If you’ve been abreast of how technology impacts their business, and the evolution of marketing, you may have heard about growth marketing in some corners.
It’s the new in-thing in the business world – from startups ecosystem, to established businesses looking to expand, even to companies who are almost giving up on digital marketing altogether.
The impression is that this is the new life saver, and a much needed recipe to reverse the trend of wasteful, unproductive digital marketing efforts. And this is right, in so many ways in fact.
Iterable puts it that, growth marketers ‘use growth hacking techniques to experiment with different channels and strategies frequently, optimizing their tests incrementally to determine how to best optimize their marketing spend.”
For them, it’s all about endless innovative experiments and constant analysis, all geared towards increasing their user base at lower costs, and as quickly as possible.
But come to think of it, where does all this idea about hacking growth come from?
Sales isn’t One-Dimensional
Over the past two decades, as the global population gets bigger, and every industry becomes aggressively competitive, the way people buy continues to evolve.
Your salesperson probably just needed a phone call to sell a mobile phone in the 60s. Think of how companies like Nokia, Motorola got swept off the mobile communications industry.
It wasn’t just about new companies coming up, but the fact that this democratizes customers’ choice. And the more choice people have, the more miles you’ve got to go, to get them to choose you.
This evolution doesn’t stop, and won’t. That means selling will continue to be harder for an average marketer, as it extends beyond what you’d call a ‘linear approach.’
How do you go out of the box to make your voice heard? There’s no particular, single answer to this, not anymore, and there’s no simple answer either.
It is now a combination of several factors – from thinking of PR, to seeing what advertising can do, to making comments on product development. Finding this answer is typically what growth marketers are trusted to do.
Growth Marketing Brings it all Together
MarketerHire had to say that growth marketers are the marketing managers of our current world.
Since marketing has shifted from the usual, innovative thinkers and versatile experimentalists are better positioned to solve marketing challenges businesses face. Of course, this then makes them more suitable to lead marketing drives.
The field of ‘growth marketing’ itself is a combination of many skills that you hardly find in a single person.
Check a JD for growth marketing, and if nothing else, you can’t help but notice what seems to be a description of a whole department.
Clear understanding of growth strategy, with expertise in acquisition campaigns, data analytics, plus knowledge of content strategy – and probably a lot more.
Now, this doesn’t mean growth marketing has to be an individual’s role. But here’s a thing. A growth marketing can better structure a copywriter’s work to be strategic, and contribute to the company’s bottom line.
That’s where the versatility comes in. That capability to align organization-wide efforts for a single purpose.
Speed of Iteration
In almost every situation, growth marketing is a role that is performance-driven. It’s always about what can happen in the shortest possible time.
And with that comes the need to experiment with a lot of campaigns, and very fast too.
If the marketing department thinks of planning campaigns for a month, a growth marketing department wants to do it in a week, and probably have four experiments running before the close of the same month.
Think of growth marketing as taking an agile approach to marketing.
In one its C-suite takeaways, McKinsey opined that “agile approaches are critical in enabling companies to target micro-markets, test ideas at speed, run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously, personalize offers on a truly granular scale, use data to drive decisions, and maximize MROI.”
That’s the breath growth marketing brings to your business.
Focusing on What Works
Growth marketing demands fluidity. It’s only what’s working that counts.
See this as a product of its agile approach to marketing. For them, the objective is always to test as much as possible, and zero-in on campaigns with the highest ration.
Every moment counts in growth marketing, and that’s why startups can’t get enough of marketers with a growth mindset.
Conclusion
If you haven’t seen online marketing playing a vital role in your business, it’s likely the time to rethink how you approach marketing.
The next right step might be to get more strategic with it, by having a growth marketer or growth marketing team accelerate your marketing results, as you want it to be.
Our team at Audience Lab provides an end-to-end growth marketing service, functioning like we’re a part of your team, and helping you drive the results that matter to your bottom line.
Talk to us about your business needs, and we’d be excited to help!