In an environment filled with many options, it can be difficult for all companies to stand out. In order to stand out, it's become crucial to have a marketing strategy that is compelling, iterative, and creative. A good strategy is one that assists with customer acquisition as well as favoring organic growth. This new and compelling way of creating a loyal user base is what is referred to as growth marketing.

This guide illustrates what growth marketing is all about, the steps you need to take to get started as well as the best practices in growth marketing.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is basically the incorporation, improvement, and iteration of strategies to get and maintain paying customers. It's a methodical organization of information based on testable interpretations of how the world actually works.

Marketing efforts have been traditionally set apart from the product whereby the marketing department is set aside from other factors of the business. Currently, growth marketing is incorporated into product development. It goes without saying that growth marketers must learn and understand the growth metrics needed. The foundation of growth marketing lies in the customer discovery process. Customer discovery/ market fit is the process of identifying people experiencing the problem that your product can resolve. A clear understanding of your targeted customer can also assist with the growth marketing strategy in addressing the various goals of the company.

How to Get Started

Growth marketing is formed with the principles of iterative learning; the methodical optimization and gradual increase of retention, acquisition, and long-term value of paying customers. The process involved in growth marketing provides an opportunity for growth marketers to identify which methods work as well as which don't.

Test A through Z

One of the most crucial aspects of growth is the readiness to experiment. Gradual improvements through experimentation can also contribute to great results. A/B testing is one of the popularly used implementations. But why stop at B? Growth marketing is all about experimenting on the moving parts and their effect on performance metrics. It might take you by surprise when you discover the effects seemingly random elements of marketing material such as button corner radius, background color, and font weight can have on conversions. This is the main reason why micro testing is a crucial job for marketers.

Sanity Over Vanity

While performing the test process, it's vital to make use of a control group as an indicator to calculate the correct performance of variables. A control group that's set aside makes sure that they aren't inappropriately attributed or misinterpreted. Growth marketers must have the knowledge and understanding of the metrics that are useful to their business and measure the effectiveness of the tests. Although these metrics tend to be different from industry to industry, it's very important for every marketer to be conscious of the vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are the fake indicators that give the impression of sustainable growth. Just like the number of mobile app downloads, vanity metrics don't really show if the app is experiencing desirable retention which is a really important metric.

Iterate Towards Improvement

After you've calculated useful improvement of key metrics, you'll need time to check out what worked. Identifying the strategies that worked well during the tests, if carried out on a small part of the population, are more likely to do well on a large scale.

Although scalability is growth, usually growth isn't scalable and this is the main reason why it's crucial to test which strategies are working prior to scaling the tactics. Yes, fail fast but improve as gradually as possible to succeed.

Growth Marketing Best Tactics

Growth marketing depends on best tactics that span preparation, implementation, analysis, and revision. Among these tactics include:

Creating Goals and Objectives

Even though it might be hard to align our projections and plans with reality, the practice of setting objectives and goals can assist in finding out which strategies to use.

Experiment with Many Strategies

Diversify wisely by assigning a smaller section of the overall expense across different growth marketing strategies, resulting in the greatest possible combination.

Stay Flexible

At times, the hardest time to do is doing nothing! It's up to you to learn to practice discipline and patience by starting small, identifying the right strategy, and only progressing when it proves to work.

Embrace Failures

It's of great importance to be cautious and ready to walk away from a not-working strategy.

- Form an open work space and create a data environment from the beginning.

- Be certain of the problem you want to provide a solution to and also be fast with executing it. It should never exceed 3 weeks while still waiting for a code snippet.

- Even though it is really tempting, don't try to reach a lot of clients at the same time. It would be important to keep in mind that transparency and consistency in information is everything you will need to attract stakeholders.

- Keep away from causality bias through preaching hypothesis-driven testing.

- At every time, make sure to check out and compare the potential effect with the effort needed when working on a project. Despite that fact, don't try to pay too much attention to the ROI or the results too early. Instead, you could shift your focus on learning more on growth marketing.

- Have a clear understanding that growth marketing is planning to go the extra mile by planning and doing smart marketing with the help of automation as well as technology.

- You also need to acknowledge the fact that the whole process of growth marketing involves working as a team sport and not as solo players. This is an important factor to remember.

- Another tip to carry with you is that you will need to keep in mind that experiments never fail, you'll always learn and discover something new while doing them.

The Bottom Line

No matter what stage of the company life cycle you are within, growth marketing can prove to be a crucial function within your organization. By following framework tactics described in this article you will be positioned to drive your company towards hitting your goals.