Growth Marketing Basics

Nov 10, 20223 min read

Introduction

Growth marketing is the process of acquiring new users while retaining old ones in a cost-efficient way. It's a metric-based approach to marketing that centers around improving business growth by focusing on the entire customer journey. While there are many facets of growth marketing, we are going to cover the three main pillars: acquiring, activating, and retaining customers

Acquire

Acquiring a customer is about getting your product or service in front of people who don't know about you yet, with the goal of getting some type of lead or contact information from your customers. These are some helpful ways to get people to your landing pages or website:

Content marketing (Personalized email marketing, Blogging, SEO)
Social Media Marketing Strategies
Hosting webinars
Event marketing
Create a community around your brand
Create a free tool for your users

Remember the focus is on new leads or contact information. The metrics you should have for each method you try are:

Total number of engagement
The conversion rate of visitors to new leads.

We recommend trying a few methods at first and using A/B tests to see what content works best within each method, and then adding different methods and comparing metrics. By doing this a couple of times, you will be able to see which methods reach more of your customers, and which methods have the best conversion rate of turning your customers from visitors to leads. Cut out the bad ones and focus on the top 2 or 3 methods.

Bonus: With your top 2 or 3 methods known, it's safe to spend money on marketing if you can, and make sure to track your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Cost per Acquisition (CPA) metrics.

Activate

Activating a customer means engaging them with an experience that makes them want to come back and buy again. The key to getting customers back is to provide the best customer experience and integrate the “aha moment” into your customer’s journey. Some ideas on how to do this are:

Use tutorials or onboardings to push customers to the “aha moment”
Personalizing the customer experience
FAQ sections and easy contact methods (email, chatbots)

The metrics you are going to want to track will all be around your “aha moment” to understand how many users are getting to the “aha moment” and how many abandon your product or service before and after your “aha moment.” The metrics are:

Active users (measured daily, monthly, or quarterly depending on your product)
Abandonment rate before and after the “aha moment”
Activation rate (how many users make it to your “aha moment”)

This will help you understand if your “aha moment” is correct or if customers are finding value from the “aha moment.” This area of growth marketing will unlock a ton of understanding around your product and validate your key assumptions around the value you are bringing to your customers.

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Retain

Retaining customers is all about making sure customers keep coming back by providing excellent service and quality products. Getting an initial sale isn't enough, you need a long-term strategy that retains customers. This lets you grow your customer base exponentially and efficiently since you don't have to spend as much marketing money to get repeat customers to buy again and repeat customers become your “word of mouth” marketing channel. Some great ways to retain customers are:

Personalized email perks
Reengagement campaigns
Reward promos and programs
Build a community
Create a customer journey that loops customers back to the “aha moment”

Some metrics to help with tracking your retention strategy are:

Customer Retention Rate (shows how many new customers come back)
Churn rate (how many customers do not come back after a given period of time)
Average customer lifespan (the average days between a customer's first and last order date)
Reactivation rate (how many churned customers you are able to make active again)

Finding out what changes can help retain more customers is one of the best ways to learn about your customer’s pains, what features need to be prioritized, and to start building repeatable and predictable revenue.

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Conclusion

Growth marketing is the perfect solution to address many of the key issues companies face when starting and growing. By practicing growth marketing early, you will also start collecting data on your customers and product earlier. Getting data early will start a good culture around data collection and data-based decision-making. If you are able to master the 3 main pillars of growth marketing you can start tackling the final 2 pillars: Referrals and Revenue.