matt analyzes data from user sessions, he sees that the percentage of visitors who add products to the shopping cart is also close to their competitors. However, this flow changes in the checkout page.

Clothing Store Online requires users to signup before purchasing, which is OK since nearly all web stores do that. What’s different in this case is, they require users to verify both their emails and phone numbers and they don’t give an option to use Google Accounts or Facebook, etc. as a signup option.

Matt thinks that this is a pain point that has been holding the visitor to buyer rate back. He comes up with two ideas to fix this:

1. Remove email and phone number verification,
2. Enable Google and Facebook signup.

He can do both since they don’t overlap, but the management only allows one so he has to find the best performing improvement to apply.

Matt first removes the email and phone number verification and tests this solution for 2 weeks. Turns out, he was right because the visitor to buyer ratio improves significantly by more than 70%.

The management is pleased, customers are buying, everyone is satisfied, but not Matt…

Because there is a possibility that the second solution is more effective, so they enable signup via Google and Facebook accounts and give it a try for 2 more weeks.

The visitor to buyer ratio has now increased by 60% proving that the first solution is better. In growth marketing, you are always supposed to try every option, whether you have achieved your goal or not because there is a possibility that other improvements might work much better.

Conclusion

Growth marketing is a newly emerging field. As more businesses realize that optimizing your existing campaigns to perfect them is a much more affordable and efficient way to coming up with new “growth hacks”, growth marketing will be more valuable.

Whether you are a growth marketer or interested in becoming one, you have to keep in mind that your best friend is real data from real users to get your business where it deserves to be.

Are you interested in podcasts as much as you are into growth marketing? Here's our list of growth marketing podcasts that are just right for you.