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What is Growth Marketing, Anyway?

March 17, 2020 | 5 minute read

Growth marketing is a comprehensive marketing strategy that takes the whole story of a customer’s lifecycle into consideration.

Table of Contents (4 Minute Read)

An Introduction to Growth Marketing

i. The Most Important Skills for Growth Marketers

ii. Why You Should Outsource Marketing for Growth

An Introduction to Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is data-driven, measuring everything that a company could possibly adjust or change to make the customer experience better.

The goal of growth marketing is to keep customers engaged, and turn them into brand ambassadors, in turn, driving sustainable company growth.

As Matt Bilotti from Drift says, “Growth marketing isn’t about fixating on one part of your funnel.” It looks at your complete sales funnel as a whole, considering the relationships between each section of the funnel.

Strong growth marketing requires looking at insights from every part of the company and every portion of customer experience.

Drift highlights the importance of retention in their slide deck about the topic.

Customer retention is the key to growth marketing. Without customer retention, you have nothing. But the problem is that most companies do not have communications in place for the customer. They’re hardly speaking to them after product delivery, and this is a massive mistake. You need a whole communication plan in place to take care of these people and show them love post-purchase.

As an example, in economic development, after-care of your investors could be the major lever that helps other investors choose your communities over others. If you don’t believe us, just think about how companies encourage their supply chain to move closer, or site selectors recommend communities they trust to new clients.

In tourism you know the people who have a good experience tell others. But what about your ability to get those tourists back to your community or resort, or sister resorts? Without a communications strategy in place to love the people who booked with you, you have a sunk the cost on the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

CLV loss can get a whole lot worse in the B2B sales world. Let’s look at Education, SaaS and Manufacturing as examples next. Here’s the crux of the issue on CLV loss for them -many marketing and sales systems are disconnected and this creates purchasing friction in a classic case of the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing Look at this system and ping us if your recognize yourself:

Marketing tackles awareness and acquisition.
Sales tackles activation and revenue.

So who is managing retention and referral?

When retention and referrals are left up to the customer to handle - it rarely happens. You need a communication system in place to drive these priorities as even the customers who love you are busy. They don't know how to listen for the ‘red flags’ that identify a good customer for your company. (They have a hard enough time doing that for their own company - it’s true or growth agencies like Tangible Words wouldn’t be in such high demand!)

Instead, your communications strategy should help manage your customer’s experience with your product, promote engagement with your brand, and build a strong relationship.

The Most Important Skills for Growth Marketers

A good growth marketer drives company success by juggling several areas of your company at once to find any changes that need to be made to improve the customer experience. A growth marketer must be able to see the big picture – while keeping an eye for detail – and connect with anyone. Learn more about how a skilled growth marketer can get you more sales and drive sustainable growth.

Why You Should Outsource Marketing for Growth

That age old question: to outsource or not to outsource your marketing department. You've already got your marketing and sales team working at full capacity, and while you might just stumble upon a lone unicorn growth marketer who can take it all on, it's worth saying that growth marketing is no small feat. If you're considering outsourcing, see how you can get 7 expert growth marketers for the price of one.

Pirate Metrics: The Phases of Growth Marketing

Pirate Metrics The Phases of Growth Marketing A growth marketing person, department, or agency, thinks about your whole sales funnel, top to bottom, as a cohesive system. They constantly ask questions about how to affect positive relationship outcomes with your customers.

Beyond the Growth Funnel

You need to continue delighting that customer, so they’ll come back and purchase from you again and again. Growth marketing means developing long term relationships with every customer.

If you think it sounds a bit overwhelming, that’s because it really can be. But investing in growth marketing may be your best business investment yet. This is a big job, and it's probably not something you want to tackle on your own. That’s ok, you can outsource a good chunk of this.

At Tangible Words, we have a team of 7 university-educated experts with widely varied experience across many industries. Together, these unique perspectives allow us to hold and analyze those views from the smallest details to the grandest scheme. This means we ask questions fast, drill down at amazing speed, and can iterate on ideas and experiments fast.