What is Growth Marketing?

With the changing user expectations and habits over time, the impact of traditional marketing methods has gradually decreased. Businesses now require new strategies to thrive in an increasingly competitive environment. In this context, Growth Marketing, also known as growth-focused marketing, is predicted to become one of the most significant marketing strategies in the next five years. The concept of Growth Marketing was introduced as a new type of marketing by entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010.

Growth Marketing is defined as a modern, user-centric, experimental, innovative, and comprehensive marketing approach based on the growth goals of businesses. In other words, it is a high-paced, data-driven, holistic funnel marketing method. When we examine marketing approaches from the past to the present, traditional marketing has mostly focused on brand awareness and acquiring new customers. However, the Growth Marketing approach focuses on all stages of the customer lifecycle (Growth Funnel) to increase revenues and efficiency. The following funnel represents the fundamental customer lifecycle we have encountered so far, explaining the concepts on the funnel will help us understand the difference between Growth Marketing and other marketing methods.

Lifecycle Metrics: AARRR = Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue

User Acquisition: How can I find potential users? User Activation: How can I activate potential users introduced to my product or service? User Retention: How can I increase the loyalty of these users and make them use my products or services repeatedly? Referral Through Sharing/Invitations: How can I get all these users to bring in new users for me? Maximizing Revenue: Finally, how can I generate continuous revenue from all these acquired users?

Differences Between Traditional Marketing and Growth Marketing:

The most significant aspects that distinguish Growth Marketing from other marketing methods are advanced personalization, a culture of testing, and automating the entire process with artificial intelligence algorithms. This way, brands can achieve sustainable and measurable growth and obtain a long-term strategic methodology. Growth-focused marketing starts by adding new layers to traditional marketing. This means that brands develop growth strategies, SEO campaigns, email marketing, A/B tests, content marketing, video marketing, and more. As a result, if growth-oriented marketing methods are consistently maintained, brands significantly improve their abilities to retain customers, loyalty, and satisfaction.

• While traditional marketing focuses only on awareness and user acquisition layers on the funnel, Growth Marketing concentrates on all layers of the funnel, addressing the entire customer journey.
• Marketing teams are campaign-oriented in traditional marketing, whereas growth teams are designed to be test/experiment-oriented.
• Marketing teams consist of marketers, while growth teams consist of autonomous individuals with cross-disciplinary skills.

Why is Growth Marketing Important?

Traditional marketing channels have reached a certain saturation point in recent times and are becoming increasingly expensive. Therefore, entering traditional marketing methods may do more harm than good. Traditional marketing is costly and consists of long-term campaigns that eventually disappear. However, the dynamics are different in the new era of digital marketing. In the Growth Marketing approach, techniques such as SEO optimization, A/B testing, data-driven email marketing campaigns, landing page optimization, and blog posts are used. Growth Marketing can progress more users down the funnel and direct them towards making a purchase.

Growth Marketing does not focus solely on user acquisition (Acquisition) but also emphasizes building a sustainable relationship with your customers (Retention). This way, you can increase the frequency of purchases, and organic growth of customer interaction and brand loyalty. Building strategies to retain customers and consistently create loyalty campaigns will help you keep your customers. Existing customers who have already had the experience of purchasing from you are more likely to contact your brand again. If you continue to offer valuable products and services, they will become a loyal customer who repeatedly buys from you.

In the Growth Marketing approach, A/B tests can be applied to multiple channels such as social media ads, landing pages, and email marketing. Conducting these tests continuously allows you to quickly learn which content your customers are interested in and what they are not. Trying different strategies and regularly conducting A/B tests to achieve higher engagement and a better customer experience is essential. Obtaining clues from conversions will help you create loyalty campaigns repeatedly and keep your customers.

With Growth Marketing, you can measure all your marketing efforts and understand how your campaigns are progressing through real-time data. You can explore the needs of your target audience, analyze their behavior, and even predict what will happen when you try a new idea with data-driven marketing efforts. By discovering insights from data, you can attract your target audience to your brand with personalized and goal-specific campaigns and messages.

In conclusion, there are not always exact truths in marketing, and the strategy that every business applies may vary depending on factors such as the industry, the services provided, the products sold, the target audience, etc. Even when we consider two companies selling software products with the same characteristics in the B2B sector, different marketing strategies are required for companies targeting large-scale businesses and those targeting small-scale businesses.

Therefore, especially in the field of Growth Marketing, it is necessary to remain dynamic and work with data specific to the business. This is why Growth Marketing is an area that is so comprehensive and dynamic that its definition, scope, and strategies cannot fit into a single blog post. Growth Marketing is seen as a time-consuming, long-term process for many companies. Therefore, many marketers choose to focus on the upper part of the sales funnel rather than sustaining a sustainable plan. However, the secret lies in focusing on the entire customer journey. A Growth Marketing strategy helps businesses attract new customers and retain them in a way that creates a sustainable relationship.