Growth marketing specializes in attracting new customers by experimenting and executing creative strategies. If done right, growth marketing can help you get new customers and sustain your existing ones. Here's a simple guide to effective growth marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing uses data-driven methods to acquire and keep customers, aiming to increase a company's client base and customer revenue. It's like a puzzle that combines marketing, data analysis, and experimentation to make a company grow faster.
In general, successful growth marketers do things like:
- Optimization of conversion rates
- Trying out new ideas to improve different parts of the business
- Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and marketing metrics
- Reducing customer acquisition (CAC) costs
By constantly analyzing and adjusting their growth marketing strategies, they aim to steadily increase their sales and expand their business. This is how growth marketing helps companies reach their goals.
Importance of Implementing Effective Growth Marketing Strategies
Growth marketing focuses on long-term growth rather than short-term wins and marketing.
Here are some important reasons why it's important:
- Faster time-to-market: Successful growth marketing helps businesses launch products or campaigns faster by immediately testing, learning, and improving. This saves time and gets their offerings to customers sooner.
- Higher ROI: Higher ROI means that growth marketing helps a business make more money than it spends. By using data to make smart choices, businesses can invest in campaigns that give them the most profit.
- Scalability: Successful marketing efforts can be scaled efficiently. This means that a successful marketing plan can be expanded to reach more people or markets without a major revamp.
- Adaptability: Adjusting tactics to market developments and customer behavior is crucial in growth marketing. It helps organizations adapt swiftly to changing market conditions and consumer preferences.
- Data-driven decisions: Growth marketing uses information to make smart choices. By studying data, businesses learn what customers like, helping them make better, evidence-based marketing plans for success.
15 Effective Growth Marketing Strategies Every Startup Needs Today
Companies that want to grow through marketing don't usually rely on just one method. A crucial part of growth marketing is always trying new things. Over time, you'll try several methods to attract customers to buy your stuff.
Now, let's look closely at the top 15 effective growth marketing strategies for your team.
1. Content Pillars Strategy
Content marketing is super essential for any B2B business. It consists of a pillar strategy. Content Pillars Strategy is a way of organizing your content to make it more powerful and effective. Imagine your content as a big tree with a strong trunk and many branches. The trunk, or the "pillar content," is a comprehensive, in-depth piece about a core topic in your field. This pillar content serves as the foundation for your content strategy.
The branches are smaller pieces of content, like articles or blog posts, that explore specific aspects of the core topic. These branches link back to the pillar content, creating a web of information. This strategy helps you establish authority, improve SEO, and engage your audience.
When someone wants to learn about your core topic, they find your pillar content, and as they explore the related branches, they stay on your site longer. This boosts your chances of converting them into customers or followers.
However, content strategy is not just about a few keywords and topics; it includes SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) goals, segregated marketing goals to achieve business goals, an overview of marketing strategy, target audience, types of content and number of content you would need to create for respective marketing channel, keyword research for each content targeting SEO, customer journey stages, briefs for content creators and designers, content marketing process to distribute content and content performance KPIs.
HubSpot used this Content Pillars Strategy effectively. Their pillar content is a comprehensive guide on inbound marketing, covering all aspects. To support their pillar page, they generated clusters of blog articles, videos, and infographics on content marketing, social media, and email marketing that can be linked to the pillar.
This approach is a good way to showcase your expertise while improving your SEO and generating more organic traffic.
2. AI-Powered Social Media Scheduling
AI-enabled social media management tools can facilitate the creation of posts, the tracking of engagement statistics, and the development of customized messages for users. In addition to saving the social media managers time and effort, this guarantees that all content is relevant to and of a high caliber for the target audiences.
AI algorithms analyze data like your audience's online behavior, historical engagement patterns, and platform-specific trends. This data helps the AI program determine when your audience is most active and likely to engage with your posts.
One specific example of how you can use AI-powered social media scheduling is through the use of StoryChief’s AI Power Mode tool. This tool generates content ideas from any URL, and simplifies posting these across multiple social channels.
3. A/B Testing
A/B testing is an experiment with marketing whereby two different kinds of things, like an email, webpage, or ad, are tested to ascertain their efficiencies. It gives an insight into what is preferred by your audience.
But how does it work? Let's say you have a website and want to know which headline (A or B) gets more people to sign up for your newsletter. You show half your visitors version A with one headline and the other half version B with a different headline. Then, you track which one gets more sign-ups. The one with more sign-ups is the winner, and you use that one.
Kiva, a special organization that helps people in need, wanted more people to donate money on their website. So, they tried A/B testing. They guessed that if they put more information on their main page, more people would give money. After they added a box with extra information at the bottom of the main page, the number of donations went up by 11.5%.
When it comes to experiments, I would like to highlight that the former VP of Growth of HubSpot and now the founder of Reforge, Brian Balfour, recommends running hypothesis-driven experiments.
“A hypothesis clearly states what we expect to observe and should always be written down. A good hypothesis will be quantifiable, set the foundation for the design of the experiment, and help us ask the right questions during the analysis phase so that we can extract the most impactful learnings. Without a hypothesis in place, our questions are undirected and don’t necessarily lead us to critical learnings. In a later lesson, we will dive deeper into how to structure and test growth hypotheses. ” - Brian Balfour
4. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is like having a helper robot for your marketing tasks. It's software that makes marketing easier. It helps businesses send the right messages to people at the right time. It involves the following things:
- Gather Data: It collects info about your customers, like what they buy and when they visit your website.
- Segmentation: It divides your customers into groups based on their behavior and interests.
- Automation: You can set up rules. For example, if a customer visits your website and leaves without buying, the software can automatically send an email with a special offer.
- Lead Nurturing: It helps you build a relationship with your customers. You can send them useful content or reminders about products they like.
Airbnb uses marketing automation to send personalized emails to hosts and guests. For hosts, they send tips on improving listings. For guests, they offer travel recommendations. This personal touch boosts engagement and bookings, making it a prime example of the power of marketing automation.
5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a virtual notebook for businesses to store data on customer interactions. It keeps essential customer data such as contact information, buying habits, and likes.
CRM records contact details when a client calls you through the Internet, emails, or physical visits. In due course, additional data is recorded on the customer’s file as you transact with them. This affords businesses opportunities for better customization.
As such, should your customers ask for any specific product, the CRM data can help you suggest any related and better one.
Now, see how Tesco implemented CRM. Tesco is a big international company and was one of the first to use a special computer program called CRM in 2009. They picked the one called RightNow, which Oracle now owns. They used this CRM mainly in their call centers to help with the electronics part of the business.
Additionally, they adopted it to improve the quality of communication they used towards clients. This was achieved by monitoring customer data and communicating with such people using phones, chats, or e-mail.
6. Full-Funnel Content Marketing
Full-funnel content marketing is a strategic approach in B2B content marketing strategy. It is a widely used strategy, with about 70% of B2C and 73% of B2B marketers regularly using it to connect with their audience. However, a more comprehensive approach is the key difference in a growth-focused content marketing campaign.
Rather than merely seeking attention for your brand, you consider how you can always benefit your customers through all steps of the buyer’s decision – pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. In other words, this entails producing beneficial content throughout the buying cycle.
For example, Apple is good at this. They create blogs and documents that cater to a variety of users - starting from end users to a developer. Moreover, their social media presence and branding efforts keep up the high among buyers, resulting in improved sales.
7. Community Building
Communities have become super important online lately. Community building is a brand-building approach that prioritizes customer satisfaction by uniting consumers around a common interest or issue directly tied to the company.
By approaching community marketing, you build a group of people with interactive and lasting connections, unlike traditional advertising, which primarily focuses on acquiring new customers. It builds strong emotional ties, which means customers stick around longer and may even become your biggest fans.
I’m a big fan of Areej AbuAli, the largest community builder, Women in Tech SEO, and she shared her 8 learnings of building and running a community for 30 months, which says you need to be focused on the below things to build a successful community:
- Set your community values and rules from the very start
- Be open to feedback but be decisive about the next steps
- You won't make everyone happy, and that’s okay
- Communities are about giving and taking
- The dilemma of paid versus free is never easy to figure out
- Only partner up with those who share your values
- If something stops being fun, stop working on it
- You can’t do it all on your own
8. Referral Marketing
Referral Marketing is like telling your friends about something you like and getting rewarded. In business, it means encouraging your customers to bring in more customers. In most cases, customers refer friends to a business, usually resulting in the two parties getting freebies like discounts or bonuses.
An excellent example of this strategy is when you refer a friend to an online retailer, and the retailer gives you a certain discount on your subsequent purchases. It contributes to business growth regarding word-of-mouth endorsements and compensates customers when they refer others.
An excellent example of this is Dropbox, which did something clever with referrals. Instead of giving money as a reward, they gave more storage space. When you invite a friend to join, you get an extra 500MB of free storage, up to 16GB. This worked well, and in just 15 months, Dropbox grew by a massive 3900%. They made it even better by rewarding you and your friend and making it easy to refer people when you signed up.
Here’s Dropbox’s user growth timeline for your reference:
9. Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing involves companies working with social media influencers to promote their products. These "influencers" create content showcasing the brand and share it with their audience.
In 2025, influencer marketing will be valued at $24.1 billion, with companies using creative individuals to attract customers. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are making it simpler for brands to work with these creative folks. In 2024, to grow, companies will prefer smaller influencers and more genuine, real content. It's all about being more authentic and relatable to the audience.
One good example of influencer marketing includes McDonald’s online campaign, which reached over 31 million. The campaign was done through DRIM, a performance influencer marketing platform. With the power of influencing marketing, McDonald’s got over 3000 Instagram reels and YouTube shorts along with 20,000+ positive comments, increasing brand calls in eight months.
10. Video Marketing
Video marketing involves creating engaging videos to connect with your audience. These videos can be on platforms like YouTube, social media, or your website. They help explain things, tell stories, or showcase products. For example, a company might make a video showing how their product works or share customer testimonials.
GoPro, a famous brand for action cameras, is a good example of video marketing. They ask their customers to share their adventure videos taken with GoPro cameras, which is a great example of user-generated content.
11. Event Marketing
In the digital age, event marketing has become very popular as more businesses compete online. According to data, with the right event campaigns, nearly half of the brands can make five times more money than they spend.
Events are super important for businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B). Almost all B2B marketers say that live events make a big difference in how well their business does.
Business events let you meet customers in person, which is better than ads. Also, they help show that you are an expert in your field.
For example, Microsoft uses events to create excitement about their business news. You can see the huge list of events happening almost every day at Microsoft!
12. Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing helps businesses connect with their audience, share updates, and offer special deals.
Companies collect email addresses from interested people, often through website sign-up forms. Then, they send personalized emails with useful content or offers. Email marketing tools help automate this process.
For example, you may receive an email saying, “It seems you have forgotten something” after abandoning your online shopping cart. The purpose of these automated emails is to encourage clients to engage more people and generate higher profits.
However, you should be aware of mistakes that harm email marketing results. Such mistakes include not defining the success metrics for emails, missing out on the purpose of emails, and writing ultra-formal, sales-heavy emails. Learn about these email marketing mistakes and how to be better at it
13. Disruptive Marketing
Disruptive marketing is a fun way of getting noticed by your customers. In this strategy, we carry out things differently or creatively. Although the outcomes may not be permanent, it’s a fantastic way of demonstrating that you are a smart leader and thrilling people about your company.
Disruptive marketing involves implementing innovative and unconventional strategies that have never been used before. For instance, let's take the example of Netflix, a company that offers streaming services for movies and TV shows. In 2022, a popular show called Squid Game was released on Netflix, which became a massive hit globally. Following its success, Netflix executed an unusual marketing campaign by placing "red light, green light" dolls in different locations worldwide. These dolls were identical to the ones used in the show, and people could play games with them.
14. Social Proof
Customers often rely on the opinions of other customers when making a purchasing decision. This is known as social proof, which includes reviews and testimonials that can help convince potential buyers that a product is worth buying. There are various strategies that businesses can use to generate social proof, such as creating unique hashtags for customers to share their experiences on different platforms or collaborating with influencers and brand ambassadors.
Airbnb is a great example of a company that uses social proof to ensure quality stays for their guests. They noticed that many customers would check a host's profile before making a booking, and those who had no reviews were less likely to receive bookings. By providing a platform for reviews, Airbnb can maintain a high standard of quality for their guests, which, in turn, improves their brand reputation.
15. Using Freebies to Increase Sales
Freebies are always appreciated, and a preview or trial helps people compare and make the best choice for them. As an example, companies, especially those that deal with software, often offer demos and free trials to help them grow.
Freemium is a strategy in which a company allows customers to use its product or service free of charge. This allows customers to see its usefulness and creates interest among them.
StoryChief is an excellent example of such a platform. It allows other companies to test out their content marketing platform at no cost. The goal of free trials is to make customers enjoy using the tools so much that they can't do without them once the trial ends.
Providing free resources is another way for a company to demonstrate superiority. For example, Missive Digital offers a content calendar template that helps you plan and organize your content marketing funnel.
Ready to Skyrocket Your Business With Marketing?
Marketing plays a crucial role in the success of any business. No matter how amazing your product or service is, it won't succeed if people don't know about it. That's why having an effective marketing strategy is essential.
The 15 strategies mentioned below act as a toolkit to help your business thrive. By implementing these strategies, you'll be able to stay ahead of the competition, achieve accurate results, and pave the way for long-term success.
Are you tired of having to use multiple tools for your marketing needs? Join 5,000 marketers who manage content marketing, campaigns, deadlines, and team members all in one place. Give it a try for free today!
