Growth marketing is a broad term. Depending on who you talk to or what job description you look at. Growth marketing can encompass a lot of things. From organic to paid social, top of funnel optimisation, through to conversion rate optimisation or retention. In many cases, businesses have growth marketers at all steps of these funnels. Turning the dials of progress through thousands of small optimisations and A/B tests. The truth is, it's all of these things.
Popularised by tech brands and fast being adopted my some traditional advertisers. The growth marketing approach is taking the world by storm. But what does it mean and how can we, as growth marketers, get better at explaining what we do, exactly? Let's discuss.
"Ahhh, the growth hacking department" said a past colleague with a cynical tone. My heart sank. For the third time, the message hadn't gone through. The sense of disapproval at our work was rife.
As you might've guessed, my first foray into building out a growth marketing team was a challenge. Burdened by horrific stories of 'growth hackers' using nefarious tactics to transform human behaviour and increase conversion rates. It was always going to be a hard slog gaining respect as a team and a discipline. A company of idealists were not ready to adopt the growth marketing mindset.
So, what is the difference between growth hacking and growth marketing?
Growth marketing is culture built upon a process. It's the development of a culture of continuous test and learn at all ends of the customer journey. Growth hacks are the individual actions that make up growth marketing.
Gone are the days of sporadic 'campaigns'. Campaigns that run for a few months, then you sit in a room together at the end and present to your CEO on how it went. You're always on now. You're watching your customers work their way through your customer journey. Like water through a series of funnels, you're continuously searching for friction, removing it, and finding dozens of tiny 0.5% efficiencies along the way. Furthermore, you're always measuring. There are no post campaign reports. Measurement, itself, is something that you're optimising.
Your first foray into attribution is always going to be basic. It takes time and many experiments to understand the limitations of your measurement strategy. You will identify gaps in your approach and create solutions for how to fill them. Classic examples are how some top of funnel channels are notoriously under measured, while high intent channels like organic search tend to get the most accolades and the lion's share of budget.
Sometimes you have to go back to basics, and that's fine too. A simple post purchase survey in the funnel asking customers where they first discovered you can be more illuminating than anything. Especially as Apple and Google move into a more privacy centric direction, much to Facebook's dismay. I personally learned that my YouTube campaigns were being under measured by around 18%. This was a massive insight that changed my media weightings. So, in summary. Yes, growth marketing is a process of continual ideation and testing. But equally, the refinement of your measurement approach is equally fluid and important.
In sum, growth marketing is a process. It's a new way of marketing designed for the always-on world. In the same way that supply chains continuously seek tiny improvements, growth marketing is the continual improvement process for the marketing world. Data driven, creative marketers are becoming more important and harder to find than ever. This is why.