What Is Growth Marketing?: Definition, Examples, Strategies & Tips

The constantly evolving ecommerce trends such as the use of AI to track buying patterns are continuously redefining commercial activities around the globe, resulting in more business owners turning to ecommerce for its benefits to successfully run a business.

It has become increasingly important to have an effective ecommerce marketing strategy that is creative and compelling in order to gain an advantage over the competition. Growth marketing as a strategy is a great way of acquiring new customers, building a loyal client base, and improving sales.

In this article, we will define the growth marketing concept and break down in detail the strategies, tips, and examples of business growth marketing. We’ll also explore growth marketing tools such as data analytics to track progress in order to facilitate your ecommerce business decision-making process.

Table of Contents

• What Is Growth Marketing?
• What Are the Key Components of Growth Marketing?
• How to Launch a Growth Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps
• How to Improve Your Growth Marketing Tactics: 5 Tips
• Hacking Growth Marketing in 2023

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a strategy designed to increase revenue by improving customer retention and loyalty. It is a long-term ecommerce marketing goal that aims its efforts on the consumer, specifically by taking innovative approaches to acquiring new customers, while keeping the current customers captivated and finding ways for these customers to assist in business growth.

At the core of the growth marketing concept is using data to drive ecommerce business expansion through experimenting with different marketing strategies and campaigns.

Growth Marketing Definition

Growth marketing is a long-term iterative and data-driven strategy for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. The defining characteristic of growth marketing is its focus on constant experimentation, which involves a series of tests being launched throughout the growth marketing funnel.

The main objective of these tests is to better understand the customer’s intent and interest plus product-market fit, and use the insights generated to continuously adjust marketing campaigns.

Growing the ecommerce business by maximizing the value of campaigns or better engaging customers to ensure long-lasting profitable relationships is the main goal of a growth marketing strategy.

Growth Marketing Examples

Below are some inspiring examples of growth marketing strategies that can be put to use to grow your business:

• Onboarding by experts from your brand for new customers that sign up for a product is essential in terms of user experience optimization. This provides customers with valuable information and insights about the product and provides the ecommerce business with customer feedback which helps create a systematic product improvement approach. For example, over the years Dropbox has grown into a multi-million dollar business by gamifying the onboarding of their website.
• Personalized email marketing is another growth marketing strategy example that can help your ecommerce business stand out, which is helpful in converting your leads into customers. In order for this to work, there needs to be a focus on making emails engaging, responsive, and customized for each of your recipients.

Growth Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is focused on short-term goals that revolve around brand and product awareness involving strategies like gathering customer contact details, such as email addresses and phone numbers.

Growth marketers, however, are concerned with long-term goals and strategies that will benefit the company in the long run, such as creating buyer personas and tracking the entire customer journey to ensure customer loyalty and retention.

Growth Marketing vs Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is a short-term targeted marketing strategy based on the return on investment that includes different types of online content, where advertisers only pay when a specific action that benefits their business is achieved.

Growth marketing, on the other hand, focuses on long-term growth aimed at retaining and bringing new customers to your business through experimenting with new approaches and zeroing in on what works best.

Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking

Although growth marketing and growth hacking are often used interchangeably, there are some subtle differences that should be taken into account.

Growth hacking marketing is all about data-driven experimentation to grow an ecommerce business by any means necessary. However, growth marketing uses systematic processes with numerous strategies to grow brands, acquire customers, and build a loyal customer base.

Whereas growth hacker marketing focuses on short-term results to achieve rapid growth, growth marketing focuses on the bigger picture seeking to achieve long-term growth with a set of full-funnel strategies.

What Are the Key Components of Growth Marketing?

Having learnt that growth marketing strategy is all about taking care of all parts of the marketing funnel by having well-structured solutions, it is important to note that there are two major components of marketing for business growth.

These include:

• Omnichannel marketing: This is a marketing strategy that involves interacting with potential and current customers through various marketing channels such as email subscriptions, blog posts, social media, digital advertising campaigns, and many others. Omnichannel marketing creates improved customer experiences with smooth transitions, enabling customer retention. Ecommerce businesses that implement omnichannel marketing determine the best methods and approaches for contacting various customers.
• A/B testing: This method of examining the similarities and differences between two variations of the same thing is used by growth marketers to determine the best version of a particular marketing strategy, campaign, and type of content. Once a growth marketer figures out which variation has the most success in acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers, they can improve upon that variation and use it for future marketing campaigns.

What Are the Benefits of Growth Marketing?

When executed correctly, B2B growth marketing and B2C growth marketing can be very beneficial to building your ecommerce business.

Some of the benefits are laid out below:

Creating Brand Awareness

Growth marketing is all about expanding your brand by putting what works to the test, assessing data, and improving on successful strategies. Ecommerce businesses that often use growth marketing strategies are, consequently, better positioned above their competitors.

Attracting New Customers

Growth marketing uses data gathered from new clients to effectively determine the specifics of what drew them through the sales funnel. As a result of such data analysis, a marketing plan can be put in place to better resonate with the audience using the insights generated. Growth marketing requires ongoing attention to and analysis of data to successfully attract a quality customer base through highly innovative campaigns.

Improving SEO

With constant experimentation and data-analytics based decisions, growth marketing greatly improves SEO effectiveness. This means that your ecommerce website will rank higher on the top of the search engine results. It is advisable to take advantage of the data and use keywords in your website content and social media content to enhance your SEO efforts.

Better Understanding of Your Audience

It is important to note that the focus of growth marketing is not conversion, but rather looking out for those who are interested in your products and services. Constant testing and iteration helps ecommerce businesses better understand their target customers and efficiently make data-driven decisions and adjustments.

Upgrading Existing Campaigns

Utilizing the leads acquired from your brand’s already existing campaigns by following them on social media platforms or exploring new ways to gather information on their buying habits is relevant to boosting future campaigns.

How to Launch a Growth Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps

Building a growth marketing strategy for your ecommerce business is a rather easy process given that you follow the “AARRR” framework to recognize channels that lead to your pre-set goal.

In ecommerce marketing for growth, AARRR stands for:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue

Here is how you can launch a growth marketing strategy in 5 steps:

Step #1: Set Specific Goals

Begin by defining your product vision, and then identify what goals you want to accomplish. Your ecommerce business goals can change from time to time, but they ought to be specific and have an understandable meaning of success.

This helps establish the growth marketing metrics which determine whether the goal has been attained, with anything above the pre-set goal being considered a success and anything other than that being a sign that your strategy needs adjustment.

Step #2: Put KPIs and Growth Marketing Metrics in Place

Aligning your high-level goals with business KPIs and growth marketing metrics is the best way to gauge if you are on the right track towards achieving growth for your ecommerce business.

It is vital to set up specific KPIs related to your overall objective along with growth marketing metrics for every step of the funnel to identify what growth looks like at every stage and ensure that you are moving towards your preset goals.

Step #3: Lay Out Your Customer Journey

In order to create a sustainable growth marketing strategy, it is essential to understand the customer as well as the customer journey. To effectively take advantage of the buyer’s journey, you have to understand where your buyers are in the funnel and how to correspond to their needs.

This helps you better understand the type of content to be delivered at every stage of the marketing funnel.

Step #4: Carry Out Testing

Having set your high-level goals, established growth marketing metrics, and mapped out your customer journey, the next step is to recognize the best-performing channels throughout the customer journey.

Ensure that you are not losing any conversions by creating controlled experiments that focus on optimization. Whether to conduct A/B tests or A/A tests will depend on what your top-performing channels are.

Step #5: Focus on the Experiments That Yield Desired Results

Once you have identified your top-performing channels, you are in a position to double down on your efforts.

As you scale your growth experiments, keep track of the results month over month to accurately identify any new or shifting ecommerce trends with your marketing channels. Be on the constant lookout for new areas in need of improvement and new opportunities to further optimize your efforts and results.

How to Improve Your Growth Marketing Tactics: 5 Tips

Every ecommerce business today must have a sustainable marketing strategy to stand out from the competition. Developing a growth marketing strategy is a sure way to achieve next-level success in your marketing campaigns and such a strategy can be improved with the help of the tips below.

Here are 5 proven tips on how to boost your growth marketing strategy for the best results:

Tip #1: Analyze Your Competition

It is essential to keep track of how your competition is running their marketing campaigns. This could help develop a better growth marketing strategy since you can identify what is missing in the other companies’ marketing strategies and apply them to your own.

Similarly, it is conceivable that your business rivals are following in your footsteps, and it is time to adjust your marketing strategies to stay a step ahead.

Tip #2: Consider Your Marketing Content

An effective growth marketing strategy involves diverse channels and complex marketing funnels, as well as relevant content to support your business activities.

Although creating content is labor-intensive and time-consuming, it is important to have content that is engaging to both new customers and already existing ones. You may consider creating new content or repurposing old content into new formats in order to maximize its value.

Tip #3: Track Growth Marketing Metrics

The backbone of every growth marketing strategy is data. Growth marketing metrics come from tracking your revenue, activation rate, repeat purchase rate, retention rate, and average customer lifespan among others.

The insights gathered from tracking growth market metrics will help you make data-based decisions that improve your growth marketing strategy.

Tip #4: Engage Users Consistently

Consistent customer engagement on multiple channels creates top-of-the-mind awareness for your brand.

Creating a consistent omnichannel user experience across all channels that is engaging the customer with relevant, compelling content encourages customer loyalty and retention. This in turn improves your growth marketing tactics.

Tip #5: Use the Right Tools for Your Growth Marketing Strategy

Success with growth marketing is all about access to the best personalization data and tools to help you set up and constantly optimize your strategy.

Coretava provides ecommerce businesses with a set of AI-driven tools that help them boost their marketing efforts in a smart, efficient manner:

• Core Marketing for marketing your ecommerce business via customized pop ups, personalized emails, tailored SMSs, and gamification features
• Core Personalization for delivering the most relevant products to each customer through smart recommendations, instant predicts, and intelling search
• Core Loyalty for launching a customer loyalty program including points-based, cashback, tiered, and VIP programs, with the help of sophisticated gamification options
• Core Omnichannel for creating a seamless, consistent phygital experience across all touchpoints

Schedule a demo with our team to learn more about how Coretava can boost your growth marketing results in an effortless manner.

Hacking Growth Marketing in 2023

Growth marketing is a well-devised, detailed plan for sustainable progress and taking your business to greater heights with a focus on building customer loyalty and retention. It includes a lot of experiments, trials, and errors along the way, and is a process of gradual growth, but the results are definitely worth the wait. Growth marketing strategies have been tested and proven effective, which has prompted business users across the globe to employ them in their ecommerce businesses.

If you need some extra help in cracking growth marketing for your ecommerce business, Coretava is here to help. Our tools will allow you to personalize and customize your marketing strategies and campaigns to the exact needs and expectations of your customers to get them to buy more frequently, at higher values.

Click here to get started today.