What Is Growth Marketing And How To Do It Right

If you work in marketing, you might have heard the term 'growth marketing' at least once. Although many people understand the concept, they don't understand how to do it correctly. 

In definition, growth marketing is a marketing approach focused on fostering strong connections with customers, cultivating loyalty, and nurturing a lasting bond between the brand and its consumers ultimately leading to long-term sustainable growth. 

While traditional marketing primarily focuses on building brand awareness and acquiring new customers, growth marketing covers the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to account expansion and referrals. Growth marketing strategies help you generate revenue by getting new customers and also by retaining and actively engaging your existing customers.

Although growth marketing is an incredible marketing strategy, it’s not very easy to get it right. Here are 4 things to keep in mind to succeed with growth marketing:

1. Personalization 

No matter what you do, you should always focus on delivering a personalized experience to your prospects and customers. Personalization is a key element in fostering long-term relationships with your potential customers and existing customers. This helps them to relate their pain points easily and connect with your product properly ultimately leading to product signups or account expansion. 

For existing companies, you can run personalized campaigns to deliver onboarding, upsell, or cross-sell communication using product activity data and user events. You can use product events and activity data to trigger real-time email campaigns and push notifications, and you can further improve the experience by using personalization based on the product events. 

Here’s an example showing a personalized customer email created using Inflection based on their product usage: 

For prospects, you should personalize all the nurture campaigns and outreach emails using your CRM and account data, this will speed up the acquisition process and reduce the time and cost per acquisition significantly. 

For inspiration, this blog explains how we built our product activity-based onboarding process. 

2. Test, test, and optimize

For growth teams, testing is essential for data-driven decision-making. A/B testing of marketing assets is a great way to test the effectiveness of your marketing assets. It involves comparing how an audience responds to the original version and a potential new version of a marketing asset. This method provides clear insights into which version performs better. You can conduct A/B tests on your customer communication emails, prospect outreach messages, in-product terminology, alert copies, and pretty much everywhere possible.  

A/B testing is crucial in growth marketing because it relies on data, not assumptions, and can save a significant amount of time and money. For instance, if you’re planning a comprehensive website redesign, A/B testing can reveal that the original version outperforms the new one, saving you substantial design expenses. This demonstrates the power of A/B testing in guiding your marketing decisions.

In addition to A/B testing, you need to test and compare your marketing channels too. Utilizing different marketing channels is a smart strategy to make sure you connect with both your existing customers and potential ones in the places where they are most open to hearing from you. But when you do that, you need to conduct tests and experiments to assess which channel performs better with less spending. 

3. Real-time automation 

Automation is the most effective way to ensure your prospect and customer communication is real-time. If a prospect comes to your marketing landing page and downloads a piece of content, you should be able to hit them with a follow-up email or an email with related useful content almost instantly. Also, you should enroll them in your automated nurture programs to deliver more resources over time. 

However, if you follow up with them after 2-3 days of form submission or content download, they’re more likely to ignore your email, potentially causing an opportunity loss. In our case, people open the follow-up content delivery email almost all the time, because we send them this follow-up email in just 1 minute of downloading content. Many of those content downloaders eventually qualified for opportunities and we are proud of that setup and its performance.  

4. Scalability 

When it comes to building a growth marketing engine, only the best professionals think about the scalability of the system. But in fact,  it is the most important aspect of building a growth stack and everyone should consider that at every stage of the process. 

Growth marketing is a continuous and ever-evolving set of processes. As your company grows, your lead volume, new signups, product activity events, and everything else will grow as well. However, you need to have a proper system in place to accommodate that growth. All of your platform and tool vendors should be able to scale as you grow without eating up all your money. 

Always consider vendors that are built for scalability and offer a cost-effective solution for your growth engine. Also, pick vendors that are specifically built for handling more volume and offer a cost-effective solution. Inflection is a great example here as it’s a customer communication platform purpose-built for product-led companies that are growing every day. 

Growth marketers should use scalable solutions like Inflection for their stack. You can use our Ultimate Product-led Go-To-Market (PLGTM) Vendor Buying Guide 2023 to find out which tools and platforms are right for you. 

Wrapping up

Marketing is not just about attracting new customers; it's about retaining and nurturing existing ones while continuously expanding your reach. In an end-user era, businesses that prioritize personalization in communication, and optimize marketing efforts based on data at scale will be the ones best positioned to thrive and succeed. By focussing on these aspects is how you make growth marketing work for your business.

If you need to scale your growth engine while delivering a personalized experience to your prospects and customers, you should check out Inflection.io. 

Inflection.io is a customer communication platform built for the modern data stack with native integrations with data warehouses and product analytics platforms. You can run customer activity-based personalized campaigns to better communicate with your customers and make them travel through the customer journey without friction and enable expansion.