Growth marketing: definition and practical advice

Growth marketing brings together many tactics aimed at developing commercial activity. Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing methods are mainly concerned with increasing the number of customers. This branch of marketing is interesting because it includes a lot of invaluable consumer data to grow your business. It achieves this goal by following a complete customer conversion funnel: the AARRR funnel. The latter extends from acquisition to customer recommendation. Here we explain the details of this model, before discussing several strategic and practical recommendations.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing has a clear impartial: to intensification the activity of a company. Its main mode of operation is based on increasing the number of regular and loyal customers. This set of operational marketing strategies is designed for different purposes:

Commercial: achieve, if not exceed, your commercial objectives
Notoriety: strengthen ties with current customers to seek new prospects to convert
Innovation: understanding consumer motivations to implement new processes, packaging, pricing policies, etc.

This practice differs from growth hacking. Certainly, rather than concentrating on experimentation, growth marketing plays the card of long-term progress.

How to optimize customer conversion using the AARRR funnel?

Through growth marketing, brands seek to convert their prospects into consumers, while retaining their current customers. To this end, the best marketing funnel model is certainly the AARRR funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Recommendation, Revenue. Here are the explanations for each of these terms.

Acquisition

Acquiring new customers is a daily struggle for many companies. This is why it is the first order of the day within the framework of the AARRR model. Fundamentally multi-channel, this type of approach focuses on optimizing a brand’s conversion rate. When it comes to inbound marketing, acquisition isn’t just about increasing traffic to your site. Indeed, this increase alone cannot be synonymous with success: we seek above all to attract quality organic traffic. In other words, you have to attract potential customers.

Do not hesitate to take a look at the statistics of your site to decipher some essential indicators for growth marketing:

Number of users: measuring your domain’s traffic
Number of views per page: detect the most popular themes on your site
Engagement rate and bounce rate: recognize why users stay longer or shorter on your dissimilar pages
Customer acquisition cost: determine the impact of your various advertising campaigns on Google and social networks

Activation

As soon as the prospect officially becomes a customer of your brand, marketing activation becomes a priority. This is about gaining consumer confidence. Thus, it is encouraged to transmit positive messages about your brand (Saeed, R., 2015). It is then necessary to accompany the future customer in his user experience, so that it is as pleasant as possible. For example, this may involve highlighting your offer through a fluid website and good internal networking.

It is a key element of growth marketing. Indeed, activation efforts encourage the consumer to remain loyal to your brand, even after conversion.

In short, clearly explaining the added value of your offer proves that the first purchase was anything but a mistake.

Retention

While the time is as much about customer acquisition as customer retention, here’s how to keep your customers. Indeed, a company will hardly be profitable if its new customers are not retained in a second time. To counter this, there are several techniques to encourage consumers to make multiple purchases from you:

Product: Apple is a good example of a high repeat purchase rate. The reason is simple: the American brand offers a range of accessories for each of its flagship products. In addition to this, it also offers products ranging from mid-range to high-end. It then encourages its customers to upgrade to the next level if they feel satisfied with their current property.
Service: possible use of different trigger marketing methods to encourage renewal of a subscription. Among the most loyal users, it is even possible to submit them special pricing for a Premium offer.
CSR: corporate social responsibility positively influences customer loyalty. We now know that co-creation is a good way to gain the trust of its customers (Iglesias, O. et al., 2020).

Recommendation

Growth marketing stands out because of its ability to stimulate advocacy marketing. Thus, the recommendations of consumers are not negligible in order to increase your business! With that in mind, keep in mind that you need to reward your current users. Here are some examples of marketing operations to adopt:

Sponsorship: exchange good practices with your customers. For example, offer them discounts if they recommend your brand to 10 of their friends.
Influencers: an opinion leader influencer with your target audience is a key contact. Collaborate with these kinds of profiles to improve your brand image.
Sample: distribute permitted samples to reach your advertising target more easily.

Revenue

Finally, the AARRR model concludes through this “Income” axis. It plays a very important role, because it is here that we measure the return on investment of your growth marketing. Among other things, here we evaluate performance indicators such as your customer acquisition cost. In a perfect world, this would be less because you will have succeeded in increasing the customer lifetime (or CLV).

To be profitable, apply each of the instructions of the first 4 axes of this framework, and voila!

2 starting points for a good growth marketing strategy

Now that we have seen the hypothetical values of growth marketing, let’s tackle the applied advice. We suggest that you begin your future marketing efforts through 2 basic axes:

A/B testing for quantitative measurement of consumer behavior
Natural referencing, or SEO, to generate ever more traffic on your web domain.

A/B testing, a formidable weapon of growth marketing

A/B testing consists of comparing several versions of a website with each other. It is very interesting because it allows us to better understand the real behavior of consumers. A/B testing is relatively adaptable; it can be distributed via mailing campaigns, on your site, or on social networks. Technique par excellence for your quantitative market studies, this test is fundamental for your marketing efforts.

A/B testing facilitates the implementation of growth marketing by accumulating key information on the customer journey.

Create content regularly to improve your growth marketing

There is no better method than regular and consistent content creation to increase your online traffic with the help of Journalist Writing Services. Indeed, feeding your site and your social networks with posts and articles greatly contributes to improving your digital notoriety. The keys to success lie in a systematic application of good natural referencing practices. Nothing rocket science about that, all the explanations on the basics of SEO can be found below.

2 essential growth marketing tools

Now, let’s take a look at the most interesting online platforms for your growth marketing. In this case, we have opted for two complete, accessible and free tools. Both offered by Google, we detail here the benefits of Analytics and Tag Manager.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the basic tool for evaluating the performance indicators of your website. It is also a free tool from Google. This platform is essential to understand what works (or not) on your digital channels. It offers several positive points:

its free
The veracity of its data
The ease of its handling (Google even offers online courses, for beginners, but also for followers of the platform)

However, be careful: the current tool, Universal Analytics, will give way in June 2023 to Google Analytics 4. Don’t panic, there are already new courses to quickly learn the functions of the new platform.

Google Tag Manager

Then, your growth marketing will be reinforced by the use of another Google tool: Tag Manager. It offers an additional contribution of capital information on your pages, and this, in a simultaneous way! To be more precise, Tag Manager allows you to organize your tags (or “tags” in English) on your domain. These are used to configure one or more features on your site. Ultimately, proper management of these tags is essential for your digital communication campaigns. Indeed, you will then be able to determine the most attractive channels and campaigns for your brand. The video below explains the fundamentals of the Google Tag Manager platform.