What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing is the Elon Musk of marketing.  It is all about creating a large, extensive, and more-than-devoted, loyal user base.  It requires extensive use of every channel, by constantly monitoring and rapidly responding to build an authentic and ever-green user (experience). It is knowing what it takes to acquire new customers and additionally, how to keep them.  Growth Marketing uses a variety of delivery channels to distribute thought-provoking, clever, consistent, relatable, and shareable content via word of mouth, video, or viral adoption.  

Growth Marketing, as the name implies, is a strategy that is focused on a consistent growth of customers based upon the response to intentional marketing initiatives; meaning, the consistent analysis and monitoring of successes during the campaign, intentions of quick and rapid adoption to embrace knowledgeable, and decisive actions that create the rapid growth of the customer. 

Another way of visualizing Growth Marketing is to imagine the marketing as a tree.  The roots are the foundation, the trunk is the vessel of knowledge that flows to the branches, and knowledge ultimately makes it to the leaves.  The tree needs to adapt frequently to the seasons, just as Growth Marketing needs to adapt to the experimentation and examination of what is learned through marketing insights. 

As I dare to compare our marketing tree to Growth Marketing; it is easy to say that the successful launches of well-developed Growth Marketing strategies are the fruits.  Growth Marketing draws the birds (users) to the branches, encourages the nesting, harvesting, and sharing that the tree provides and as a result more flock to visit and settle into the lifestyle that it brings. Pretty soon the tree is full with song birds.  

What does this magical Growth Marketing tree consist of?  It has the basics of all marketing strategies, acquired data, analytics, research, customer development, branding, positioning, and digital interpretations.  The nourishment of the tree begins from the roots (the company). From here the knowledge works its way up the trunk, and supports the heavy lifting as a marketing campaign develops.  As the nourishment, (okay I’m going there) the sap develops so does the customer journey.  User experience is defined, statistics are applied, copywriting is written and design is applied; using wireframes, UX, A/B Testing, funnel marketing etc…  These are the branches that sustain the leaves, bloom the flowers that bear the fruits of the marketing campaign.  Tested by the seasons, consuming rain and hibernating in cold and drought the marketing strategy begins to flourish, the tree grows in knowledge.  Sprouting leaves, gathering sunlight, converting the sunlight to energy, converting carbon dioxide and water into sugar… you remember 4th grade science.   This feeds the flowers of the tree.  Pollination by the bees (here I go again… and the BUZZ around the tree) produces fruit - and back to the birds - the fruit encourages the birds to visit the tree. 

This all appears to be elementary marketing for most seasoned tree farmers; but Growth Marketing is like adding the Miracle Grow tm.  If you don’t know, it comes in granular form (apply water as directed), and it makes the trees flourish.  The channel expertise of Growth Marketing is granular in form as well and this granularity is the fast-working secret nutrient formula in any strategy.  It is in part business development, drip campaigns, events, multimedia, paid advertising, social media community, PR, video and all working with the H2O of Content Marketing and SEO.

Growth Marketing is theoretical and speculative.  A lot of what is done may not produce fruit for all of our aviary friends, but what it does do is help in learning more about what birds we are attracting.  The purpose of Growth Marketing has more than just regular marketing expectations.  It goes beyond just awareness and acquisition of the customer but it gets the customer to bite the fruit or bring it back around in marketing terms, it is the Activation.  In regular marketing strategies the win or in this case is this bite.  So once the user has taken the first bite the rest is up to the farmer’s Business Development team to grow the business from there; but with Growth Marketing it is the activation or eating of the fruit in whole, getting the early adopters to stay in the tree, building retention of the flock.  As the flock grows so develops the recurring revenue and finally the “tweet” or referral which is the intention of Growth Marketing.

Stepping away from the orchard and back to the desk, the simple meaning of Growth Marketing is that it is growing at all times.  It is all about attracting, engaging, retaining and getting them to evangelize.  It requires the marketer and the company to be comfortable with the tensions of being both obsessed about the minutiae while never losing focus on the campaign strategy.  So what does that mean besides double talk? It means the retaining of the customer requires detailed observation, experimentation, development for the customers, monitoring their changing preferences and activating to deliver continued retention, acceptance and referrals.  The usual methods of marketing are applied such as A/B testing, constant customer lifecycles and cross channel marketing.  

Engaging in growth hacking is a quick way to adopt Growth Marketing.  

What is a Growth Hacker, it is a marketer that uses cutting-edge and often unconventional techniques to gain, acquire and retain customers.  Sounds dicey? Not really, oftentimes these are very low-cost, avante-garde experiments.  The purpose is to be fast moving, experimental with multiple and frequently changing channels - I’m sure this is where our seasoned marketer will cringe but in this way the clever use of innovative experiments along with constant analysis of the minutiae at a rapid pace as possible along with low cost makes it a viable option for start-ups but also organizations that have a need for fast go-to market audience engagement. 

A successful growth marketer will build a user base that is highly engaged and will consume - whether that is product, service or content.  They build a loyal and ultimately satisfied referral base.  Growth marketing is all about customer journeys, monitoring it as it evolves, responding to the evolution in order to build a trust-based relationship that drives advocacy through social media.

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