14 December 2022 1347 words, 6 min. read Latest update : 15 March 2023

Growth marketing: definition and practical advice

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
Growth marketing includes many tactics to increase business activity. These methods are mainly about increasing the number of customers. This marketing branch is interesting because it includes many priceless consumer data to grow your company. It follows a complete customer […]

Growth marketing includes many tactics to increase business activity. These methods are mainly about increasing the number of customers. This marketing branch is interesting because it includes many priceless consumer data to grow your company. It follows a complete customer conversion tunnel: the AARRR funnel. This funnel extends from acquisition to customer recommendation. Here we explain the details of this model before discussing several strategic and practical recommendations.

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The image below summarizes the main points of this article.

growth marketing


Summary


What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing has a clear objective: to increase the activity of a company. Its main modus operandi is based on increasing the number of regular and loyal customers. This set of operational marketing strategies is designed for different purposes:

  • Commercial: achieving, if not surpassing, your commercial objectives
  • Notoriety: to strengthen the links with your current customers to find new prospects to convert
  • Innovation: to understand the motivations of consumers to implement new processes, packaging, pricing policies, and so on.

This practice is different from growth hacking. Indeed, rather than focusing on experimentation, growth marketing plays the card of long-term growth.


How to optimize the customer experience with the AARRR framework?

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


Acquisition

Acquiring new customers is a daily struggle for many companies. That’s why it is the first order of business in the AARRR model. Fundamentally multi-channel, this approach focuses on optimizing a brand’s conversion rate. When it comes to inbound marketing, the acquisition is not just about increasing traffic to your website. That alone is not a recipe for success: we’re all about attracting quality organic traffic. In other words, you need to attract potential customers.

Don’t hesitate to take a look at your website statistics to decipher some essential indicators for growth marketing:

  • Number of users: measure the traffic to your domain
  • Number of views per page: detect the most popular themes on your website
  • Engagement rate and bounce rate: understand why users stay longer or shorter on your different pages
  • Cost of customer acquisition: determine the impact of your various advertising campaigns on Google and social networks

Activation

As soon as the prospect officially becomes your brand’s customer, marketing activation becomes a priority. This is about gaining the consumer’s trust. Thus, we encourage him 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 with good internal linking.

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


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



Retention

While time is as much about customer acquisition as it is about customer retention, let’s see how to keep your customers. Indeed, a company will only be profitable if its new customers are retained a second time. There are several techniques to push consumers to make multiple purchases from you to counter this:

  • Product: Apple is a good example of a high repurchase rate. The reason is simple: the American brand proposes an array of accessories for each flagship product. In addition, it proposes products ranging from mid-range to high-end. It then encourages its customers to upgrade if they are satisfied with their current property.
  • Service: possible use of different trigger marketing methods to push to renew a subscription. Among the most loyal users, it is possible to submit special pricing for a Premium offer.
  • CSR: the social responsibility of companies positively influences customer loyalty. We know today that co-creation is a good way to gain customers’ trust (Iglesias O. et al., 2020).

Recommandation

Growth marketing is a great way to stimulate advocacy marketing. Consumer recommendations are a great way to grow your business! Keep in mind that you need to reward your current users. Here are some examples of marketing operations to adopt:

  • Sponsorship: proceed with a goodwill exchange with your customers. For example, propose them discounts if they recommend your brand to 10 of their relatives.
  • Influencers: an influencer who is a thought leader among your target audience is a great conversation partner. Collaborate with these types of profiles to enhance your brand image.
  • Sampling: distribute free samples to reach your marketing target more easily.

Revenue

Finally, the AARRR model concludes with this “Revenue” axis. It plays an important role because this is where we measure the return on investment of your growth marketing. Among other things, we assess performance indicators such as your customer acquisition cost. In a perfect world, this would be lower because you would have succeeded in increasing the customer lifetime (or CLV).


To be profitable, apply each of the instructions in the first 4 axes of this framework, and that’s it!



2 starting points for a good growth marketing strategy

Now that we have seen the theoretical principles of growth marketing let’s tackle the practical advice. We suggest you start your future marketing efforts through 2 basic axes:

  • A/B testing for quantitative measurement of consumer behavior
  • Search engine optimization, or SEO, to generate more and more traffic to your web domain.

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A/B testing, a formidable growth marketing weapon

A/B testing consists in comparing several versions of a website between them. It is very interesting because it allows us to better understand consumers’ real behaviors. A/B testing is relatively adaptable; you can distribute it via mailing campaigns, your website, or social networks. It is the ultimate technique for quantitative market research and is fundamental to your marketing efforts.


A/B testing simplifies the implementation of growth marketing by accumulating key information about the customer experience.



Create content regularly to improve your growth marketing

There is no better way than regular and consistent content creation to increase your online traffic. Indeed, feeding your website and your social networks with posts and articles strongly contributes to improving your digital notoriety. The keys to success lie in a systematic application of good SEO practices. There is nothing mysterious about it; all the explanations on SEO basics are to be found below.


2 essential tools for growth marketing

Now, look at the most interesting online platforms for your growth marketing. In this case, we have chosen two complete, accessible, and free tools. Both proposed by Google, we detail the benefits of Analytics and Tag Manager.


Google Analytics

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

  • Its free nature
  • The integrity of its data
  • The ease of its handling (Google even proposes online courses for beginners, but also the platform’s followers)

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, you will reinforce your growth marketing using another Google tool: Tag Manager. It offers an additional contribution of vital information on your pages, and this, simultaneously! To be more precise, Tag Manager allows you to organize your tags on your domain. These tags are used to configure one or more features on your website. Ultimately, managing these tags is essential for your digital communication campaigns. Indeed, you will be able to determine the most attractive channels and campaigns for your brand. The video below explains the basics of the Google Tag Manager platform.

 



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