The Real Definition of Growth Marketing

Unravel the essence of Growth Marketing, a term often misunderstood or misused. Delve into its true meaning, exploring its core principles, strategies, and how it transcends traditional marketing paradigms to drive sustainable business growth.

What is Growth Marketing?

As tech companies go all-in on growth, growth marketers are emerging as a critical component of winning growth models

• Mark Fiske is an Operating Partner at H.I.G. Capital, a Private Equity firm with $37 Billion in assets under management
• From startups to the Fortune 500, Mark has scaled marketing teams across acquisition, lifecycle, monetization, brand, and UX
• Brittany Bingham is the VP of Marketing at Guru, a collaborative knowledge management solution where answers find you–everywhere, every time
• She worked as Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) where she oversaw acquisition, conversion, engagement, and retention

Defining Growth Marketing Is the First Step

It takes a lot more than a definition to execute great growth marketing

Growth marketing is on the rise

Global interest in the term has increased steadily over the past decade, and in 2021, “growth marketing” was the top trend in the B2B Marketing Trend Tracker, beating out other popular terms like personalization, marketing automation, and martech stack.

Growth Marketing Fuels, Accelerates, and Restarts

Fuel: Bring potential users or customers into the model through Facebook or TV ads

• Accelerate: Enable people to move through the growth model with minimal friction
• Restart: Bring people back into the loop to build or restart a habit

What Is Great Growth Marketing?

It’s widely accepted that you need great growth marketing to win. But most people can’t tell you what it is.

• There are two common pitfalls: set up growth marketing roles with an overly narrow scope and leverage the trendiness of “growth marketing” to recruit for the same marketing roles they have always had.

Growth Marketing Is One of Three Key Marketing Domains

Brand marketing

• Growth marketing is one of three key marketing domains that enhances the core product offering in the eyes of the consumer. Each domain focuses on enhancing the offering in different ways and for different customers.
• The different marketing domains focus on different target audiences with varying degrees of proximity to the product.

Growth Marketing Is a Key Component of Growth Teams

As growth teams move towards greater specialization, defining growth marketing has become more important than ever before

• Winning at growth requires you to have the best approach and deploy it rapidly
• Decentralization
• Pod structures
• Many teams use working groups that resemble growth teams, but members report into their functional teams
• Cross-functional complexity
• Misaligned expectations
• A poorly defined growth marketing team cannot deliver what it should to the growth model
• Companies that can’t clearly define what each growth-related function (marketing, product, sales, eng, design) is doing risk “losing the plot” of their growth story through holes

How Is Growth Marketing Different?

Growth marketing uses triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring new and existing customers into the product to experience its value.

• It typically controls most of the channels and language designed to elicit an immediate response.
• Strategic lens that ties to business outcomes
• Data-driven mindset
• Cross-functional collaboration with growth partners
• A strong ongoing partnership with product, engineering, and design is critical to their success. Growth marketing can’t optimize new channels to scale on their own.

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