What Is Growth Marketing? 5 Key Tips for Success

You’ve probably experienced the tension between long- and short-term goals. Should you drop that extra $200 in your retirement savings or invest in hand-sewn sequin pants? Schedule a dentist appointment or do the dishes?

These decisions aren’t easy—a killer outfit and an ant-free kitchen are nothing to sniff at. Research shows, however, that people tend to overemphasize short-term gratification over long-term goals. Long-term strategies are essential—especially when it comes to running a business. One popular and effective long-term strategy is growth marketing.

Here’s what growth marketing is, how it helps business owners plan for sustainable growth, and five tips to help you implement your own growth marketing strategy. Plus, hear insights from the ecommerce team behind adventure travel gear retailer Eagle Creek.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is the process of using marketing experimentation and customer data to drive growth.Growth marketers focus on delivering value at every stage of the customer journey, which boosts customer loyalty, increases customer retention rates, and encourages repeat purchases and referrals. By using customer feedback, testing, and analytics, growth marketing seeks to understand the needs of your company’s target audience and address pain points.

Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing

• Goals
• Customer journey
• Customer experience
• Performance monitoring

Although both growth marketing and traditional marketing help companies increase sales, they chart different routes toward the same end goal. Here’s how the two compare:

Goals

Growth marketing focuses on building customer relationships. It’s a long-term strategy based on the belief that a loyal customer base is key to sustainable business growth.Traditional marketing methods often target shorter-term goals, emphasizing new customer acquisition over retention. They also use promotional and product marketing strategies to boost revenue in the near term.

Customer journey

Growth marketing journeys focus on retaining customers, emphasizing a quality customer experience throughout the entire customer journey. Traditional marketing strategies might over-emphasize the top of the marketing funnel, focusing on potential customers and neglecting customer retention stages.

Customer experience

Growth marketers view the customer experience as a key growth driver. They partner with customer experience and customer support teams to maximize the value delivered to customers post-purchase. Traditional marketing teams are less likely to focus on existing customers and may not involve customer care and support teams in their marketing strategy.

Performance monitoring

While both growth marketers and traditional marketers might use key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate past performance, growth marketers also monitor user behavior to test and optimize campaigns. They also actively solicit customer feedback as they experiment with multiple marketing tactics and channels.

Elements of a growth marketing strategy

• A/B testing
• Data analytics
• Cross-channel marketing
• Customer feedback analysis
• Customer lifecycle planning

Growth marketing uses experimentation and data analysis to improve the customer experience and boost loyalty. Here are five key growth marketing tactics to adopt—and a few expert insights from the ecommerce team at adventure travel gear retailer Eagle Creek.

A/B testing

A/B testing uses customer engagement data to help businesses identify the best version of a piece of marketing content—such as an email, blog, social media ad, landing page, or webpage. Marketers create two versions, send each one to a different small subset of a business’s audience, and compare results between the two audience segments.

For example, consider a business deciding between two email marketing newsletter subject lines:

• 6 summer reads for the beach or the couch
• Bikinis, BBQs, books: 6 lazy summer reads

The business sends each version out to 5% of its total email subscriber list and reviews each group’s opens, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and engagement rate two hours later. If the second subject line performs better, the business distributes that version to the remaining subscribers.

Wade Litsey, director of ecommerce at Eagle Creek, sees the benefits of A/B testing site content with the A/B testing app Shoplift.

“Rather than saying, ’We think this is going to be better,’ we can actually test each change and get real-world information to say it is better, or it’s not,” he says.

Data analytics

Growth marketing is a data-first approach. You’ll gather data about your current customers and target audiences, A/B test campaigns, experiment with new strategies and analyze results. You can also use site analytics to understand how various audience segments interact with your business online.

“The most important thing is making sure analytics are dialed so you understand your traffic and customer behavior by channel,” says Wade. “Once you know where your customers are coming from and how that differs by channel, you can figure out how to show up on each one.”

Cross-channel marketing

Growth marketing frameworks encourage businesses to advertise on multiple marketing channels, helping them maximize reach and meet different user segments where they already are. A single company might use social media advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), SMS marketing, push notifications, and traditional advertising.

Cross-channel marketing can also provide more valuable data than single-channel efforts. Instead of comparing social media ads with organic social media video posts, for example, you might compare social media advertising, organic social media posts, and direct mail. As a result, you may discover that organic social generates the highest number of website visitors, social media advertising has the highest conversion rate, and direct mail delivers the strongest return on investment (ROI). You can then use this information to optimize your marketing efforts.

Customer feedback analysis

Growth marketing also involves gathering and analyzing customer feedback and adjusting your strategy based on findings. You can use post-purchase emails, customer surveys, and focus groups to gather customer feedback or use AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to process information, identify strengths and areas for improvement.

Customer lifecycle planning

Growth marketing focuses on meeting customers’ unique needs throughout the entire customer lifecycle. This means helping businesses retain customers, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and activate engaged customers as brand advocates.

Eagle Creek offers a lifetime product guarantee as part of its post-purchase customer satisfaction strategy.

“We don’t want you to replace that piece of luggage. We want you to shop again when we have something new and great to offer you,” says VP of ecommerce and marketing Lisa Bressler, adding that the guarantee is a key driver of loyalty and referrals.

Eagle Creek also encourages referrals with its pro program, a loyalty program designed for outdoor industry and travel professionals.

“We want to get our gear in the hands of people that are experts in the adventure travel space and use that word of mouth as a vehicle,” Lisa says.

5 tips for successful growth marketing

1. Build your marketing stack
2. Stay current
3. Center the customer
4. Involve your whole team
5. Focus on loyalty

Growth marketing can position your business for long-term success. Here are five tips to help you plan and implement your growth marketing strategy:

1. Build your marketing stack

Marketing technology is critical to the growth marketing process, helping teams gather and analyze customer data, experiment with strategies, map customer journeys, and effectively manage multichannel growth marketing campaigns.

Look for marketing tools that support analytics, audience segmentation, lead management, and marketing campaign optimization. You can also explore marketing automation tools and AI apps, which can extend your team’s capacity, freeing up time for higher-level marketing tasks.

2. Stay current

Growth marketing pushes the envelope. Successful growth marketers are willing to embrace cutting-edge marketing technologies (whether that’s AI marketing, AR shopping, or any number of high-tech innovations in between). They also pursue innovative strategies to improve the customer experience.

You can keep up to date by reading industry publications, attending marketing events, or pursuing online or in-person skill development opportunities for your growth marketing team.

🌟Hone your social media marketing skills and stay on top of new trends in the industry by listening to these top social media marketing podcasts.

3. Center the customer

Imagine that your customer support team members are overwhelmed, and you’re looking for ways to reduce their workloads. You could eliminate phone and chat contact options or outsource your customer support network, but selecting these options might downgrade the customer experience. Instead, you might decide to incorporate a chatbot to extend your team’s capacity while maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

For a growth marketing team, the key consideration is how each option would affect customer support quality. You can support your growth marketing efforts with a customer-first approach to decision-making, avoiding strategies that threaten customer experience—even if they reduce workloads and operational costs.

4. Involve your whole team

Although your marketing team might develop your growth marketing plan, they can’t implement it alone. Effective growth marketing requires collaboration between marketers, business leadership, data analysts, product developers, customer service representatives, and operations teams.

Empower your marketing leaders to activate other departments. They can delegate responsibilities, collect and analyze data from other teams including sales and customer support departments, solicit feedback, and help separate teams align around growth marketing goals.

5. Focus on loyalty

The end goal of growth marketing is to increase customer loyalty, so emphasize strategies that boost loyalty and build brand trust. Some of those strategies might include values-based marketing, marketing personalization, and loyalty and referral programs.