What is Growth Marketing?

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Developing a marketing strategy for your B2B company will help align goals and provide a framework for the future. It’s important to create this plan to help your sales and marketing departments successfully work together. 

Having key performance indicators (KPIs) and long-term goals will help your company decide where best to allocate resources. It will also help cultivate quality new leads.

Growth marketing is a strategy that relies heavily on data to grow a company, increase revenue, and encourage customer retention. This is a complete strategy, rather than a one-off marketing campaign, and it requires experimentation and brand building. Using data to drive this plan allows companies to find target audiences, generate leads, and promote customer loyalty. 

This differs from traditional campaigns through constant experimentation across marketing channels. Using this strategy allows your team to gain a deeper understanding of your customer, as well as target audiences best suited for your product. This plan is also based on collecting data and performing data analysis, rather than luck or gut feeling. 

Your team will use information like customer demographics, website traffic, and content engagement to see how clients interact with your brand. This data helps determine your ideal customer, outline the customer journey, and build your sales pipeline. Data will also help your team re-target leads as they fall out of the funnel and perform lead nurturing for those who aren’t ready to make a purchase immediately. 

Growth marketing also encourages customer retention, which is crucial for scaling a business. According to Forbes, it is five to twenty-five times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain current clients. With that in mind, customer retention is crucial to increasing ROI and overall sales.

This long-term strategy is made up of many smaller parts. It’s important to understand that growth marketing is successful when your team uses it to allocate resources and set performance metrics. By having an overarching framework, your team can collect data and measure how well marketing campaigns are doing, redirecting those that are struggling.

Unlike newer or trendier plans, growth marketing focuses on acting as a sustainable solution for businesses that are committed to scaling over time. Rather than throwing out your strategy for every new hack that comes along, utilizing growth marketing keeps your team on a specific track with future goals.

What is Growth Hacking?

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While growth marketing focuses on a long-term strategy, growth hacking can be seen as the opposite approach. It still relies heavily on data and experimentation, but growth hacking uses unconventional approaches and innovation to deliver quick results. Simply put, it’s a “hack” for your marketing strategy.

While it might seem like an obvious choice to most since its goal is to deliver quick results, growth hacking requires extensive resources for success. Through experimentation, your company determines what types of marketing campaigns work best for your brand, and then uses that data to drive growth. 

However, it’s important to understand this strategy doesn’t just throw caution to the wind. Experimentation is required to make sure campaigns will end up delivering growth. 

This means using conversion rate optimization (CRO) until your team can get the results needed. CRO is a process that focuses on increasing the amount of website visitors who complete a call to action. For example, website traffic filling out a web form or downloading a white paper boosts your conversion rate and generates new leads.

A high conversion rate usually means that your website or content is performing well, most likely because it's well-designed and appeals to your target audience. Optimizing your conversion rate can lead to an increase in revenue as website traffic becomes qualified prospects. CRO helps your team reach the right people by testing which channels receive the most engagement.

A great example of growth hacking and CRO is Dropbox’s referral hack. It helped the company gain 4 million users across a span of 15 months by utilizing a data-driven referral program. This type of success relies on experimentation to see which type of forms and incentives target audiences engage with most. 

Growth hacking relies on a company’s ability to allocate enough resources to do intensive testing to find the right campaign. This means your team will be running experiments across channels and collecting data, which should be used to push growth. 

While this strategy does focus on delivering quick results, it’s important to understand that it is not a one-off technique. Rather than viewing it as a campaign or short-term undertaking, your business should be prepared to adopt this as its overall marketing strategy. This means having the resources in place to handle continuous analysis, create new ideas for campaigns, and execute experiments. 

It also requires multiple people to successfully run the operation. Typically, growth hacking requires someone in a lead position who coordinates a team of several individuals. Any small B2B company or start-up needs to know that growth hacking is a team effort.

What are the Pros and Cons of Growth Marketing?

For companies willing to invest in a long-term marketing solution that provides a sustainable increase in revenue, growth marketing can be a good fit. This strategy requires alignment across departments for your business to create an outlook and goals to work toward. Looping in sales and other departments will help provide a robust look at the business.

Growth marketing is also great for those who want to center their campaigns around a singular strategy. This will help your team collect data, create content to reach target audiences and convert visitors to leads. It also works to help increase brand awareness and promote customer loyalty, which should boost customer retention. 

This is a good fit for companies who feel they lack a cohesive vision for scaling. By focusing on growth marketing techniques, your team will develop a brand and generate a sales funnel with loyal customers. It also focuses on the entire customer journey, rather than a few sections, which helps create lasting relationships as your business improves the sales process.

As a slower strategy, growth marketing may not be the best fit for companies looking to allocate large amounts of resources for quick growth spurts. 

What are the Pros and Cons of Growth Hacking?

On the flip side, if your company has the energy and time to dedicate to intensive experimentation for rapid scaling, growth hacking may be a great fit. It works well for those who want to focus on pieces of the sales funnel and customer journey rather than examining them as a whole. This strategy can help collect valuable data that provides deep insight into the motivations and behaviors of your target audience, which can be used to drive sales.

For startups or new businesses that need customers quickly, growth hacking is a great way to jumpstart the sales process. By allocating resources for trial and error testing, your team can focus on creating effective marketing campaigns. This strategy also works for organizations that need a short-term and cost-effective plan to acquire customers.

Creating a long-term marketing strategy can be a big undertaking, and it may feel as though your company is sitting idle while the plan is being developed. Using growth hacking in the interim is a great way to generate revenue and gain insights into your target customers. 

Growth hacking is a team effort that requires all hands on deck for its success. Companies should be prepared to provide the necessary resources and employees to get the job done. It is also important to understand the type of commitment needed to complete the necessary experimentation. 

B2B companies who need a boost from stalled marketing plans can also benefit from growth hacking. If your team is hitting a plateau, utilizing this strategy can help get the ball rolling on innovative ideas.