What Is Growth Marketing? Examples of Effective Growth Marketing Strategies.

marketing strategy business growth

Many startups and early-stage tech companies rely on growth marketing strategies to scale up and engage their user bases.

Growth marketing is a blurry term that’s difficult to precisely define — it’s sometimes referred to as growth hacking — but basically, it’s the data-driven, often-experimental practice of finding and repeating scalable ways to acquire, engage and retain more users of your product or service.

Forming a growth marketing strategy is key for many businesses that want to launch themselves into the stratosphere of success.

More on Growth Marketing Metrics What Is AARRR?

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing uses data from marketing campaigns to inform experimental adjustments to the marketing strategy in an effort to drive business growth. The goal is to better target the right customers, build stronger relationships with them and ultimately turn them into loyal buyers of a company’s products or services.

Growth Marketing Definition

Growth marketing is finding and repeating ways to acquire, engage and retain more users of your product or service through the use of data insights and experimentation.

Growth marketing can take many forms and incorporate various tactics, such as launching paid advertising campaigns, experimenting with viral video stunts or producing search-engine-optimized content , all in the hopes to capture, grow and retain a customer base.

It’s also worth noting that business growth isn’t strictly placed in the domain of marketing either. In fact, growth marketers often collaborate with product and engineering teams to design and build ways to drive up the company’s North Star metrics.

To get an expert’s perspective on growth marketing, we spoke to Matt Bilotti, product lead, growth and lifecycle at Drift ; Rita Cidre, global head of integrated marketing at Qualtrics ; and Shane Pittson, vice president of growth at quip . Their responses, from a 2020 interview with Built In, have been edited for length and clarity.

Traditional Marketing Vs. Growth Marketing

Bilotti: Growth marketing is finding repeatable and scalable campaigns or processes that drive a marketing outcome. Traditional marketing is a little bit more of a one-off, like a webinar or going to an event or sponsoring something. You get this influx of leads and then you’ve got to go do the thing again.

  Pittson: The essence of a growth marketing path is one that’s more akin to direct response marketing — something that’s very close to the analytics and the near-term effects and results. Traditional marketing still encompasses that discipline and that focus but also tends to think about very long-term effects of marketing, like brand positioning and brand sentiment, and thinking about how that might play out over the course of years.

Related Reading What Does a Growth Hacker Do in Marketing?

Benefits of Growth Marketing

Growth driven by data and testing.

Bilotti: The most successful growth marketers or marketing teams are technical; they have engineering chops. Either there is an engineer on the team or the growth marketer actually can code stuff on their own, because that enables this whole other level of testing and building new funnels for lead generation or developing systems to make even more out of the existing funnel.

Targeting the Right Customers

Cidre: The type of marketing that growth marketers do is directly tied to the bottom line of the business. It’s not just about attracting new customers or acquiring new people into your database. It’s about making sure that you’re acquiring the right customers into your marketing program and then that you have the right experiences for those customers aligned to various stages of the funnel, and ultimately converting those customers into paying customers.

Improving Conversion Rates

Cidre: In a previous role, the team worked on landing page optimization . That was an incredibly impactful project. It drove millions of dollars in revenue, and it all came out of a funnel analysis, realizing that we definitely had enough traffic, we just had really terrible conversion rates for that traffic. And so we focused super heavily on the middle of the funnel, and we saw the benefit of that at the bottom line.

Retaining Customers

Pittson: Focusing on the customers you have is something that can easily be overlooked. Thinking about growth, not just in terms of acquisition but also in terms of retention and community is really important. One of the things that we prioritized early on was that we weren’t just selling a product, we were selling a broader experience.

Measurable Success

Bilotti: What’s important is that you have to go into each of those projects or campaigns with a hypothesis: “We believe, if we make this change on the website, it can result in this many more signups per month.” You set the win condition at the beginning, and you set that based on historical data and perceived potential. Then you can actually just know if the thing works based on if it fulfilled what you believed.

Cidre: If you are a growth marketer for a startup and your boss tells you, “We need to make $100,000 in revenue,” you can take that $100,000 and use very simple math to back out from that number into “How many customers would I need to have?” OK, let’s say I need to have a hundred customers, assuming a $1,000 price point. Out of those 100 customers, assuming a 2 percent conversion rate from the site, how many pageviews would I need on my site in order to get 100 customers?

Pittson: Having multiple points of reference is really critical. Very early on, we were looking at last-click attribution through Google Analytics, looking at native reporting from the platforms or the partners that we were testing with, and then post-purchase surveys directly from our customers. If we only had one of those points of reference, then the channels and the tactics that we would have prioritized would have been very different. Having multiple lenses to view your performance through helps to construct a clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not.

Examples of Growth Marketing Strategies From Experts

Getting started with growth marketing as a startup .

For startups, a successful growth marketing strategy begins with a clear outline of the marketing funnel, which illustrates the stages of a customer’s journey from initially becoming aware of the brand to ultimately converting into a paying customer. A startup needs to be able to assess that journey to understand where they’re losing the largest number of prospective customers. Doing so can help the organization identify current challenges and build an informed growth marketing strategy to overcome those hurdles while still spending the marketing budget effectively and efficiently.

Bilotti: Measure the funnel and then zero-in on where the biggest drop off in the funnel is. Maybe you get X visitors with Y people clicking on the sign-up button, and then this many people see the form, and then this many people complete the form. You have to map all that out, and then once you map it out, you find the biggest drop-off and try to understand why those people are dropping off.

Cidre: The first step would be understanding what the top of your funnel looks like right now, if you have a lot of people who are coming to your website and demonstrating interest in your products. And then, a step down, do you have a lot of people clicking through on your website or a lot of people who have shown interest in Facebook ads for your product that you could consider a middle-of-the-funnel pool? Finally, how many customers do you have at the bottom of the funnel? Are you finding that it’s a business with a one-time purchase or is it a renewal business where it’s important for you to focus on the bottom of the funnel to ensure that people are renewing their subscriptions?

Do a funnel assessment to understand the health of the funnel and understand where the challenges and the opportunities lie. If you have a ton of funding, growth marketers have seen a lot of success with Facebook ads or paid search. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, you’re probably going to rely heavily on earned and owned channels.

More on Growth Experiments 12 Successful Growth Hacking Strategies You Should Know

Using A/B Testing to Optimize a Sign-Up Page

A/B testing is an experimental methodology that randomly divides users into two groups and shows each of those groups one of two variations of an interface, such as an online sign-up page. The strategy is used to test how those variations affect user behavior and determine what kinds of changes should be implemented as part of a successful growth marketing strategy.

Bilotti: Drift is a chat widget that you put on websites, and at the bottom it says, “Powered by Drift.” And so we get a lot of people who click on that and it would just take you to Drift.com with all the info to sign up.

We realized that if you were clicking on that, you were clicking on it because you’ve already semi-experienced the widget and you’re clicking on it because you want to know more about that exact experience — probably because you want to put it on your website too. And so on the page that people would arrive, we A/B tested the homepage versus a completely stripped out version of the website where there was no header, or footer. All there was was a headline of what the thing was that you could sign up for and then the sign-up button. And we saw a threefold increase in the conversion rate, because it enabled us to help the lead not get lost in the website but instead help them on the path that they already wanted to go down.

Experimenting With New Marketing Channels

Growth marketing can sometimes lead teams down the path of experimenting with new marketing channels , such as audio advertising or trying out campaigns on emerging social media platforms. The process of testing the effectiveness of using new channels requires thorough preparation in the form of research and purposeful strategizing.

Pittson: Both of quip’s founders are designers, and so we were under the impression that a lot of our traction and success was related to the visual draw of the product, and so we were hesitant to use our test-budget in this channel (audio advertising) that had no visual element. But we were really careful in terms of selecting partners and thinking about how to articulate some of those more visual elements of the product in that “audio theater of the mind.” We started really small and consistently tested specific shows using different offer codes. And it was working, and we continued to grow that and ultimately became one of the larger advertisers in the space.

Great Companies Need Great People. That's Where We Come In.

8 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2023

Kayla Carmicheal

Published: October 26, 2023

Creating a marketing strategy is essential to effectively nurture your customers, improve your business’s bottom line, and increase the ROI of your efforts.

Marketing strategy graphic with a woman with a bullhorn and chess pieces for strategy.

A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to use the highest ROI trends for 2023 : short video, influencer marketing, and branded social media. To get powerful results, you must carefully weave both emerging trends and proven strategies into your plan.

Let's dive into the critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2023, followed by some examples for inspiration.

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy covers a company’s overall approach for promoting its brand to a target audience. The process involves research, goal-setting, and positioning.

A completed marketing strategy typically includes brand objectives, target audience personas, marketing channels, key performance indicators, and more.

A marketing strategy will:

  • Align your team to specific goals.
  • Help you tie your efforts to business objectives.
  • Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
  • Empower you to capitalize on emerging trends.

The last one is especially important. Keeping up with marketing trends is important for your strategy, but could be a full-time job.

Why? Because almost 80% of marketers say this industry changed more in the last three years than it has in the past five decades. In short, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past might not fly today.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy outlines the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.

Phrased another way, marketing strategy guides the overall marketing efforts of a business. It includes goal-setting, market and competitor research, as well as messaging and positioning for a brand.

For example, say you're creating a marketing strategy for a new fashion brand. Your strategy might target young urban professionals and position the brand as trendy and affordable.

But a marketing plan is a detailed tactical roadmap. It outlines the specific actions and tactics that should achieve the marketing strategy's goals.

For example, the marketing plan for the fashion brand mentioned above might include:

  • Targeted social media campaigns
  • Influencer partnerships
  • Online advertising timeline

Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are essential for a business's success.

marketing strategy business growth

Free Marketing Plan Template

Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

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To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevance with your audience — it's vital to stay ahead of the curve.

To help ease some of that uncertainty, we're going to show you step-by-step how to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.

Marketing Strategy Components

  • Marketing Mix (4 Ps of Marketing)
  • Marketing Objectives
  • Marketing Budget
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning
  • Content Creation (Including Trending Content)
  • Metrics & Key Performance Indicators

1. Marketing Mix

marketing strategy components: marketing mix

Image Source

The marketing mix, also known as the 4 Ps of marketing, is the preliminary document you must create to understand what you will be marketing, where you’ll be marketing it, and how you’ll be marketing it. The following P’s make up this framework:

  • Product : What are you selling?
  • Price : What is the price?
  • Place : Where will you be selling the product?
  • Promotion : Where will you be promoting the product?

You can then extrapolate this information into a full-fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel. It’s important to lay out the information in broad strokes so that you understand the overall direction of your marketing strategy.

2. Marketing Objectives

marketing strategy components: marketing objectives

You can set your marketing objectives in conjunction with your 4 Ps, or right after. Either way, you should outline your marketing goals before building upon your strategy. Why? Because your goals will inform other components of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.

With every objective, you should aim to be as specific as possible. Try to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic, and don’t forget that you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.

3. Marketing Budget

marketing strategy components: marketing budget

A marketing budget is an essential element of your strategy. Without allocating funds to hiring the right talent, using the right software, advertising on the right channels, and creating the right content, your marketing strategy won’t have a powerful impact. To get a high return on investment, you must first invest.

Remember that you can always start small — hyper-focusing your budget on one or two efforts — and build upon them once you generate an ROI.

4. Competitive Analysis

Knowing your competition is key when creating a marketing strategy. Otherwise, you risk "yelling into the void" without measurable results. Worse, you won’t know whether you’re differentiating yourself enough from the competition and effectively drawing the attention of your intended audience.

You might already have an idea of who your competitors are, but it’s still essential to sit down and find them. You might end up uncovering a surprise competitor who’s vying for your target buyer’s attention and engagement.

5. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

marketing strategy components: audience segmentation, targeting, and positioning

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) refers to the process of delivering "more relevant, personalized messages to target audiences." In other words, rather than publishing posts and advertisements on a whim, you’ll go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with your target buyer.

During the segmentation, targeting, and positioning process, you’ll take three steps:

  • Identify your target audience . This process not only entails interviewing your current customers, but carrying out market research and creating buyer personas .
  • Target a segment of your target audience . It’s best to speak to a narrow group of highly qualified buyers than to send your message out to everyone.
  • Position your brand alongside other brands . What do you do better than your competitors? It’s essential to map this information when creating a marketing strategy.

6. Content Creation

marketing strategy components: content creation

Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and STP information, it’s time to create your marketing content . But it’s essential to be strategic. For one, you don’t want to publish random content that doesn’t solve for the customer, and for two, you must aim to capitalize on emerging trends so that your brand enjoys high visibility in the marketplace.

The competition is fierce across all formats. According to HubSpot Research , "half of marketers are using videos, with 47% leveraging images, followed by 33% posting blogs articles, infographics (30%) and podcasts or other audio content (28%)." Of these, video has the highest ROI.

marketing strategy components: content strategy data

It’s even more essential to invest in trends that have a high ROI, such as short-form video, influencer marketing, and social media DMs.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in blogging , one of the most proven content marketing techniques. It’s simply important to know where to allot the most resources, especially if you have a limited budget.

7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

marketing strategy components: metrics and kpis

Last, but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators to understand how well your strategies are working. The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels . Examples of KPIs include:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Organic Traffic
  • Conversion Rate
  • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Now, let’s dive into why it’s important to follow the steps of a marketing strategy.

Why is a marketing strategy important?

Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And that process will cost you money, time, and resources.

But a robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience. It has the power to turn people who've never heard of your brand into loyal repeat customers.

Here are just a few of the top reasons a marketing strategy is essential:

Offers Direction

A marketing strategy outlines clear goals and defines the path to achieve them. It pulls together all marketing efforts within an organization for optimal effects.

Targets the Right Audience

A well-defined marketing strategy helps you find and understand your target audience. This helps your business tailor your messaging and positioning to reach the right people at the right time.

Builds Brand Identity

A marketing strategy helps you create a consistent and cohesive brand identity. This makes it easier to align all marketing initiatives for increased brand recognition and loyalty.

Maximizes ROI

With analysis of market trends, competition, and customer behavior, marketing strategies help businesses find the most effective marketing channels and tactics to invest in. This helps businesses get the maximum return on investment.

Evaluates Performance

A marketing strategy defines key metrics and performance indicators. This makes it easier for your business to measure and track the success of marketing initiatives. It also gives you what you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize future campaigns for better results.

Marketing Strategy Process

  • Conduct market research.
  • Define your goals.
  • Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
  • Conduct competitive analysis.
  • Develop key messaging.
  • Choose your marketing channels.
  • Create, track, and analyze KPIs.
  • Present your marketing strategy.

1. Conduct market research.

Before you can begin creating your marketing strategy, you need to gather useful data for making informed decisions. Market research is like playing detective, but instead of solving crimes, you're uncovering juicy details about your customers.

Market research will help your businesses make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy. It also makes it easier to understand your target market, find gaps, and make the most of your resources.

This process is essential for understanding your customers and adapting to changing trends. If you're new to this process, this complete market research guide and template can help.

Once you have the data you need, you’ll be ready to set some marketing goals.

2. Define your goals.

What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts?

Whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or diversifying your customer base, well-defined goals will guide your marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals. They should also offer clear direction for marketing efforts.

For example, say one of your business goals is to increase market share by 20% within a year. Your goal as a marketer could include expanding into new target markets, updating your brand, or driving customer acquisition.

Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.

Defining clear goals provides direction and clarity, guiding marketing efforts toward desired outcomes. It helps with resource allocation, decision-making, and measuring the success of marketing initiatives.

This SMART goal guide can help you with more effective goal-setting.

3. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.

To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. Take a look at your market research to understand your target audience and market landscape. Accurate customer data is especially important for this step.

But it's not enough to know who your audience is. Once you've figured out who they are, you need to understand what they want. This isn't just their needs and pain points, it's how your product or service can solve their problems.

So, if you can't define who your audience is in one sentence, now's your chance to do it. Create a buyer persona that's a snapshot of your ideal customer.

For example, a store like Macy's could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.

With this description, Macy's Marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.

Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information, including age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Notice how Belinda has all those attributes in her description.

You don't have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it's really fun).

You can also use a platform like Versium , which helps you identify, understand, and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.

Buyer personas should be at the core of your strategy.

4. Conduct competitive analysis.

Now that you have an understanding of your customers, it's time to see who you're competing with to get their attention.

To begin your competitive analysis, start with your top competitors. Reviewing their websites, content, ads, and pricing can help you understand how to differentiate your brand. It's also a useful way to find opportunities for growth.

But how do you know which competitors are most important? This competitive analysis kit with templates will walk you through the process. It will help you choose and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of your competitors.

This process will help you find market gaps, spot trends, and figure out which marketing tactics will be most effective. Competitive analysis can also offer valuable insights on pricing, positioning, and marketing channels.

5. Develop key messaging.

You've figured out who you're talking to, what they've already heard, and what they want to hear. Now, it's time to share your brand's unique value proposition .

In this step, you'll craft key messaging that shows the benefits of your product or service and resonates with your target audience. This process should show off the research and work you have done up to this point. It should also incorporate your creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to experiment.

Well-crafted key messaging:

  • Sets businesses apart from the competition
  • Resonates with the target audience
  • Is flexible enough to be consistent across all marketing channels
  • Builds brand credibility
  • Creates an emotional connection with customers
  • Influences buying decisions

The key messaging in your marketing strategy is critical to driving engagement, loyalty, and business growth. These value proposition templates can help if you're not sure how to draft this important messaging.

6. Choose your marketing channels.

You know what you have to say, now decide on the best marketing channels for your message. Your top goal for this stage of your strategy is to align your channel choices with your target persona's media consumption habits.

Start with media channels you're already using. Then, consider a mix of traditional and digital channels such as social media, TV, email marketing, podcast ads, SEO, content marketing, and influencer partnerships.

To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories — paid, owned, and earned media.

Marketing strategy, paid media example, Apple billboard

Paid media is any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. Most of this spending is advertising . This includes online and offline channels like:

  • Direct mail
  • Social media ads
  • SEM (Search engine marketing)
  • Podcast advertising

Owned Media

Marketing strategy, owned media example, blog

Owned media refers to (mostly) online channels your brand owns, including:

  • Organic social media

It also refers to the media your marketing team creates such as

  • Infographics

Earned media

Another way to say earned media is user-generated content . Earned media includes:

  • Shares on social media
  • Posts about your business on X or Threads
  • Reels posted on Instagram mentioning your brand

To decide which marketing channels are best for your marketing strategy, look carefully at each channel. Think about which channels are best for reaching your audience, staying within budget, and meeting your goals.

For example, a business targeting a younger demographic might consider using TikTok or Reddit to reach its audience.

Don't forget to take a look at emerging platforms and trends as you complete this review. You may also want to look at the content you've already created. Gather your materials in each media type in one location. Then, look at your content as a whole to get a clear vision of how you can integrate them into your strategy.

For example, say you already have a blog that's rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media). You might consider promoting your blog posts on Threads (owned media), which customers might then repost (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

If you have resources that don't fit into your goals, nix them. This is also a great time to clean house and find gaps in your materials.

7. Create, track, and analyze KPIs.

Once you have a clear outline of your marketing strategy, you'll need to think about how you'll measure whether it's working.

At this stage, you'll shift from marketing detective to numbers nerd. With a little planning and prep, your analytics can unveil the mysteries of marketing performance and unlock super insights.

Review your strategy and choose measurable KPIs to track the effectiveness of your strategy. Create a system that works for your team to collect and measure your data.

Then, plan to check and analyze the performance of your strategy over time. This can help you refine your approach based on results and feedback.

Analyzing KPIs helps businesses stay agile, refine their strategies, and adapt to evolving customer needs.

8. Present your marketing strategy.

A finished marketing strategy will pull together the sections and components above. It may also include:

Executive Summary

A concise overview that outlines the marketing goals, target audience, and key marketing tactics.

Brand Identity

You may want to create a brand identity as part of your strategy. Brand positioning, voice, and visual identity may also be helpful additions to your marketing strategy.

Marketing Plan and Tactics

Your marketing plan is the specific actions you'll take to achieve the goals in your marketing strategy. Your plan may cover campaigns, channel-specific tactics, and more.

Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.

marketing-strategy-template-free

Download for Free

Budget Allocation

Defining a budget for your marketing strategy helps you show that your planned resource allocation aligns with business goals.

Timeline and Milestones

Marketing strategies can be complex and difficult for stakeholders to understand. Creating a timeline that outlines the different tactics, milestones, and deadlines can help.

Your marketing strategy is a living document. It will need constant reviews, revisions, and optimizations to meet your long-term goals. Prepare to revise your marketing strategy at least once a year to address market trends, customer feedback, and changing business objectives.

Recommended Resources

Here are a few tools that can help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals:

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub allows you to connect all your marketing tools into one centralized platform.

hubspot marketing hub dashboard

Too often, you’ll find a tool that’s powerful but not easy to use. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the website and landing page builder, and lead tracking features.

With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan out your next move. Plus, HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 700 tools .

Pricing : Free; Starter, $20/month; Professional, $890/month; Enterprise, $3,600/month.

trello-for-marketing-planning

Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicating about the projects they're working on. Create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.

Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.

Pricing : Free; Standard Class, $5/month; Premium Class, $10/month for 100 users; Enterprise, $17.50/month for 250 users.

3. TrueNorth

truenorth-software

TrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.

One of the key benefits of TrueNorth is that it centralizes all your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.

Pricing : $99/month (free for 14 days).

4. Monday.com

monday.com hubspot integration

Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.

You can also transform data pulled from timeline and Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com to make sure you're meeting your deadlines. Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and make sure your whole company is collaborating.

Pricing : Basic, $8/month/seat; Standard, $10/month/seat; Pro, $16/month/seat; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

semrush dashboard

SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website.

SEMrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitor's SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.

But the benefits don't stop at SEO. Use SEMRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.

Pricing : Pro, $129/month; Guru, $249/month; Business, $499/month.

6. Buzzsumo

buzzsumo marketing strategy tool

BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.

Use the platform to find influencers who may help your brand reach, track comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.

As your needs evolve, you can also use their crisis management and video marketing tools.

Pricing : Content Creation, $199/month; PR&Comms, $299/month; Suite, $499/month; Enterprise, $999/month.

7. Crazy Egg

crazyegg website optimization

Need to optimize your website this year? Consider getting started with Crazy Egg. You'll be able to identify "attention hotspots" on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.

You can even make sure your "Buy Now" buttons are in the best place.

Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help make sure your website is offering the best user experience.

Pricing : Basic, $29/month; Standard, $49/month; Plus, $99/month; Pro, $249/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies

1. regal movies, digital strategy: owned media.

This "Guess the Monday Movie" question is a fun, interactive way to get followers invested in Regal's content:

owned media example, Regal Cinemas

Regal's Instagram post is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers followers gave (and, apparently, they’re hoping for fewer horror movies).

Regal kept true to their brand by asking viewers to guess the secret movie. And this is a popular type of post for this brand. In only two hours, it has over 800 likes and 64 comments.

2. La Croix

Digital strategy: user-generated content, earned media.

User-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy.

It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, builds community, and incentivizes other users to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out.

Plus, sometimes the content your brand loyalists create is really, really good.

User-generated content, earned media, La Croix

In this case, the consumer is creating a handmade needlepoint featuring the brand’s product.

3. Small Girls PR

Owned media, Small Girls PR

Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company's talents is connecting with amazing clients. This post on Instagram is an effective marketing example, as it boosts awareness for your brand and offers social proof by featuring high-profile clients.

4. Superside

Digital strategy: paid media.

Design agency Superside launched an Instagram ad to promote a lead magnet: Their digital ad design guide. While the brand may have created the guide specifically for paid promotions, it’s also possible that they repurposed a high-performing blog post into a downloadable ebook.

marketing strategy paid media example

In this case, all they had to do was repackage their current content, build an ad around it with creative assets, and run it.

In previous sections, we discussed the power of leveraging multiple forms of media in your marketing strategy. This is a great example of it.

Digital Strategy: Owned Media, Influencer Partnership

If you've got the time for influencer partnerships, take full advantage of it.

Influencer marketing is when you partner with influencers, to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:

Influencer marketing, target

This post from Target highlights new apparel from a trusted partner. More social channels are offering ways for shoppers to purchase in-app or close to it, driving sales and boosting exposure for brands.

What to Expect After Following Your Marketing Process Steps

Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn't something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to confirm you're reaching your ideal audience, whenever and wherever they want to be reached.

Stick with it (and use some of the resources we've included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to make sure you're spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.

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10 Growth Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Business

Sarah Burner

ClickUp Contributor

February 8, 2024

Consumer preferences and habits change in the blink of an eye, and keeping up with them is a constant challenge for any business. You’re always on your toes, wondering what your customer wants next. Moreover, the market isn’t your lifetime friend. Consumer trends change, as do approaches to marketing and growth. 

Amidst this constant flux, how do you ensure your business grows sustainably?

The solution is a strong growth marketing strategy that is responsive and adaptable, tapping into real-time data analysis and staying tuned to ongoing consumer insights. It also needs to understand the market situation comprehensively. What is it that’s creating a buzz, which strategies are working out for your competitors, and what your customers love.  It’s only when you understand such diverse pillars that you will be able to direct long-term growth.

In this article, we’ll show you ten data-backed growth marketing strategies for your business. We’ll also show you some examples of companies doing this successfully.

Growth marketing strategy vs. growth hacking strategy

Product-led growth, obsess over customers, telling stories with content, 2. tiktok , get started with growth marketing with clickup, what is growth marketing.

Growth marketing is an advanced marketing approach that focuses on driving sustainable business expansion. It relies on data-driven methods and a thorough understanding of the entire customer journey.

Unlike traditional marketing, which may prioritize brand awareness or lead generation, growth marketing focuses on achieving scalable and measurable marketing outcomes , such as increased revenue, user acquisition, or customer retention.

Growth marketers continuously experiment with channels such as social media, SEO, and email marketing. They are also constantly looking at market data, learning, testing, and iterating to figure out the best marketing strategies. By closely examining user behavior and leveraging insights, you can fine-tune and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.

As growth marketers, you must look at the big picture, by bringing together everything from product development to customer experience. And with this holistic view, you can fuel steady and rapid business growth.

In growth marketing, it’s crucial to know your customers well—understanding their demographics and pain points, and even the value they place on a solution.

But here’s the neat part—unlike traditional marketing, it’s not just about customer acquisition.

Growth marketing also analyzes customer engagement and retention rates to determine the best approach. It additionally employs A/B testing, email marketing, SEO mastery, and data crunching to fine-tune your growth strategy.

While a growth marketing strategy emphasizes sustainable, long-term growth through comprehensive data-backed marketing efforts, a growth hacking strategy focuses on rapid experimentation and unconventional tactics to achieve quick, scalable results.

Growth hacking and growth marketing strategies operate on different timelines and methodologies. Let’s explore their differences:

  • Main aim: Growth marketing takes a holistic approach, striving for sustained, long-term growth through comprehensive full-funnel marketing strategies that help enhance your customer’s lifetime value. On the other hand, growth hacking aims for swift, short-term results, primarily focusing on rapid acquisition
  • Data handling: Growth marketing views data as a source for identifying patterns and refining an overarching strategy, emphasizing a more systematic and analytical approach. Conversely, growth hacking is all about hands-on experimentation and quick refinements, using data as a tool to iterate rapidly 
  • Primary tactics: While growth marketing involves automated and algorithmic processes, complemented by periodic adjustments to ensure effectiveness, growth hacking leans towards direct, manual testing and tweaking
  • Differing philosophical foundations: Growth marketing centers around understanding and alleviating customer pain points, fostering a more customer-centric approach, and winning loyal customers. In contrast, growth hacking addresses immediate business pain points and achieves specific marketing goals

Still confused? Let’s try to understand this with an example. 

Let’s assume your company is looking to onboard more customers. Growth hackers may propose a quick solution, such as implementing a double-sided referral program, where both the existing customer (referrer) and the new customer (referee) receive benefits for a successful referral to boost your numbers rapidly. 

However, it’s important to recognize that this is a short-term fix. 

If you want to implement growth marketing efforts with this strategy, you need to encourage your team to collect customer feedback after they sign up for your referral program. 

This ongoing process ensures that growth marketing isn’t just about getting new customers and is also looking to improve the overall customer experience using real-time feedback. You can do this over six months using a project management tool like ClickUp. 

The collected data becomes a powerful tool for making data-driven adjustments. It also helps optimize the referral program, and fosters sustained growth by aligning with your customer base’s evolving needs and expectations.

Here’s a quick table to help you understand the differences between growth marketing and growth hacking:

Growth Marketing Strategies for Success in 2024

Let’s see how you can implement effective growth marketing strategies for long-term sustainable benefits:

The product-led growth strategy uses your product to drive business growth and guide the customer lifecycle. By focusing on delivering an outstanding product experience, you nurture organic growth and support data-driven decisions for lasting success. 

Let’s explore some growth marketing strategies to achieve product-led growth:

1. Offer freemium or free trial options

Everyone loves freebies!

Offering freemium or free trial options is a great way to organically incorporate growth marketing strategies, especially if you have a SaaS product. Not only do you gain satisfied customers, but you also collect valuable feedback to fine-tune your strategies in the future. 

If your business involves physical products, then you could share some free samples at events; if it’s a service, offer a free trial. 

Providing a product sample or a free trial without requiring financial commitment lowers entry barriers and encourages your target audience to experience its value directly.

2. Implement the AARRR framework

The AARRR framework, also known as Pirate Metrics, is a product analytics model representing different stages of the customer lifecycle: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. Each stage allows you to understand user behavior and optimize product-led growth strategies.

Within the AARRR framework, each metric addresses critical aspects like revenue enhancement and expanding your customer base. Though these domains do not overlap, they collectively establish a well-defined sequence. Mastering this sequence ensures that your company operates at peak efficiency.

Use ClickUp’s product marketing software to track and record these metrics—it’s the perfect tool. It comes with multiple templates you can share, and a documentation hub called ClickUp Docs where marketing team members can comment and collaborate. 

ClickUp's Marketing Plan Template is designed to help you create, organize, and track your marketing project plan.

ClickUp’s Growth Experiments Whiteboard offers a methodical way to test business expansion plans. Outline, organize, and execute growth experiments systematically. Structure your hypotheses, set up experiments, track results, and draw insights.

ClickUp’s Goals feature provides a structured platform for setting, tracking, and achieving growth objectives, thus ensuring alignment with your overarching business strategy.

ClickUp’s Marketing features offer specialized tools tailored for marketing teams for easy collaboration and project management. With multiple scalable workspaces, ClickUp allows you to organize and manage various aspects of your marketing efforts in a centralized and efficient manner.

ClickUp Goals

3. Engage your audience with interactive product tours

To captivate your audience, use interactive product tours that provide users with a firsthand experience of your offerings. These tours allow users to engage with your product in real time, enabling immediate responses to their questions and feedback, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Beyond boosting user engagement, these interactive demos are also vital in optimizing conversion rates. Get users actively involved, meet their needs, and watch your business grow with these interactive experiences.

ClickUp helps engage your audience better with its unique product features. Use ClickUp to brainstorm ideas or create workflows or demos with ClickUp Whiteboard . Coupled with ClickUp AI , you can write interactive copy and create knowledge bases about your product.

ClickUp’s checklists ensure nothing gets missed in your processes, preventing oversights. Moreover, ClickUp’s forms smoothly capture user questions, making it easy to gather info and improve communication.

‘The customer is always right’ is a virtue that rings true for any business–big or small. A fundamental aspect of growth marketing strategy involves providing the utmost value to customers. 

Here are various customer-centric growth marketing strategies you can incorporate:

4. Build an active and welcoming community

By building an active community, you’re letting word-of-mouth marketing efforts work for you. 

A community of like-minded people means an impactful network of individuals enthusiastic about spreading the word about your brand. 

Not only that, the feedback a community provides proves to be invaluable in optimizing products. Not to mention the credibility and trust you gain with your target audience by engaging a welcoming community.

5. Personalize your marketing efforts to your target audience

Personalization goes beyond inserting the customer’s name in premade mail templates.

Personalization digs deep into your hard-earned data analytics to dynamically adjust and redirect your marketing campaigns. It helps you reach a wider audience without spending money on ineffective marketing efforts targeting the wrong people. 

Customer interests, buying preferences, customer experience, demographics, and transaction history—all have a part to play in creating personalized marketing campaigns. Customers will react favorably when they see messaging that resonates with their interests.

With ClickUp, you can shoot off emails from the platform, keeping all your communication in one place and saving you from tool-hopping.

You can also enhance your email content with ClickUp’s AI capabilities, writing engaging and compelling copy that resonates with your audience.

ClickUp’s Newsletter Whiteboard also makes crafting engaging newsletters easy. This feature provides a collaborative space for brainstorming, planning, and designing newsletters. Whether you’re working solo or with a team, the whiteboard facilitates seamless collaboration, ensuring that your newsletters are visually appealing and effectively convey your message to your audience

ClickUp's Newsletter Whiteboard Template is designed to help you create, track, and deliver newsletters.

ClickUp’s Tasks and Views , coupled with the ClickUp campaign management template , make project managing every campaign a straightforward process. ClickUp is your go-to hub for everything—from planning to execution. It’s where collaboration happens seamlessly, making your work life much easier.

ClickUp's Marketing Campaign Management Template is designed to help you manage marketing campaigns from start to finish.

6. Offer benefits to your most loyal customers

Implement a loyalty program to retain frequent customers and give your customers a better experience. 

For instance, when a returning customer wishes to purchase your product, give them a discount unavailable to first-time visitors. Alternatively, provide them with QOL (Quality-of-Life) features easily through ClickUp. For example, it could be shorter wait times made possible through ClickUp’s trigger-based task automation . 

Similarly, retain frequent buyers by offering gifts, member-exclusive discount coupons, and other loyalty perks. Offer a paid membership program for significant discounts—it’s a proven method to build a loyal customer base.

7. Collect and display testimonials from users who love your product

A testimonial collection on the landing page has a two-pronged effect. 

First, it builds trust and fosters human connection to your product. Moreover, it makes actual users of the products feel valued. Testimonials show how your product or service solved a real-life problem and positively impacted people’s lives.

Use featured stories from actual users on your website, blog, and social media channels for referrals. The positive perspective of actual users will encourage others to try out your products or services.

ClickUp’s case study design template is a user-friendly and efficient tool that simplifies creating compelling case studies. A structured and intuitive layout guides you through the essential elements of a case study, ensuring a professional and impactful presentation of your success stories.

ClickUp's Case Study Template is designed to help you capture ideas and insights from customer feedback.

ClickUp understands the importance of gathering feedback to improve and refine your processes. That is why the platform provides user-friendly forms tailored for feedback surveys. These ClickUp forms are customizable, allowing you to design surveys that capture specific insights from your audience. The collected feedback can then be analyzed to make informed decisions and enhancements to your projects or services.

ClickUp's Feedback Form Template is designed to help you capture customer feedback and organize customer data in one place.

Consumers today are bombarded with advertisements and promotional messages. However, storytelling can separate you from the rest of the crowd. 

Tell compelling, believable stories that resonate—they create a genuine connection with customers while subtly promoting your product or service.

Here are some ways to incorporate this powerful growth marketing strategy into your business:

8. Use narrative-focused video marketing

Incorporating video into your growth marketing strategy will put you a few steps ahead of competitors. Storytelling through video is more evocative and compelling and can do wonders for your business. 

Narrative-focused video growth marketing efforts focus on telling the story of your business from a human angle instead of drab and monotonous spreadsheets and numbers. 

Video growth marketing strategy effectively conveys your brand’s story and what it stands for, as people often find videos more engaging than textual content.

Not sure how to get started? ClickUp’s here to help once again. With its intelligent AI, you can compose video scripts that touch customers. Use ClickUp Docs to save and share them effortlessly with the creative minds in your organization. 

Leverage the power of ClickUp Production Tracking to help you produce quality videos within deadlines using its in-built production pipeline.

ClickUp's Production Tracking Template is designed to help you manage and track the progress of your production workflows.

9. Use social media

Social media marketing is a no-brainer these days, especially for a successful growth marketing strategy. 

First, consumers expect you to have a solid social media presence. Second, if you’re not leveraging social media to promote your products or services, you’re missing out on a significant pool of potential customers. Also, social media is a great place to let your brand’s personality and voice shine and break through the clutter.

Even while being budget-friendly, marketing on social media allows your promotional content to reach a vast sea of potential loyal customers. To make the best out of social media marketing, identify your target audience, analyze user behavior, and proceed with compiling data and utilizing social media analytics tools . 

Follow and observe your competition, learn from their mistakes, and adapt your content to market trends.

10. Publish SEO-optimized blog posts

SEO has always been about growth. It focuses on optimizing content to improve online visibility and better SERP rankings.

Effective SEO demands a solid understanding of search engine algorithms and ranking factors. Then there’s the most vital part of SEO–keyword research. Developing a proper keyword strategy is a surefire way to cement SEO-powered lead generation. Did we mention that ClickUp has keyword research templates too?

Once you get the hang of SEO, use your blog posts to direct traffic to your product or service page and help your business achieve higher lead conversion rates. 

Case Studies of Real Growth Marketing Success

Let’s look at examples of businesses and brands that applied growth marketing strategies successfully to achieve sustained success.

Dropbox's growth marketers going for growth marketing over traditional marketing

One of the biggest players in the cloud storage industry, Dropbox achieved an astonishing $10 billion valuation in 2018 without spending much on advertising. How did they do this? 

Dropbox leaned heavily on referrals, implementing a referral system into the product. And they did so cleverly. 

Dropbox gifted users additional storage space free of cost when a new user joined the service using the former’s referral link or code. This approach encouraged users to invite their friends and family to the platform and also created a base of repeat customers.  

Dropbox is an excellent example of how businesses can achieve rapid and explosive growth by tapping into the power of referral growth marketing strategy. 

One major takeaway from Dropbox’s success is the importance of simplicity. They created a referral program that was simple and easy to understand without complicated terms and conditions.

Tiktok;s effective growth marketing strategies over traditional marketing

Who doesn’t know (or use) TikTok nowadays? The staggering popularity of the app has even carved a new niche of content creators—TikTokers. 

TikTok proudly recorded a 215 percent growth rate in brand value ; and stands among the most prominent media and entertainment brands on the global stage. 

TikTok’s enormous popularity, for the most part, can be attributed to the influencer growth marketing strategy. 

TikTok partnered with social media personalities, mainly bloggers and influencers, who already had a large social following on other platforms. These creators then started posting content on TikTok and shared it with followers on other platforms. 

TikTok, along with focusing on an influencer growth marketing strategy and creative growth marketing strategy, also kept its eyes on the Gen Z and millennial generation. It tailored its platform to suit the needs and interests of the youngsters. This personalized approach had a big part in propelling TikTok into App Store charts worldwide.

TikTok’s success is a clear example of the power of influencer growth marketing strategy and the clever use of social media. It emphasizes the significance of tailoring a product to meet the wants and needs of its target audience; TikTok’s focus on youth is a key selling point.

Airbnb's effective growth marketing strategies over traditional marketing

Airbnb, the global vacation rental business, started way back in 2008. It faced skepticism due to the unconventional concept of strangers sharing homes. 

Fast forward to now, and Airbnb successfully pulled off an IPO valued north of $100 billion . How did a seemingly crazy idea reach the masses and become a global business? 

Certainly not through traditional marketing methods.

Instead of spending on advertising and promotions, Airbnb lets user-generated content do the heavy lifting. Only 30 percent of their content is created in-house; the rest is user-generated and circulated. 

Just glance through Airbnb’s Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, and you’ll be welcomed by hundreds of user-submitted photographs, videos, and other content. This makes for an efficient community-building and social media strategy. 

Apart from the emphasis on community and user-generated content, Airbnb also adopted a multi-channel social media growth marketing strategy. Airbnb uses different social media platforms to cater to unique and different content. For example, their YouTube channel is centered around travelogues and travel vlogs, while their Instagram showcases the best and newest Airbnb homes.

If you aren’t leveraging growth marketing channels to boost your business, you’re doing it wrong. 

While growth shouldn’t always be the only focus of your business, it should be a priority that you regularly pay attention to. 

The growth marketing strategies we have discussed are battle-tested, and when implemented correctly, they can enhance your customer relationships while boosting profits. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing strategies are a one-way road to achieve sustained success in a hyper-competitive business environment. 

And guess what can help you throughout your growth journey? ClickUp, of course. Its comprehensive end-to-end project management and marketing automation capabilities can scale with your business. With ClickUp, you can set and achieve realistic growth milestones throughout the entire customer journey. 

Come try it out for yourself and witness the magic of ClickUp. Sign up to ClickUp for free now!

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Mindset to action: Imperatives for Growth

Growth remains a top priority for C-level executives, but for many, achieving and sustaining growth remains elusive. In fact, about a quarter of companies don’t grow at all, often because leaders limit their exploration of growth opportunities and neglect to make multiple bets. Knowing where to focus has become especially difficult recently as companies struggle with skyrocketing inflation and heavy competition for talent.

Even under these conditions, however, profitable, sustained growth remains a possibility. The evidence lies in the successes of high-performance companies. In the last decade, one in eight companies in the S&P 500 achieved 10 percent annual growth, and one in ten maintained growth rates above GDP growth for more than 30 years.

Outperforming executives break the powerful force of inertia. They do this by rethinking growth strategy and taking decisive steps to put critical talent and resources behind a well-defined, timeless growth plan while taking into account imperatives for success.

Executives who achieve profitable, sustainable growth are deeply committed to implementation of their growth strategy, from mindset to bold actions. They back up their commitment by investing in well-defined growth bets and ensuring they have invested in a set of critical enablers of that growth, such as an M&A engine and capability building. Above all, these leaders understand that growth is achieved by confidently pursuing the timeless growth imperatives while nimbly cutting through disruptions and steering the business through uncertainty.

This collection of rich insights and articles was assembled to help executives and their companies own the next era of growth. In the following pages, you’ll find ways to set the right growth aspirations and mindset, invest in a comprehensive set of timeless growth initiatives, and execute with excellence.

What do growth leaders do differently?

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Courageous growth: Six strategies for continuous growth outperformance

Set a Growth Aspiration, Mindset, and Culture | Turbocharging the Core | Innovate & expand into adjacencies | Ignite growth through breakout businesses | Programmatic M&A | Timely Actions

Set a Growth Aspiration, Mindset, and Culture

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Staying ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance

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Retail growth: The big sprint towards customer obsession

Patrick Lammers headshot

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Choosing to grow: The leader’s blueprint

CEO Excellence book cover - Best Seller list on New York Times, Wall Street journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly

CEO Excellence

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Are you a growth leader? The seven beliefs and behaviors that growth leaders share

Are you a growth leader? The seven beliefs and behaviors that growth leaders share

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AI-powered marketing and sales reach new heights with generative AI

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The growth code: Activating pathways to growth

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Experience-led growth: A new way to create value

Growth rules: which matter most, transformation in uncertain times: tackling both the urgent and the important, the three building blocks of successful customer-experience transformations, innovate & expand into adjacencies.

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Igniting your next growth business

Growth and resilience through ecosystem building, taking fear out of innovation, how do companies create value from digital ecosystems, the great acceleration, ignite growth through breakout businesses.

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A blueprint for M&A success

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Getting tangible about intangibles: The future of growth and productivity?

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marketing strategy business growth

Michael Birshan

Senior partnerlondon.

marketing strategy business growth

Biljana Cvetanovski

Partnerlondon.

marketing strategy business growth

Rebecca Doherty

Partnerbay area.

marketing strategy business growth

Tjark Freundt

Senior partnerhamburg.

marketing strategy business growth

Senior PartnerAtlanta

marketing strategy business growth

Senior PartnerStamford

marketing strategy business growth

Ishaan Seth

Senior partnernew york.

marketing strategy business growth

Jill Zucker

RESOURCE CENTRE

What is growth marketing strategies to grow your business..

Time to read: 11 minutes

Growth marketing: It seems self-explanatory. In fact, it seems redundant. Isn’t the very purpose of marketing to grow your business? You look for improvement or growth in metrics, such as the number of website visitors, leads, and customers.

Believe it or not, the term “growth marketing” actually refers to a very specific kind of marketing. It refers to businesses growing exponentially as they discover the power of tailor-fitting a marketing strategy for their company using both sides of the brain: creativity and data-driven practices.

So what exactly is growth marketing? How can small businesses use it to their advantage? Is it right for your company? Read on to find out.

What is Growth Marketing?

How is growth marketing different from traditional marketing.

Growth marketing is anything but old school. It differs from traditional marketing in that it uses modern tools and metrics to measure the performance of specific strategies and tactics as completely as possible. Different from old-school marketing, growth marketing is inherently tailor-fit to your company, and constantly evolves to fit changing customer attitudes, respond to industry events, and handle your competition. It’s completely dynamic.

In the past, marketers used generally accepted principles to guide their efforts, and worked creatively within those parameters. Growth marketing, however, depends on thinking outside the box. It’s highly experimental. It’s where marketing meets scientific theory.

Growth marketers don’t build a marketing strategy to implement, because their strategy is to adapt to whatever seems to be working best. In order to know what’s working, they have to just get out there and get started. You could say it’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks—if you then measured exactly how much each and every noodle stuck. Then, one at a time, you’d slightly alter cooking time, the type of noodle, temperature, angle of the throw, and more to see how each affected noodle stickiness. But you still wouldn’t be done, because then you’d test the best settings of each element together and fine-tune further to eke out just a bit more stickiness. By the time you finish that, someone will have remodelled the kitchen with fresh wallpaper. So you’d start all over.

If it sounds like a never-ending process, it is. But that’s the point. Your business environment is constantly changing, and so are your offerings as a company. And they’re changing faster than ever before. If you decide on a marketing strategy that isn’t dynamic, in the way that the Don Drapers of the world did, you’ll be out of touch before your campaigns ever go live.

Key Aspects of Growth Marketing

1. data-driven decision-making, 2. experimentation and testing.

Growth marketers must embrace a culture of experimentation. They continuously test different marketing strategies, channels, messaging, and user experiences to uncover what works best for their target audience. A/B testing, multivariate testing and conversion rate

Optimisation techniques are commonly used to refine marketing campaigns and improve overall performance.

3. Customer-Centricity

4. agile and iterative approach, 5. holistic funnel optimisation, the 8th edition state of marketing report.

State of Marketing

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Requirements for Growth Hacking

So, what do you need to hack growth? More than ever before, marketing depends on technical savvy and the ability to gather, interpret, and act on data. So here’s what you’ll need:

The ability to test everything: That means views, clicks, and visits, as well as time spent on web pages and how much is made over the customer lifecycle. Some things are hard to measure, like exactly how many points of contact a customer needed before making a purchase, but a growth marketer will measure everything he or she can.

Robust data tracking solutions to accompany that testing: A team full of both creatives and analysts. They’ll need to work closely together to brainstorm, roll out, measure, and refine each and every strategy.

The ability to think outside the box. Just because many companies succeed using tried and true formulas doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to eke out a few more leads or improve your ROI by a few more cents.

A willingness to commit to the long haul: Sure, “growth hacking” and “growth marketing” might sound like magical incantations that instantly improve your marketing. But as any programmer (the original hacker) will tell you, hacking is a long process where each small success builds on the next to get big results.

If you can roll with all that, growth marketing could be the greatest thing for small businesses since the internet.

Growth Marketing Best Practices: How to Implement a Successful Growth Strategy

You may be wondering how to develop your growth marketing strategy. Thankfully, there are some industry best practices that you should always try to implement throughout your growth marketing strategy.

These include:

  • Gather information about the potential customers you want to target, and analyse whatever feedback you already have. 
  • Use the information you’ve gathered to develop a few simple A/B tests to test if your strategy may have success. 
  • Create and run sample campaigns through multiple marketing channels. This can include email campaigns, social media posts, blogs, podcasts, and other content 
  • Track engagement data on your test campaigns. 
  • Analyse what works best and add those tactics to a growing database. 
  • Reach out to other teams for new data and feedback before starting again

Metrics to Consider in Growth Marketing

Throughout your growth marketing campaign, you must have KPIs and metrics that will influence the direction of your efforts. When choosing the metrics for your KPIs, choose the metrics that matter most to the growth of your company. It will act as the true north for you marketers and create a focus for the company.

If you’re struggling to decide, here's a summary of the key metrics to consider:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Measures the average cost to acquire a new customer. 
  • Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of visitors or leads that take a desired action. 
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Estimates the total revenue a customer will generate over their lifetime. 
  • Retention Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who continue using your product or service. 
  • Churn Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service. 
  • Revenue Growth: Measures the increase in overall revenue over time. 
  • Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the return generated from marketing investments. 
  • Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Measures the average cost to acquire a single customer. 
  • Virality and Referral Metrics: Tracks the success of referral and virality initiatives. 
  • Engagement Metrics: Measures user engagement with your website, content, or social media.

How Does Automation Affect Growth Marketing?

Personalisation at scale, improved lead generation and nurturing, data-driven decision-making, enhanced customer relationship management (crm), scalability and expansion, growth marketing for small businesses, step 1: prioritise ideas and opportunities.

Whether you hire an experienced growth hacker or take on the task of learning the trade yourself, you’ll come across tons of ideas for how you can improve your efforts. But that doesn’t mean you should act on all of them right away. That would be chaos to implement, and you wouldn’t know which strategy changed your metrics in which way. Instead, focus on tactics that:

Have the most significant potential impact on your company. This means those that will have the most significant growth in revenue and your company’s KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. Are the easiest to deploy and test. You want the greatest results, but not if you have to spend all your resources to achieve them—at least, not at first. Go for the low-hanging fruit in the beginning, then use your growth to fund the exploration of more challenging opportunities. Are most likely to succeed. For example, if your team includes a skilled graphics designer, an experienced PR manager, or a phenomenal webmaster, go after opportunities then lean on these people for success.

Take less time to test. At this stage in your efforts, you need feedback about what’s working—and what isn’t—fast. You need to understand the big picture as soon as possible so you can structure your following efforts accordingly.

Kev Kaye of Growthboks recommends dumping each of your ideas into a spreadsheet, then rating them for each of the above criteria. Add each rating into one overall score, and use that score to prioritise your efforts. Then knock them out one at a time.

Step 2: Scale It Up

Once you’ve tried out a few strategies, it’s time to start using them throughout your brand. One of the most important elements of successful growth marketing is the ability to scale up your efforts. If you’re a numbers geek or have a scientific mind, you may enjoy A/B testing blog titles. Sure, having a passion for figuring out what makes consumers tick is going to help make you a good growth hacker, but the science isn’t really the point. At least, an understanding of the science won’t in itself affect your bottom line. You have to use your knowledge and you have to use it in big ways. You’ve invested in learning what your consumers respond to, so make the most of it by scaling that knowledge up.

The best part about growth marketing is that you often learn about more than just marketing. You can learn how to improve the entire customer journey with tactics you can employ in sales, service, product development, and even packaging and delivery options. Hire additional support as needed, knowing you’re growing your business based on concrete, data-backed strategies and decisions.

Step 3: Simplify

Is growth marketing right for a small business.

Growth marketing is the future of marketing. But is it the right move for your business right now? While growth hacking is all about the long-term (a marathon, if you will) it happens in sprints. You’ll do a whole lot of testing, then spend time implementing what you’ve learned across your organisation. And because what you learn today could change next month, in order to take advantage of your investment, you’ll need to be ready to act on your findings right away.

Sometimes, you’ll get growth hacking results that your company simply can’t adapt to quickly enough. If, for example, as part of your A/B testing you end up with a huge influx of leads, but don’t have the sales team to nurture them into customers, you may miss out. And if you end up doubling or tripling your product orders, are you poised to fill them?

Prepare for Growth Investing in growth marketing may require hiring new staff, guiding company culture in a new direction, and new equipment, software, or other tools. Before you do any of those things, make sure you’re ready to capitalise on your investment with these key steps.

  • Line up additional suppliers, manufacturers, and other vendors to handle any overflow work. 
  • Streamline your sales and other department hiring processes so you can find great candidates faster. 
  • Ensure your board of directors and other executives are “all in” and ready to approve actions based on new discoveries. 
  • Choose tools and technology that grow with you so you can avoid retraining, setup, and other unnecessary costs.

Make sure your tools allow you to focus on your relationships with your customers. Use a cloud-based system for service, community management, and marketing. The right platform will help you set up A/B testing for everything from social media posts to email drip campaigns. You can gather data from dozens of metrics, and also compile, display, and interpret it. Make it easier to share and implement your findings across your organisation, no matter how big or small.

Growth marketing is only as powerful as the technology behind it. With the right tools and people, you can find success in this very reactive, exciting marketing niche.

Use Growth Marketing to Your Advantage Today

Question: Why is Growth Marketing important?

Answer: By utilising data-driven and imaginative campaigns, growth marketing assists brands in expanding their customer base. This strategy is effective in boosting customer acquisition and sales, enhancing customer retention, improving the overall customer experience, and developing digital advertising campaigns that convert at high rates.

Question: What is growth marketing vs marketing?

Answer: Product marketing aims to craft a compelling value proposition and messaging for a target audience, while growth marketing focuses on expanding the reach and impact of the product or service. Growth marketers employ data-driven tactics to acquire and retain customers, optimise customer experience and develop highly-targeted advertising campaigns. These two roles work together to ensure a product's success and growth.

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Home Growth Marketing 30+ Growth Marketing Strategy Examples

30+ Growth Marketing Strategy Examples

Aaron Brooks

If your marketing strategy is focused on maximising performance at the top of the funnel, your business isn’t growing as fast or sustainably as it could. Rapid growth is the product of marketing being a well-tuned system that makes effective decisions across the entire funnel at the speed of data .

Welcome to the world of growth marketing, which places focus on continual growth across the entire funnel.

In this article, we break down the ins and outs of growth marketing before looking at some of the best examples and tactics. You’ll see how some of the world’s biggest brands got to where they are now and how small newcomers took on industry leaders and won.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is an evidence-based approach to marketing that prioritises maximising business growth by focusing on the entire funnel. This contrasts to traditional marketing, which is often opinion-based and siloed around specific areas of the funnel (e.g. marketing must drive X many leads).

The underlying theory is that a business will grow faster if the marketing team takes a holistic view across the entire customer journey.

marketing strategy business growth

“Growth marketing isn’t about fixating on one part of your funnel. It’s about looking at your entire customer lifecycle and using those insights to create compounding returns that drive more engaged customers.” Matt Bilotti – Drift

So the emphasis is on capturing and keeping as many customers as possible. This way, new customers are adding genuine growth to your business instead of simply replacing ones you no longer have.

This is why we reference active monthly users to illustrate the growth of software platforms and social networks. This KPI measures the number of people who continue to use the platform in question and increased numbers reflect genuine growth.

Another explanation of growth marketing I’d like to address comes from this article by WebFX, What Is Growth Marketing? (What Marketers Need to Know) .

“Growth marketing acquires and retains customers by targeting every stage of the buying funnel with various marketing channels, like search and email. It revolves around creative, data-driven tactics that consider the unique wants, pain points, and questions of users throughout the buying funnel.”

Again, this emphasises the need to optimise the entire sales funnel but it also touches on the multichannel approach required to achieve this. The customer journey may start on social or in search before moving onto your website and resting on remarketing campaigns.

At this point, you may capture the first sale or need to nurture leads through email marketing to secure the deal. Eventually, the focus turns to customer retention, cross-selling, upselling and other strategies to maximise customer engagement and lifetime value.

To summarise, growth marketing prioritises metrics and KPIs that demonstrate genuine growth. This requires a multichannel strategy that optimises the entire customer journey with three key objectives:

  • Maximise lead generation
  • Maximise lead conversion
  • Maximise customer retention & lifetime value

A successful growth marketing strategy ensures your business continues to grow, even as competition intensifies in your industry. The more clout you have, the more difficult it is for rival businesses and newcomers to take your place. At the same time, you become more resilient to market disruption and business challenges.

In other words, growth marketing is the strategic path to long-term growth.

Growth marketing vs growth hacking

Growth hacking is a specialist form of growth marketing that prioritises rapid growth above everything else – even if it means trampling over a few “rules” and best practices along the way.

In the rogue world of growth hacking, there is only one goal: maximum growth in the shortest possible time-frame, regardless of what it takes. This has been the strategy favoured by Silicon Valley for many years and it’s responsible for some of the biggest startups and tech names around the world, including Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, PayPal and Dropbox.

As Neil Patel explains in his excellent break down of growth hacking on the QuickSprout blog:

“In the first phase of a startup you don’t need someone to ‘build and manage a marketing team’ or ‘manage outside vendors’ or even ‘establish a strategic marketing plan to achieve corporate objectives’ or many of the other things that marketers are tasked with doing. Early in a startup you need one thing. Growth .”

The phrase “growth hacking” was first coined by Sean Ellis, one of the most influential figures in the Silicon Valley startup scene. He coined the phrase to differentiate from the niche form of marketing startups need in their first phase from the much broader world of digital marketing.

During the first phase, a startup only cares about growth and securing investment. Profit doesn’t even matter at this point and forget about building up any kind of cash reserve for a rainy day – all income goes right back into the business and maximising growth as quickly as possible.

In the startup world, it’s grow or die.

Is growth the only goal that matters?

Most businesses have to balance growth with profit, expenses, cash flow, return on investment and a range of financial performance indicators.

Startups may be the exception where growth attracts investment, which fuels further growth and yet more investment and a select few ventures establish themselves as industry leaders.

The growth hacking mantra of Silicon Valley isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though. There’s an entire list of tech startups that are worth billions of dollars without recording any profit , including Tesla, Spotify and Snapchat. It’s a problem increasingly pointed out by researchers, economists and a growing number of entrepreneurs that we need more startups that don’t prioritise growth above all else .

There are problems at the other end of the scale, too. Businesses that don’t prioritise growth enough reach income, revenue and profit ceilings. As industries become more competitive and technology evolves, they become comparatively smaller as the world around them grows bigger.

There’s no getting away from the fact that businesses that aren’t growing are dying .

This doesn’t mean you have to prioritise growth over every other aspect of your business – it all depends on what your objectives are. Are you looking to build the biggest brand possible and sell it at the peak of its value? Or are you determined to achieve long-term, sustainable growth so that your business can become an industry leader and remain there for decades to come?

Growth marketing is always strategy-first. That’s why with TrueNorth (a growth marketing OS built by our team) we don’t allow users to begin planning their growth marketing plan until they’ve created a simulation of their growth.

This not only aligns everyone’s expectations of growth (particularly stakeholders), but it crucially helps marketing leaders guide their team in the right direction towards a common goal.

marketing strategy business growth

Ultimately, growth needs to be the means to whatever end your organisation is working towards. In that sense, it must be sustainable, aligned with your values, and not at odds with your wider objectives.

Which growth marketing strategies are we looking at today?

In this article, we’re looking at a range of growth marketing strategies, ranging from the growth hacking tales of Silicon Valley to the broader, more conventional techniques used by growth marketers.

I’ve broken these examples, tactics and hacks into the following three sections:

  • Success stories: How Harry’s, Slack, Stripe & more use growth marketing.
  • Tactics: Common growth marketing tactics used by startups & brands.
  • Growth marketing essentials: Key strategies to apply growth marketing.

These should tell you all the insight and inspiration you need to step up your growth marketing game and apply similar strategies to your own ventures.

Growth marketing success stories

First, we start with some of the most impressive growth marketing stories from the past couple of decades. Here, we see how small businesses turned themselves into industry giants, startups disrupted entire markets and established names future-proofed their position in the digital age.

#1: How Harry’s took on the shaving industry giants

Harry’s is the kind of growth marketing story smaller brands dream of. According to 2019 data from Slice Intelligence (now Rakuten Intelligence), Harry’s is growing 3X faster than the industry average and faster than the Dollar Shave Club, which was the former underdog favourite until Unilever came along and bought it out.

marketing strategy business growth

Harry’s is a classic tale of a small New York business taking on industry giants like Gillette and beating them by offering a subscription service that provides quality products and keeps customers incentivised so they stay loyal and continue buying from the brand – growth marketing at its finest.

marketing strategy business growth

Harry’s is by no means the only newcomer to rise to the top of their industry by providing a subscription service, either. This has become a staple strategy in the digital age, one that has reshaped industries across the spectrum and it all revolves around the concept of capturing new customers and keeping them.

Key growth strategies used:

  • Subscription-based service: By locking customers into a subscription service, Harry’s is able to incentivise loyalty and keep them buying for the long-term.
  • Quality products: Central to Harry’s growth marketing strategy is the quality of its shaving products – a key selling point both for new and repeat customers.
  • Disruptive pricing: Harry’s makes it difficult for industry giants like Gillette to remain competitive by offering quality products for affordable prices in a market that traditionally relies on high mark up products.
  • Target audiences: Baby Boomers are Harry’s largest buying generation, which has been crucial for its staggering growth. However, the company will need to increase sales among younger generations to stay relevant.

marketing strategy business growth

The good news for Harry’s stockholders is that the company is already making grounds in the women’s shaving market, which is promising for its long-term aim of shifting relevance among younger generations across the board.

There’s still plenty of work for Harry’s to do in terms of long-term market positioning but the company has put itself in an enviable position with its impressive growth marketing tactics up until now.

#2: How Slack became the fastest-growing B2B software provider

Slack is the fastest-growing B2B software provider in history – and by a large margin. The company’s staggering growth is thanks to a sophisticated and constantly evolving mix of growth marketing strategies designed to capture new users, keep them engaged and encourage them to invite even more new users.

marketing strategy business growth

Slack was built by remote developers who understand the benefits and challenges remote teams face. While the world has seen dozens of major communication platforms in the form of AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, HipChat and Facebook’s Workplace, none of them became a staple tool in the same manner as Microsoft Word or Google Search – until Slack provided the platform we never even knew that we needed so badly.

By solving communication problems that no other provider even attempted to address, the team at Slack carved out a new market for themselves: instant messaging as a productivity tool. Instead of supplementing email, Slack positioned itself as the replacement for workplace emails and this created the foundation for its remarkable growth story.

marketing strategy business growth

  • Defining a new market: Slack says 70-80% of its early user base claimed to use no communication tools prior to Slack. Of course, they were using such tools, they just didn’t consider them to be a category of software – until Slack changed everything.
  • Problem-solving: Slack is simply a communication tool but its success lies in making the complex task of business communication seem like such a simple thing. By solving communication problems, one by one, and optimising core features to provide the best possible experience, Slack turned instant messaging from a hindrance into a productivity asset
  • Hustle: To gain its initial user base, Slack’s remote team members asked friends and contacts at businesses to sign up and spread the word.
  • User feedback: Slack has continued to improve by asking users for feedback, listening to what they have to say and addressing the issues raised.
  • Freemium: A classic strategy used by SaaS companies and Slack strives to offer “an actually-useful free” service that’s enough for basic needs and demonstrates the benefits of paid plans for serious users.
  • Onboarding: Slack’s super-simple onboarding process allows new users to sign up in seconds and existing users to invite team members without any hassle, breaking down every possible barrier that might prevent user growth.
  • User data: As all software companies should, Slack analyses user data to understand growth benchmarks, set targets and maximise engagement.

Even with a quality product and a unique marketing position, the kind of growth Slack has experiences doesn’t just happen. The company had to hustle to build its initial user base and a lot of its success comes down to maximising the positive impact every user has upon growth.

By constantly improving the platform, it retains users and by encouraging them to invite others, each retained user turns into multiple more. To maximise user growth, the onboarding process has been optimised to remove almost every possible friction point and this is reinforced by the company’s freemium model that offers genuine value to non-paying users.

Slack understands what it needs from users to maintain and maximise growth. Users that send 2,000+ messages on the app are most likely to keep using it and eventually sign up for a paid plan. Using this benchmark, Slack can optimise the experience to encourage more sends, nurture existing users to increase engagement and target users close to hitting this target with the extra little push they need.

#3: How IBM uses growth hacking to stay relevant after a century

We don’t tend to think about companies that have been around for more than a century as worthwhile examples of growth marketing but IBM has proven that this strategy is crucial for established names, too. It’s also quashed the cliche theory that old dogs can’t learn new tricks by adopting growth marketing as a means of staying relevant and competitive in the modern age.

marketing strategy business growth

Hale Schneider has written an insightful summary of IBM’s transition to growth marketing for Growthhackers.com (the latter of which was founded by none other than Sean Ellis, the man responsible for the term “growth hacking”).

In his summary, Hale explains that former Chief Digital Officer for IBM Analytics, Nancy Hensley, and former growth strategist, Jason Barbato, were key proponents for the shift towards growth marketing at IBM.

“For IBM, the goal of adopting a growth approach was not to completely change their approach to dealing with the market, but to develop a digital route alongside its already good products, making them products that people love to use through focusing on enriching the experience for customers and users,” Hale writes.

  • Cultural shift: IBM recognised the need for a cultural shift within the company to adopt the mindset of growth marketing, experimentation and optimisation.
  • Lower entry point: A key objective of IBM was to lower the entry point for new users and first purchases so that a greater proportion of employees with authority to make purchases could sign up to IBM products without getting approval from above.
  • Optimise onboarding: By optimising the onboarding process, IBM ensures more website visitors turn into free trials and paying customers.
  • Maximising successful payments: After IBM’s data scientists noticed a pattern of users trying to upgrade from free trials to paid plans – only for their cards to be declined – the company now generates millions in additional revenue every year by providing instant, technical support to help customers complete the purchase.
  • Product optimisation: In order to retain as many existing customers as possible and turn more free trials into paid plans, IBM has implemented an ongoing system of product testing and optimisation.

If a company as old and established as IBM can not only recognise the need to adopt growth marketing and implement it successfully, there is no excuse for brands of any age or size.

As Nancy Hensley is quoted in Hale Schneider’s Growthhackers.com article:

“I remember I used to hear people say ‘think like a start-up’ and I would laugh because we simply weren’t ever going to be a start-up. What we should say is ‘ think like a growth organization ,’ where cross-functional teams come together as a highly effective squad focused on the product experience and growth”.

The lesson here is that growth marketing isn’t only a tactic for startups and smaller businesses – it’s the only long-term strategy that makes sense for businesses of any kind, any age and all sizes.

#4: How Stripe cornered its own section of the payments market

By the mid-2000s, the internet was coming of age as an e-commerce platform and it had never been easier for average Joes to create an online business overnight. In 2005, Amazon launched Amazon Prime and, in 2006, Shopify launched with the aim of helping anyone create an online store.

The modern age of e-commerce was rapidly taking shape but there was a distinct lack of quality services for one crucial element in online purchases: payments.

Traditional card payment processors were notoriously difficult to work with and their solutions were woefully insufficient for the demands of online payments. PayPal was the only name really offering a digital alternative but it didn’t give developers or businesses owners the flexibility or control they really needed.

This lack of payment solutions was painfully obvious to two brothers, Patrick and John Collison, who went on to found Stripe – a startup that reshaped the payments industry and secured one of the most impressive funding runs Silicon Valley has ever seen.

marketing strategy business growth

  • Defining a niche: By building a payment solution designed for developers, Stripe has been able to solve the problems of its target audience and hone in on their unique needs.
  • Identifying a need: Stripe founders and brothers Patrick and John Collison realised that while it was becoming easy for anyone to start an online business, there was a distinct lack of developer-friendly payment solutions for the people building them.
  • Simplification: Stripe’s existence owes to the fact that the Collison brothers were astounded by the complexity and frustration of existing payment solutions and its success largely comes down to providing an easier, simpler alternative.
  • UX design: Stripe understood that it needed to provide a great experience for the developers using its products and the end users paying through them.
  • Leveraging community power: By providing the developer community with a much-needed solution, Stripe was able to spur initial growth through word of mouth.
  • Technology adoption: Stripe keeps itself at the forefront of technology advancement, ensuring that it remains relevant and the rise of mobile internet helped secure the company’s position as a leader in digital payments.
  • Acquisitions & partnerships: Stripe was founded in 2010 and it made its first acquisition in 2013 – a key strategy for driving growth, expanding the businesses and fending off competition.

Stripe is now one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable “unicorn” startups after securing new $600 million funding round that brings its valuation up to $36 billion.

The company’s funding history is staggering but its growth marketing strategy looks so simple on paper. By identifying a niche market and genuine need for something different, Stripe has been in the enviable position of letting the product do the marketing for it, powered by excellent UX design, the latest technology and a genuine understanding of what its customers need.

Even now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the company is thriving as several years’ worth of businesses transition from offline to online operations, which requires a quality payment solution.

#5: How Etsy built a $2 billion crafts e-commerce platform

Etsy’s growth story is one of building a loyal, passionate following by targeting a very specific type of audience that felt neglected by the modern web.

The company’s founders spent their early twenties doing freelance web development and one project saw them build an online community for craft makers. Once the forum was complete, Rob Kalin, Chris Maguire, Jared Tarbell and Haim Schoppik naturally found themselves reading through the comments and found one overwhelming takeaway.

Here was this community craft makers in their thousands all lamenting the lack of an online platform where they could sell their items. This was in the early 2000s and eBay was the king of online marketplaces but the craft makers resented its complexity, high fees and consumer focus.

They craved an online platform for themselves. They craved an Etsy and in 2005, the company’s founders announced it to the community to instantly capture thousands of users.

marketing strategy business growth

Etsy’s initial user base told their friends about this new platform, who signed up for themselves and went on to tell their own friends. The company used this leverage to drive organic social media campaigns – back when organic reach was still a major opportunity – and Etsy’s reputation continued to grow.

marketing strategy business growth

Key to Etsy’s growth has been its brand image as a place for individuals to showcase and sell their creative works. The company has tapped into social movements, including feminism and anti-consumerism to build a passionate following, retain its users and carve its own niche in an industry dominated by the likes of Amazon and eBay.

  • Defining a niche : Etsy established itself as a platform for craft makers, particularly targeting female creatives with a place to sell online.
  • Disruptive marketing: Etsy tapped into ideas of anticonsumerism, eco-friendliness, feminism and emotive social ideals at odds with typical e-commerce platforms – including all of its rivals.
  • Lower entry-point: By providing a more cost-effective and compelling alternative to eBay, Etsy built a strong, loyal following among its target audience.
  • Organic social growth: WIth Esty’s powerful brand image, the company was able to utilise organic social media (back when there was such a thing) to drive growth through brand awareness.
  • Customer experience: Key to Etsy’s success is its long dedication to creating excellent customer experiences – both for its sellers and buyers.
  • Difficult decisions: Etsy continues to grow but it has now reached a point where it has to make difficult decisions – many of which contradict its early brand image – to sustain continued growth.

Etsy’s growth story is now entering a new chapter and the company faces a new set of growth challenges to overcome. The downside to appealing so strongly to a niche, alternative crowd is that – sooner or later- Etsy is going to hit the growth ceiling within its own confines.

The company now needs to expand beyond its early brand image as the platform for the small, renegade retailers. The challenge is doing this without alienating its existing users, some of which are already voicing concerns about the direction the company is taking.

This is an important lesson for any brand engaged in growth marketing – at some point, you have to make some difficult decisions in order to sustain continued growth.

#6: How Spotify took on piracy & brought free music to the world

It took Spotify just six years to reach a $10 billion evaluation and build a user base of more than 50 million people, 12.5 million of whom were already paying for the service. Now, the music streaming application has more than 299 million active monthly users with 138 million of them paying for Spotify Premium.

The company is now worth more than $15 billion, little more than a decade after it was first launched in 2008.

marketing strategy business growth

Spotify’s story has seen the company take on music piracy while subsequently bringing free, legal music to millions of people around the world – two achievements that sound completely at odds with each other.

The company’s success is thanks to a rich mix of unrivalled product design, smart growth marketing strategies, data-driven technology and one incredible offer: providing users access to almost all of the music in the world for only $10 per month.

marketing strategy business growth

  • Market disruption: Spotify brought free, legal music to the world during a time when the industry was dogged by piracy.
  • Freemium: Users can listen for free with limited features or access “almost all of the music in the world” for only $10 per month.
  • Invite-only: Spotify built anticipation for its product by gradually expanding internationally through invite-only free accounts.
  • Social listening: Spotify was quick to build social sharing into its platform.
  • Partnerships: Spotify partnered with Facebook to become the exclusive music platform for the world’s biggest social media network.
  • Class-leading product: Even upon launch, Spotify’s software was class-leading and it’s only improved further over time.
  • Discovery & personalisation: Spotify uses its data and machine learning to help its users discover more music, make recommendations based on what they already like and personalise the experience to a point it becomes difficult to ever leave.

User engagement and retention are crucial to Spotify’s business model, which ultimately relies on turning free users into paying subscribers. The freemium model has worked wonders for Spotify but in terms of grabbing users’ initial attention but this would mean nothing if the quality of its product was sub-par.

This is one of many areas where Spotify has excelled throughout its journey: providing the best product on the market.

As technology has evolved, Spotify has utilised it to increase engagement and encourage users to keep listening. Social sharing was quickly integrated into the platform before a partnership deal with Facebook made it the exclusive music platform for the world’s biggest social network.

Spotify has put its extensive user data to good use, too, creating machine learning models to recommend new tracks to users, based on their listening history. Spotify isn’t only a music streaming service, it’s also a music discovery platform and a personalised catalogue of users’ custom playlists.

Users become so invested in the Spotify experience that it becomes almost impossible to leave, especially when you’re paying for ad-free listening.

#7: How Airbnb wrote the ultimate growth hacking story

If there’s one growth hacking story to rule them all, it has got to be the epic behind Airbnb. This is a company that started from two guys who couldn’t afford to pay their rent and decided to lease out their loft as a place for strangers to crash.

Three airbeds and the promise of a cooked breakfast was enough to earn $80 per person and the concept of Airbed & Breakfast was born.

marketing strategy business growth

What followed was a sequence of some of the most impressive growth hacking strategies ever publicised and, if you haven’t read the full story of how Airbnb took over the world of travel, have a look at this summary on Growthhackers.com .

Airbnb was founded in 2008 and by 2014, the company was already valued at $10 billion with more than 10 million guests and 550,000 properties listed around the world. In the space of six years, Airbnb was already bigger than some of the staple names in travel and the platform has continued to grow ever since.

Now, there are almost three million hosts on Airbnb and more than seven million listings across 220 countries and 100,000 cities around the globe. More than two million people on average stay in Airbnb listings every night and the company was valued at a staggering $31 billion at the start of 2020 – although this has dropped to $18 billion since the coronavirus pandemic brought the global travel industry to a halt .

marketing strategy business growth

  • Hustle: Founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia raised their initial funds by selling novelty election-themed breakfast cereal during the summer of ’08 for $40 a box, raising a total of $30k to get Airbed & Breakfast off the ground.
  • Venture capital: Despite a slow start, Chesky and Gebbia started to receive funding through Y Combinator ($20k) and then rebranded as Airbnb before securing $600k from Sequoia Capital and Y Ventures.
  • The Craigslist hack: Airbnb’s most famous growth hack was building a bit to automatically place listings on Craigslist to them in front of eyes – without any approval from Craigslist whatsoever.
  • The other Craigslist hack: Not content enough with its first Craigslist hack, the company later implemented a spam email bot to poach users from the website by introducing them to Airbnb. Every time users listed a property on Craigslist, they would receive an automated email from a “young lady” who really liked their property and suggested they take a look at Airbnb.
  • Product design: Founders Chesky and Gebbia are designers at heart and their dedication to building the best possible experiences for users has been paramount – both hosts and guests.
  • Simplification: A key component of the Airbnb experience is making it easy for hosts to list their property and even easier for people to book. The company went as far as offering host professional photographs to show their properties in the best light.
  • Market disruption: Airbnb continues to be one of the biggest market disruptors to this day, turning the travel industry on its head – and its appeal among book-it-yourself travellers has driven consistent growth.
  • More hustle: While driving growth in France, Airbnb found that physically sending teams of 2-3 people to locations to throw parties and promote the platform was 5x cheaper than relying on digital channels alone.

Each stage of Airbnb’s growth story is filled with cunning growth hacking strategies, some of which were ethically questionable but resoundingly successful. By tapping into Craigslist, the company was able to spur initial growth for free and pinch users from its biggest rival.

When presented with problems, such as the difficulty of making properties look appealing on the platform, the company came up with effective, even if unconventional, solutions – such as offering professional photography services, at a significant expense.

Even in the early days, Airbnb found resistance among investors who didn’t think the idea would take off. Yet, at every stage of the company’s journey, the combined problem-solving mentality of Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia with a complete lack of respect for the conventional has built the most impressive growth hacking story to date.

#8: How HubSpot built a billion-dollar growth engine with free tools

HubSpot is the growth marketing software provider that has excelled by being the success story it promotes. The company offers extensive marketing software to help businesses fuel growth by using the same tactics the company employed itself.

In other words, HubSpot is the B2B growth example its target audiences can aspire to be and the company provides all of the tools they need to get there.

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Key to HubSpot’s success is the quality of its products and one of its most cunning strategies has been offering a range of free tools designed to capture leads from marketers and start a lead nurturing process that leads them to paid products.

Of course, any business can lure people in with the offer something for free but HubSpot offers one of the best customer relationship management (CRM) systems on the market and charges absolutely nothing to use it. The secret is that a CRM only comes to life when you integrate it with other marketing and sales tools – all of which HubSpot provides on its paid plans.

It doesn’t take long for businesses with the budget HubSpot is after to upgrade to paid plans.

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  • Free tools: HubSpot offers a range of free tools for marketers that act as a gateway to paid products.
  • Brand image: HubSpot is the success story of its own products, showing new customers that they can achieve similar things with its marketing software.
  • Lead nurturing: With a highly successful lead generation strategy at work the company uses email marketing (which also happens to be one of its core product offerings) to nurture leads.
  • Pricing strategy: Shifting to a pay as you grow model by charging customers based on the number of contacts they have.
  • Content marketing: HubSpot established itself as an industry authority with a no-compromise content strategy that consistently produces some of the most informative insights on the web.
  • Webinar marketing: The company built a huge following on Twitter by running webinars and promoting them on the network.

With a compelling offer powering its strongest lead generation strategy, HubSpot needed to get eyes on its products to fuel growth. As a company that champions inbound marketing, it has prioritised the key channels at the heart of its products. Not only has it exploited these channels with great success, it’s also proven that they work and demonstrated to its target audience that its software products lead to genuine growth.

Each of HubSpot’s inbound marketing strategies is a success story in itself, starting with its excellent content marketing strategy. By producing some of the best content in the marketing industry and investing effort into organic SEO, the company has established itself as one of the top authorities and sources of insights.

marketing strategy business growth

Search for anything related to marketing and you’re only one click away from HubSpot’s website.

The company has made excellent use of both organic and paid social media opportunities. It’s been particularly successful on Twitter, building a large audience during the social network’s peak with a webinar strategy that generated thousands of leads with every showing .

HubSpot’s mastery of inbound marketing has been reinforced by intelligent, data-driven business decisions, too. One of my favourite examples is the company’s change in pricing policy. In 2011, it adopted a new tiered pricing model that charges based on the number of contacts users have on their database. Essentially, this is a pay as you grow model, meaning customers always receive more value from the product than they pay for it.

This is the standard in marketing software pricing in 2020 but it was a masterful play of psychology at the time.

#9: How Square became a payment giant by looking after the small guys

With card payments overtaking cash in major markets around the world, small businesses ran into a problem. Card payment solutions came with high transaction fees, strict approval policies and unreliable technology that could leave paying for card readers that don’t even work for days on end.

At the same time, the number of small businesses starting every year was rapidly increasing . By the mid-2000s, a lack of digital payment solutions for smaller businesses was creating a serious barrier for growth and the adoption of card payments in independent shops, markets and street food vendors.

In 2009, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey launched Square with the mission of solving this problem. With more than 99% of businesses in the UK alone being classed as small businesses (between 0-49 employees) , the payments industry was woefully neglecting the vast majority of businesses that couldn’t afford high transaction fees and expensive hardware that was inexplicably unreliable.

marketing strategy business growth

Square set out to solve the payment problems smaller businesses faced, one by one. With simple, affordable transaction fees, even the smallest of businesses could offer card payments to customers and simple hardware provided an all-in-one POS and card machine system – everything a small store needs to manage stock, take payments, print receipts and keep the queues moving.

  • Defining a niche: By offering a simple, affordable payment solution for small businesses that were neglected by major providers.
  • Identifying a need: As digital channels made it easier than ever to start a small business, Square’s founders identified a lack of payment solutions standing in the way.
  • Disruptive marketing: Square (and a select few other payments companies) turned their industry upside down by prioritising smaller businesses with low transaction rates and turnover – which happens to be the account for the vast majority of businesses around the world.
  • Simplification: Complexity was the other barrier for smaller businesses in need of payment solutions and Square has excelled at creating simple software and hardware for business owners with no interest in the technicalities.
  • Product design: A lot of Square’s success owes to the excellent product design behind its software and hardware, allowing the company to fend off competition by providing better quality.
  • Jack Dorsey: There’s no doubt that having Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the helm helped Square capture interest and funding.

A lot of people point to the celebrity of Jack Dorsey as the key reason behind Square’s success and, while this will have helped with profile and securing funds, it greatly undersells the company’s achievements.

First, of all Square is definitively a product for small businesses, not the tech scene of Silicon Valley. Backing Square was never going to see the company call industry giants customers and pave the way to becoming the new Visa or Mastercard.

Despite this, backing Square would become one of the smartest investment choices its supporters would make. From a pure business perspective, Square targeted the vast majority of the business market with more than 99% of businesses in the UK being classed as small businesses. Sure, these are low-spending customers but, collectively, the vast majority of the payments market was gradually turning to card and online transactions.

By offering low transaction rates and affordable card readers for $10, Square wowed small businesses and reviewers with a revolutionary product. As mobile payments emerged, Square was at the forefront of technology innovation with a free app that turns any phone into a card reader.

Simplicity has played a key role, too. If you can use a phone, you can use Square to accept payments from your customers.

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After making waves with its introduction, the positive reception of Square’s early customers turned into fandom and brand evangelism that drove growth within a vast new niche filled with little competition. Dorsey’s celebrity status only helped the company get more coverage in major press publications and much of the marketing was done for the company by other people.

The growth rate was staggering with a YoY growth rate of 632% by Q2 2015, which has declined since, as adoption levelled out among small businesses and Square secured its market position. Now, the company is one of the top names in the global payment industry and plenty of room remaining for growth as the birth rate of smaller businesses continues to increase every year.

Growth marketing tactics & hacks

In this next section, we take a closer look at some of the most effective growth marketing strategies and hacks behind the success stories covered so far in this article – and many others like them.

#10: Referral programmes

Referral programmes are a common strategy that involves rewarding your existing customers for turning their friends, family and contacts into new customers for you.

Not all referral strategies inspire the same level of growth, though, so what does a programme worthy of growth hacking status look like?

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Dropbox offers one of the best examples of turning referrals into a powerful growth marketing strategy. Instead of rewarding users with financial incentives, the company offered storage space in return for introducing them to new users.

For every “friend” existing users introduced to Dropbox, they would receive an extra 500MB of free storage with a total limit of 16GB. This meant that users signed up to the free version of Dropbox could earn up to 16GB of free storage space compared to the default 2GB limit.

The referral programme was so successful that it drove 3900% in the space of just 15 months .

Let that sink in for a moment. In September 2008, there were 100,000 registered Dropbox users and, by December 2009, the company had more than 4 million people signed up to its service. Less than 10 years after launching, Dropbox would have almost 40 million registered users with a $10 billion valuation and $1 billion revenue.

So how did Dropbox create one of the most effective referral programmes in history?

  • Engagement rewards: The real genius behind Dropbox’s referral programme is that it didn’t reward users financially. Instead, it incentivised them to use the service more and even depend upon it more, locking them into the platform.
  • 2-way rewards: Dropbox didn’t only reward the referrer but also their friends who were welcomed to the platform, who could then invite their own friends for dual rewards.
  • Incentivisation: By allowing users to refer 32 times and build free storage of up to 16GB, every user was incentivised to spread the word on behalf of Dropbox.
  • Goal-orientated: Dropbox’s referral programme proved each user with their own referral status where they could see how much free storage, the current status of their individual referrals and encourage them to invite more friends.
  • Onboarding: Dropbox didn’t wait until users were signed up to send them referral emails. It implemented the programme as part of the onboarding process so that new users are inviting their friends before they’ve even started using it for themselves.
  • Click invites: Users could invite friends with a simple link invitation, making it incredibly easy for new users to bring their friends on board.

All of this factored into a single referral programme provided plenty of incentive for users to invite their friends and made it irresistibly easy to do so. By setting clear goals for each user, you would find yourself ploughing through your email contact list to see who else you would invite.

Not only were users bringing new prospects to Dropbox, they were also engaging with the platform themselves on a far deeper level and emotionally investing in the service. Existing users were locked into the platform and doing everything they could to bring new users to the party, resulting in minimal churn and maximum growth.

#11: Exploiting the fear of missing out (FOMO)

You’ll find that a lot of the most successful growth marketing strategies master the art of emotionally incentivising people to take action. Logic takes a back seat when you’re able to influence user behaviour and this is a consistent theme in growth marketing.

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions to exploit and the fear of missing (FOMO) can be particularly effective.

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You may remember a time when Gmail wasn’t the most popular email client in the world and, if you can, you can probably also remember how it seemed to replace the likes of Outlook and Hotmail overnight.

We now know that a key contributor to Gmail’s rapid growth was the exclusive invite-only access it provided. While talk was growing of this new email client that provided the best experience around, it became apparent that not just anyone could sign up and start using it.

Certain people in tech journalism had access and praised it relentlessly, further fuelling the desire to get access. Each existing user was able to invite up to 50 of their friends and the invite-only policy was so effective that invites were auctioned off on eBay .

  • Exclusivity: By adopting an invite-only system, Google created tension between those in and out of the club.
  • Incentive: This tension created incentive, which was reinforced by the exclusive features available in Gmail – namely its unmatched search capabilities.
  • Press coverage: By giving access to specified tech journalists, Gmail’s reputation built and its invite-only status was publicised, increasing incentive among those not invited.
  • Invite status: Simply being a Gmail user wasn’t the only exclusive status received during its early growth. In fact, once you finally got invited to the table, you were instantly elevated to the status of being able to invite others – and choose whom to invite.

Gmail isn’t the only tech name to use this strategy, by any means. In fact, the most famous example of using FOMO-driven exclusivity has got to be Facebook, which operated on an invite-only basis that gradually opened up to different universities across the US.

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By the time access was opened to new universities, the notorious reputation of the network and anxiety to become a part of it was so intense that hoards of new users jumped on board at the first opportunity. Before Facebook even expanded beyond the US, the world was eagerly awaiting and hoping that their country would be next to gain access.

This pent up anticipation and fear of missing out on what others already have access to was the key driver of growth for Facebook, Gmail and a bunch of other tech firms.

#12: Innovation

Another Google success story (let’s face it, there are many) is turning Chrome into the world’s number one web browser. In 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) remained the most widely used browser with a 60% market share with Mozilla’s Firefox trailing way behind in second place.

On September 2, 2008, Google launched Chrome with a measly 0.3% market share. Ten years later, Chrome would have a market share of more than 70% and Internet Explorer would be little more than a bad memory.

The key to Google’s success with Chrome has been constant innovation and offering viable alternatives to IE’s many failings. Initially, Chrome gained traction as a browser for developers – one that provided tools for creating websites and applications with consistent support for the latest web standards (two areas where IE was severely lacking).

Simply put, Internet Explorer made the web a difficult medium to design for and the user experience suffered, as a result. This meant users and developers alike gained from switching to Chrome, which was capable of providing a more robust experience.

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Google followed this up with constant innovation for the end user, including the introduction of extensions in 2009, which brought app-like functionality to the browser. In 2011, Chrome rolled out the New Tab Page, turning the browser into a more effective multitasking tool – merely the latest Chrome feature all major browsers would later imitate.

However, the killer move for Chrome was its 2012 release across all Android devices, which put the browser in the public sphere for anyone with an Android device. Soon, the browser would become the default platform for browsing the web ( Android devices outnumbered iOS devices significantly, even by the end of 2012 ).

With Android devices taking more of the mobile market share every year, Chrome was the first name that came to mind when the average internet user thought of a web browser. Smooth experiences, combined with innovative features and consistent support were central to its success and the market penetration afforded by Android was immense.

  • Innovation: By innovating developer tools and browser features, Chrome gave itself the substance required to differentiate from the already-established names.
  • Competition: Google was able to exploit Internet Explorer’s weaknesses by simply being better.
  • Market penetration: Google uses all of its resources to maximise market penetration for its key products and it did the same with Chrome – most notably the Android integration.
  • Personalisation: By personalising the experience, Google incentivises users to continue using Chrome across all of their devices.
  • Expansion: Google continues to innovate and expand its products, knowing many of them will fail.

Those last two points are particularly interesting. The personalised experience delivered to users logged into their Google account encourages them to download and use the browser across all of their devices – in order to maintain the personalised UX.

This is something we’ve seen across Google products in recent years and, in many cases, Chrome is the platform that keeps the multi-channel experience alive.

Another important note has been Google’s persistent drive to innovate new products, even if many of them are doomed to fail. For every success story like Chrome, there are multiple failures in the form of Google Plus, Wave and Google Goggles (to name a few).

Yet Google marches on as a market leader on multiple fronts, not in spite of its failures but because it strives for innovation from every angle, knowing many ventures will fail. Without the tech giant’s constant experimentation and innovation, products like Android, Chrome and Google Maps wouldn’t be the industry leaders that they are.

#13: Market penetration

We talked about market penetration in the previous example and Google’s Android strategy is one of the finest case studies of this strategy. It’s not only tech giants that use market penetration as a growth strategy, though.

First, to make sure we’re all on the same page, here’s how Investopedia defines market penetration :

“Market penetration is a measure of how much a product or service is being used by customers compared to the total estimated market for that product or service.”

The same page expands upon this definition of market penetration to say that it “also relates to the number of potential customers that have purchased a specific company’s product instead of a competitor’s product”.

Swedish furniture IKEA didn’t have a side-channel to tap into in the same way Google had with Chrome and Android. Instead, it had to gradually build a global presence over many decades, which led to stores across the world by the mid-1980s.

The company’s market penetration strategy was both simple and innovative. Instead of selling the complete product to its customers, IKEA sold flat-pack furniture that customers would put together themselves, at home. Cheaper materials and the offset of expenses for assembly and storage allowed IKEA to drastically undercut furniture prices in almost every market it expanded into.

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  • Affordability: IKEA’s ability to undercut prices in local markets established the brand as a global force by the mid-1980s.
  • Quality: By offsetting production costs, IKEA was able to maintain a high level of quality against its impossibly low prices.
  • Differentiation: The unique store experience, build-it-yourself products and uniquely Swedish branding allowed IKEA to stand tall above its competitors.
  • Agile culture: IKEA has made it through multiple recessions, the rise of e-commerce and intensifying competition to remain the biggest name in its niche.

IKEA built its strict brand culture of high quality and low prices long before the age of the internet. The company was first established in 1943 and expanded across Europe in the 1970s before branching out across the globe in the mid-90s.

By January 2018, founder Ingvar Kamprad was listed as the eighth richest person in the world in the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.

IKEA’s market penetration powered the company through the 2008 recession, allowing the company to drive down the price of its product even further without cutting down on expenses by laying off staff.

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By constantly optimising its business operations and reducing production costs, the company managed to expand further during the recession. Instead of increasing prices, it lowered them to reflect the difficult times of its customer base, opened new stores and investment in marketing to drive sales.

Increased sales allowed the company to reduce production costs without sacrificing quality by ordering raw materials in greater volume.

The company also prioritised developing a more efficient supply chain and gave more employees decision-making responsibilities to increase the speed of customer service. Faster resolutions resulted in more happy customers who continued to buy from IKEA while economic constraints encouraged less budget-conscious consumers to discover the brand for the first time.

IKEA grew its way through the recession by reducing costs, improving process and keeping more customers happy – without laying off staff or compromising its people-oriented brand image.

#14: Problem solving

Uber’s growth story has been defined by problem solving, every step of the way. The company helped define the gig economy with a two-way product that revolutionised the way people travel and, for better or worse, how people earn money.

At the core of Uber’s product was the ease of booking taxi-like transport, on demand. Founded in 2009, Uber coincided with the rise of the mobile web, turning phones into a portable taxi-booking device and the integration of mobile payments only increased the convenience of the platform.

In the space of a few years, Uber had made public transport easier, faster, more accessible and cheaper – a powerful combination that culminated in huge growth to the sum of a $70 billion valuation in 2017.

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  • Problem solving: Uber addressed the problems of price, availability, booking and paying for taxi’s, one by one.
  • Market disruption: The company turned the private transport industry upside down and created its own market.
  • Technology: Timing, tech awareness and creativity allowed Uber to capitalise on the rapidly advancing mobile web.
  • Controversy: Uber has had to deal with a lot of controversy throughout its time and the company continues to find a way forward.

Uber’s rapid growth and market disruption haven’t come without consequences. Perhaps more than any of the other unicorn Startups, Uber has faced strong criticism for perpetuating the gig economy, low wages, public safety and hurting taxi industries around the world.

In fact, Uber has probably faced more criticism than any of the other big names associated with the gig economy. Now, the company’s problem solving strategy focuses on PR management, brand image and sustaining growth.

#15: Middlemanning

Some of my favourite growth marketing stories come from brands that, when you think about it, don’t really do much of anything. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen a significant rise of non-ownership business models where brands earn billions of dollars by connecting products and services with users.

I like to call this middlemanning where the likes of Skyscanner simply connects users with plane tickets sold by airlines, Airbnb helps users book rooms from property owners and GoCompare helps users find policies sold by insurance firms.

None of these companies own or sell anything other than their respective brands. They’re basically search engines that only allow you to find a select range of things yet Skyscanner was bought out for $1.75 billion in 2016.

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  • Identify demand: Identify consumer demand where supply is held back by accessibility, complexity or price variation.
  • Supply the demand: In the case of Airbnb and Uber, they supplied the demand by using homes and vehicles owned by other people.
  • Search & comparison: Build a platform that makes it easy to search, compare and buy the products or services in demand.
  • Branding: You’ve got to have a strong branding name when you don’t have any product or service commodity yourself.
  • Growth hacking: Middlemanners need to grow quickly and secure their place in the market to ensure new businesses copying the same idea don’t get ahead.

The downside to this growth strategy is that your business model is vulnerable to imitators. Once entrepreneurs catch on to the fact that there’s money to be made by simply connecting users to a type of product or service, the race is on for rivals to secure their place in the market.

For every Uber, there’s always going to be a Lyft and dozens of other rivals hot on the heels of your idea.

#16: Exploit market trends

It’s easy to forget that Netflix launched in 1998 by renting out DVDs through the post. Streaming wasn’t even really a thing yet but the writing was already on the wall for physical content. Looking back now, you have to think Netflix launched at the worst possible in an industry that didn’t even realise it was dying.

Except, even one year after launching, Netflix proved itself as a company that understood market trends and how to react to them. In 1999, it switched from a pay-per-use model to a subscription service, which was a bold move at the time.

After less than a decade of success, Netflix had established itself as one of the biggest names in DVD and Blu-ray rentals. However, the company could already see the end was coming and, once again, switched its business model to a streaming service that would revolutionise the way people consume media.

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  • Market understanding: Netflix’s success lies entirely in its ability to read the market, scrutinise its own position and respond to trends before anyone else.
  • Relentlessness: Founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph have never been content with Netflix’s market position and their almost-cynical resistance to complacency has allowed them to identify growth hurdles and overcome them.
  • Technology: Netflix was quick to jump on streaming technology and it was also one of the first platforms to make full use of big data and personalisation to recommend content and keep users engaged.
  • Disruptive marketing: Netflix has disrupted the television industry, traditional advertising, the movie industry and even the software industry on various occasions.

If you look back at Netflix’s relatively short history, it’s amazing how many times the company has identified major industry disruptions, weaknesses in its business model and adapted to market trends ahead of everyone else.

#17: Get out there & make it happen

Earlier, we looked at Airbnb’s growth marketing story and the part that has always stood out to me is the fact it sent teams of people to locations in order to recruit more hosts. Instead of relying purely on digital channels, small teams flew to countries where the company wanted to expand and held parties to engage with property owners and introduce the platform to new hosts.

This tactic was a breakthrough and it allowed Airbnb to crack the French market for the first time when previous strategies had failed to drive real growth in the country.

Sometimes you just have to get out there and make it happen through face-to-face engagement with your target audience.

Another big name that used this strategy is Tinder, which held events and colleges and universities to introduce the dating app to students, in person. By creating a buzz among its core demographic, Tinder tripled its user base with a low-investment strategy that gained the initial traction the platform needed to scale its marketing efforts.

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  • Face-to-face: Sometimes, it pays to meet your target audiences in person to build genuine connections.
  • Personal touch: With eye contact, Q&As and one-to-one demonstrations, you can highlight the benefits for every individual.
  • Demonstration: By taking your product to target audiences, you can show them the impact it will have on their lives.
  • Onboarding: Both Airbnb and Tinder excelled at showing prospects how easy it was to start using their services, removing friction and building their userbase at the same time.

To use this tactic successfully, you need to be confident that your product or service offers something of genuine interest. The demand needs to be there but you may find digital channels don’t always get your offer in front of the right eyes or engage them as effectively as you would like.

In these scenarios, you have to get out there and take the message to them through events, meetups or other face-to-face interactions.

Essential growth marketing strategies

In the final section of our article, we look at essential growth strategies every business should have in place to ensure sustainable, long-term growth.

#18: Growth automation

To truly maximise growth, you have to reach a level of efficiency where your business wastes very little time and resources. Every second wasted is another one that can’t be invested into something else that drives growth and a key challenge is ensuring that all of your resources are pumped into where they make the most positive impact.

Sooner or later, you’re going to hit a growth ceiling if all of your resources are tied up and you’ve got nothing left to give.

The only way to truly maximise growth is to automate as much of your growth marketing efforts as you possibly can.

In the article, Marcus explains how he automated growth at Venture Harbour by eliminating wasteful processes, automating everything possible and delegating tasks that can’t be automated to team members or freelancers. As a result, his time is only invested in activities where it adds the most valuable and the same thing applies to everyone on the VH team.

For more ideas on how to automate growth, you can also take a look at these articles:

  • How to Automate Your Small Business in 5 Simple Steps
  • 30+ Marketing & Sales Tasks You Need to Automate
  • 30+ Marketing Automation Workflows You Can Implement Right Now

#19: Use free tools, freemium software as bait

Earlier, we looked at how HubSpot built a software empire by offering free tools to marketers. It’s not the only company to use this as a growth tactic, either, and it’s particularly common for software companies.

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TrueNorth is a good example of this, offering a free trial of it’s growth marketing platform on the homepage of its website. Users can access create a growth simulation, manage growth ideas and build an agile marketing plan for free within the 30-day trial.

We also developed Marketing Automation Insider to help businesses determine which marketing automation tools are right for their needs.

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By offering genuine value through free tools, we can capture leads that might be interested in our own products and demonstrate some of the capabilities they have.

#20: Disruptive marketing

We’ve looked at plenty of brands in this article that use disruptive marketing tactics to carve new niches, solve unaddressed problems, shake up competitors and command their share of the market.

As every industry becomes more crowded and competitive, disruption is one of the few tactics that allows you to stand out and do something different.xz

As Neil Patel explains in his article on disruptive marketing, it takes a certain kind of brand to pull this off, though:

“Disruptive brands don’t just push the envelope, they crumple it up and throw it in the trash. They’re not afraid to be daring and break the status quo. But for all the buzz they generate, they also need to be able to ride the peaks and valleys successfully, as not everyone will be accepting of their challenge to a traditional mindset.”

We talked about Uber earlier and this is a perfect example of a company that has created all kinds of disruption in the transport industry with great success. However, it has also had to deal with scrutiny, criticism and backlashes at various stages of its growth journey.

We see these patterns across the board and disruptive brands have to be very agile in order to respond to market trends. They also need to grow quickly so they can establish a position in the market that makes them difficult to nudge when new competitors inevitably emerge.

Where PayPal was once the disruptor, now Klarna is leading the innovation race while we’ve seen a similar transition of disruptiveness with Zoom leading the video calling software race ahead of Skype.

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The key thing with disruptive marketing is to understand that results are always short-lived. If you succeed, your disruptive status expires and you gradually (or quickly) become the norm, only for a new disrupter to come along.

What you have to do is make sure you secure your market position before this happens so you have the strength to fight off competition. Instagram is a good example to look at, which is now the norm of social media and has successfully fought off the threat of Snapchat.

#21: Optimise your onboarding process

This strategy is so important and played a crucial role in every growth marketing example we’ve looked at today – and every success story in history.

You simply can’t maximise and scale growth if people interested in your product/services find it too difficult or frustrating to complete the initial purchase or sign-up.

Of course, this is important for software companies looking to grow their user base but the same principle applies to every business – whether you’re selling products online or serving customers over the counter.

Even in a supermarket, people are only going to cue for so long before they put their basket down, walk out of the store and possibly spend the rest of their lives shopping at a direct rival.

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Earlier on in this article, we explained how optimising the onboarding process was one of the key strategies that allowed Slack to become the fastest growing B2B software provider in history – it’s that important.

In the past, we’ve also looked at how other companies have used the same strategy to maximise the percentage of successful sign-ups and purchases. Growth marketing is all about maximising and retaining customers, which starts with making it as compelling and easy as possible for new customers to open their wallets.

#22: Take care of new customers

Once the onboarding process is complete, you might think it’s time to open the champagne but this is where your actions really matter. You may have just captured the first purchase from a new customer or bagged yourself another free user but now you have to ensure they enjoy the right kind of experience to become happy, long-term customers.

As soon as people buy or sign up to something, they enter a phase of nationalisation where they try to justify the expense, time or whatever the associated cost may be.

You need to do everything you can to help them decide that, yes, they did make the right decision and they’re getting more than enough value from your product to justify the investment.

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When the time is right, you can start building brand loyalty and incentivising future purchases by rewarding customers or users for taking the next step. You might offer discounts on their next purchase or reward them for introducing your business to others (like the Dropbox example we looked at earlier).

Whichever strategies you test, make sure they’re backed up with quality customer service and technical support to keep new customers happy and help them overcome any teething issues.

#23: Retain existing customers

With your onboarding fully-optimised and your new customers smiling, the next key ingredient for continuous growth is customer retention. This is where you keep your existing customers buying and users using with the aim of maximising customer lifetime value.

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Without a solid customer retention system, you can’t sustain business growth. In order to do this, you have to hang on to your existing customers and, then attract new ones – otherwise, you’re simply replacing old customers with new ones.

On top of that, your customer retention strategy should aim to maximise the value of every customer. The first step towards this is to ensure they keep buying from you but you should also run campaigns designed to upsell customers to more expensive products or services over time.

#24: Pay others to do the growing for you

Earlier, we looked at how Dropbox used a genius referral programme to rapidly grow its user base but it wasn’t the first tech company to make this tactic famous.

In fact, it was PayPal that brought referral programmes to digital marketing fame by achieving up to 10% daily growth during the early 2000s .

marketing strategy business growth

The company literally paid people to refer its services to other users, offering up to $20 per referral during the height of the programme. Over time, the terms and restrictions became more stringent but the payment provider paid out more than $60 million dollars to recruit 100,000 new users in the space of one month.

That’s a big growth marketing investment but it brings us back to the growth hacking mentality. PayPal needed to increase its user base in order to increase revenue, corner more of the market and attract more investment to fuel further growth.

At this time, profit wasn’t the priority and the only target was to maximise growth rates.

#25: Introductory deals

One controversial growth tactic is to use introductory deals to lure new customers in and then charge them more in the future. We see this employed by broadband providers, subscription software products, banks and a wide range of companies.

marketing strategy business growth

Of course, the risk is that you can end up alienating your long-term customers, which can have a negative impact on customer loyalty and retention.

As a general rule, businesses that successfully implement introductory offers without losing their existing customers sell products or services that are intrinsically difficult to leave.

For example, changing broadband providers isn’t as straightforward as customers might like to think until they start looking into alternatives and, suddenly, their desire to switch fades.

Likewise, major storage space providers get away with charging low introductory prices because they know it’s far more difficult to move stuff out of storage than it is to move it in there in the first place.

#26: Find influencers in your space

Influencers have developed a bit of a bad reputation over the past few years but they’re not all Instagram avocado nuts that expect everything in this world for free.

Look beyond the material top layer of influencer marketing and you’ll find social media personalities that have genuine influence within any industry you could think of.

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a new camera and you head to YouTube to check out some reviews. All of the top names that turn up in your search results are essentially influencers for major camera manufacturers – some of whom are supported exclusively by one brand while others choose to promote their favourites equally.

marketing strategy business growth

Like a lot of technology sectors, the camera review space has a huge influence on sales and brands have a lot to gain by working with these YouTube personalities.

The point is: it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there are social media personalities with an influence over your target audiences that you should consider working with.

#27: Help others grow

Sometimes, we can get so caught up in ourselves and the idea of competition that we overlook the benefit of helping others grow. When you look at Airbnb today, its strength lies in the business opportunity it provides property owners who can earn significantly more through short-term rentals than long-term contracts (we’ll skip on the ethics debate).

The same promise stands behind Amazon, eBay and every advertising platform around – all promising to help businesses grow in exchange for a nominal fee.

None of these is my favourite example of a brand driving growth by helping others grow, though. This award goes to Zapier, which has built an entire software product around the basis of connecting other pieces of software to make tools more powerful for everyone.

marketing strategy business growth

Take a look at Zapier’s content strategy and you’ll see it spends very little time talking about how great its software is. Instead, it focuses on all of the apps and software tools developed by other brands and the functionality you can unlock with Zapier automations.

Zapier makes other software platforms the star of the show and publishes endless amounts of content to promote them (and, by extension, Zapier itself).

This attention doesn’t go unnoticed by other software providers, either. Zapier receives plenty of reciprocal promotion from some of the biggest names in the software game.

marketing strategy business growth

This strategy also means that users interested in any of the software platforms Zapier integrates with can discover Zapier and learn how it improves their productivity.

#28: Make change easier

Earlier, we looked at how companies use introductory offers to lure in new customers. We also explained how this is most effective for companies who make it tricky to leave their services so that the same customers will continue to pay higher prices once their introductory offer ends.

Of course, you can also take the exact opposite approach to gaining new customers by making it easier for them to change.

marketing strategy business growth

ConvertKit is a business growth platform that helps smaller businesses climb the ranks in their industry. With so many software providers in this niche, ConvertKit knows that it has to deliver on the quality of its products. However, it also understands that a lot of its target audience are already tied up in other software platforms.

Leaving any kind of business software platform can be difficult – especially if you’ve got data tied up to the service or integrations that keep you locked in.

So ConvertKit offers a concierge migration service to help businesses migrate from their existing software solutions. By removing all of the challenges involved with switching providers, ConvertKit can maximise growth by growing its own user base while taking customers away from its rivals and increasing market share at the same time.

#29: Identify your weaknesses

We’ve already talked about Netflix reinventing itself as a streaming service and the company’s history of identifying its own weaknesses to stay relevant.

Jack Dorsey also famously presented investors with a document listing 140 reasons why his new venture Square would fail . By listing all of these potential risks, Dorsey was able to address any of the concerns potential investors had and demonstrate how he would not allow any of these reasons to be the downfall of Square.

On a more psychological level, he hypothetically solved all of the potential problems that could prevent Square from being a profitable investment.

Time and again, we see that the ability to spot their own weaknesses is one of the biggest strengths a business can have.

marketing strategy business growth

The same principle works on a smaller level, too. In 2013, customer support platform Groove identified a 4.5% churn rate that was standing in the way of its growth .

By identifying this weakness and taking responsibility to address it, the company was able to reduce its churn rate to a far more satisfactory 1.6% by optimising the onboarding process (another key strategy we’ve already looked at) and taking better care of their new customers (oh look, another one).

#30: Get the fundamentals right

Finally, the essential growth marketing strategy that I want to end with is getting the fundamentals right. I know we all want to hack our way to Airbnb-level success but the simple fact is: you can’t get there with hacks and tricks alone.

You have to get the fundamentals right.

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were seasoned designers when they came up with the concept for Airbnb and UX played a crucial role throughout the company’s success story. The company also understood the importance of face-to-face marketing, branding and market disruption.

Airbnb’s growth hacking epic is a tale of understanding the rules, when to play by them and, crucially, when to break them.

Make business growth sustainable

The best growth marketing strategies address every aspect of the business and every stage of the customer journey to mcuaximise growth and build a sustainable roadmap for the future.

While rapid growth is a powerful tool that can elevate your business to new heights and even disrupt entire industries, long-term sustainability becomes the priority, sooner or later.

Long-term success is why brands like Facebook, YouTube and Airbnb are still at the top of their game while former rising stars like Vine and Google+ burned out.

Aaron Brooks

Aaron Brooks is a copywriter & digital strategist specialising in helping agencies & software companies find their voice in a crowded space.

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15 Growth Marketing Strategies that Work in 2024

marketing strategy business growth

Quick links:

A growth marketing strategy might sound like a redundant concept to brands in 2023. 

After all, every marketing strategy is intended to help grow a business, so it’s easy to assume that all marketing is actually “growth marketing.” 

However, growth marketing is actually a very specific branch of the advertising world. It involves going beyond the basics of simply attracting customers to  the top of your funnel  of generating awareness. Instead,  growth marketing  paves the way for sustainable development.

The challenge for many marketers is figuring out how to implement effective growth marketing strategies in a world where consumers, platforms, and advertising best practices are changing.

Knowing how to experiment and innovate with your marketing campaigns in an environment where  marketing budgets are dwindling  takes some serious creativity. 

But, used effectively, growth marketing can help you not only grow your customer base but retain your crucial existing customers too. 

Here’s your guide to the growth marketing strategies that still pay dividends in 2023.

What is Growth Marketing?

Analysis of business growth graph

Before we look at some of the best tactics for your growth marketing strategy in 2023, it’s worth taking a moment to define what growth marketing actually is.

Traditional marketing is an approach to promotion that focuses on short-term, campaign-oriented goals. More often than not, it focuses on the “top of the funnel,” generating awareness and demand for products, services, and brands. 

In traditional campaigns, companies review their approach to marketing on a regular, annual, or semi-annual basis, making changes gradually over time.

Growth marketing takes a more agile approach. With growth marketing, businesses focus on using data and insights to improve business outcomes throughout the entire customer journey.

The underlying idea is that by experimenting with different tactics, monitoring results, and taking a holistic view of the customer experience, businesses can achieve and retain consistent growth.

In a growth marketing strategy, companies add layers to their marketing campaigns, using A/B testing, cross-channel strategies, and innovative technology to unlock greater benefits. 

Strategies for  growth marketing  evolve over time based on the evolution of industry trends, customer requirements, and new technology. This makes growth marketing a more effective way to stay one step ahead of the competition in your industry. 

15 Growth Marketing Strategies for 2023

Businessman holding light bulb showing words around

Notably, companies investing in growth marketing rarely focus on a single tactic. 

One of the core pillars of growth marketing is constant experimentation. This means you’re likely to use a number of different strategies throughout the years to learn more about which campaigns are most likely to engage and convert your audience. 

Today, we’re focusing specifically on the growth marketing strategies that are still driving results for businesses in 2023, despite the rise of things like ChatGPT and new search algorithms.

1. Full-Funnel Content Marketing 

Content marketing  isn’t just a growth marketing strategy. Around  70% of B2C marketers  and 73% of B2B marketers are consistently using content to connect with their audience. The difference between a standard content marketing campaign and one tailored for growth is a holistic approach. 

Rather than just looking for ways to draw attention to your brand, you think about how you can generate value for your customers throughout the entire customer journey, before, during, and after a purchase. This means mapping your customer’s journey from start to finish and creating content that appeals to every stage in the funnel. 

A great example of this comes from HubSpot. The company focuses so heavily on content marketing you’re likely to find a web page on Google when searching virtually any marketing term. HubSpot produces blogs to appeal to every one of its customer segments, from sales professionals to service experts. It also explores a range of different types of content. 

There are  free courses and certifications  available which teach customers how to use the HubSpot tools more effectively after a purchase. Case studies show customers why they should consider buying HubSpot in the first place. While blogs and eBooks generate audience attention.

The company makes use of both paid and organic social media opportunities and even hosts regular webinars, which earn  thousands of registrations  on a consistent basis. 

2. Innovative Search Engine Optimization

SEO acronyms and mouse pointer

Search engine optimization  and content marketing generally go hand-in-hand. Even in a world where search engine algorithms are changing, thanks to the inclusion of generative AI technologies in search systems, SEO is still crucial for engaging and attracting leads. 

SEO is a powerful growth strategy because it doesn’t just help customers to find your products and services when they’re in the early stages of the purchasing funnel. Good SEO will consistently help you to connect with your audience over time. 

The higher your website ranks, the more authority you’ll gain in the eyes of your consumers, increasing loyalty and retention. However, investing in SEO for the new age of marketing does require companies to take a slightly different approach. 

It’s not enough to simply choose the right keywords and post content constantly anymore. Companies need to  go in-depth  with their SEO strategies, focusing on user experience and value. 

In some cases, this also means adapting to new kinds of search strategies. There are more than 4.2 billion  voice assistants  in the world as of 2023, and voice-based search is growing more common every day. Adapting your SEO strategy to include more natural language keywords could be crucial to generating growth in the years ahead. 

A good way to do this is to find ways to answer common customer questions. An FAQ page, such as YouTube’s clean, fresh, and  convenient FAQ section , is excellent for appealing to voice search engines. It even helps YouTube to rank at the top of the search engines for specific queries in featured “snippets” on Google search results. 

3. Community Building

Communities have emerged as an essential part of the digital landscape in recent years. The  rise of social media , combined with increasing interest in sites like Reddit, is pushing companies to invest more heavily in ways to engage and consistently connect with customers. 

Building a community for your customers is a fantastic way to make sure your customers feel more invested in your brand. It forms emotional connections that lead to better customer retention, longer lifecycles, and even the creation of brand ambassadors and advocates. 

An excellent example of the power of community  comes from GitHub , the developer platform that built community elements directly into its product offering. GitHub encourages coders to come together to work on projects and solve problems in an open environment.

There are contribution-tracking features, options for following projects, and even competitions and challenges hosted on the platform, to bring people closer together. It’s this approach to community development that helped GitHub to earn more than 100,000 users within its first year. 

What’s more, GitHub’s community environment provides the company with an in-depth insight into its target audience. Nurturing your community is an excellent way to learn more about the problems they face, the goals they want to accomplish, and the issues they need to solve. 

4. Referral Programs

Sephora's Beauty Insider referral

Speaking of activating your audience, referral programs represent one of the most powerful and useful growth marketing strategy options in the world today. As customers become more desensitized towards traditional marketing methods, they’re becoming more reliant on the opinions of others.

In fact, 92% of customers say they trust referrals from people they know. Referral marketing is your opportunity to take advantage of the enduring power of  word-of-mouth advertising . 

An excellent and frequently referenced example of the power of referral marketing comes from Dropbox. Instead of rewarding users with financial incentives when they sent a referral to the business, the company offered increased storage space. 

Every friend who introduced a new user to Dropbox would receive an extra 500MB of free storage, with a limit of around 16GB. This program was so successful it  drove a 3900% growth  in just 15 months. Dropbox enhanced the impact of its referral program by offering two-way rewards (For both users) and even adding referral options to its onboarding process. 

Another example comes from  Sephora’s Beauty  program, which consistently rewards customers not just for referrals but also for actions like simply making a purchase.

5. Leveraging Customer Psychology

Growth marketing is often a  combination of art and science . It’s about connecting with your audience on a deeper level, leveraging their emotions, interests, and sometimes even their fears. 

In today’s complex economy, buyer cycles are growing longer all the time. Customers are increasingly concerned about making the “wrong choice” with their purchase, so they’re much slower to make a purchase. This can lead to a lot of abandoned carts and lost sales. 

Leveraging customer psychology is an excellent way to push people to act faster. For instance, countless companies use “Fear of Missing Out” or “FOMO” tactics on their store or website to create a sense of urgency among their consumers. 

Visit Booking.com, and you’ll notice the company constantly draws attention to how many rooms, apartments, or bookings are available at any given time. Amazon takes a similar approach, showing how many items are left in stock at any given time. 

In 2023, there are plenty of new ways to implement FOMO into your marketing campaigns, from using dynamic alerts on your website to show when other customers make a purchase to running limited-time sales and discounts. 

6. Hyper-Personalization

Cloud with tech circle background with connection circuit

Around  99% of marketers  say that personalization helps them to build stronger relationships with customers. Since the best growth marketing strategy will always focus on both customer acquisition and retention, this makes personalization a key tool for any business leader. 

Thanks to a variety of data collection tools and emerging AI solutions capable of adapting product suggestions and recommendations to customer needs, it’s never been easier to implement personalization into your marketing strategy. 

Netflix, Amazon, and Walmart all use generative AI to recommend solutions to their audience based on previous purchases, browsing history, search terms, and other factors. Another excellent example comes from Spotify. The music-sharing company takes advantage of the data that customers are willing to share about their listening habits.

Using machine learning models, Spotify recommends new tracks to users based on their listening history, turning its platform into a “discovery” environment for music lovers. The company even runs regular “Spotify-wrapped” campaigns to highlight customers’ listening habits for them.

This not only leads to a more personalized experience for customers but it also ensures Spotify has a way to encourage customers to share their Spotify experiences with others. In 2020, Spotify wrapped increased the company’s mobile app downloads by  around 21%  in just one week. 

7. Re-Engagement Campaigns

A growth marketing strategy should help you to maintain your connection with your existing customers for as long as possible, increasing customer lifetime value and revenue. According to one study, a company can increase its  growth by 50%  just by minimizing its churn rate. 

Re-engagement strategies are relatively easy to implement in today’s world. You can experiment with retargeting campaigns across paid advertising platforms like Facebook and Google, designed to draw customers back to your site. Email marketing automation tools make it easy to send cart abandonment messages to customers with personalized recommendations.

There are even CRM tools that can help you track engagement levels among your consumers so you know instantly which segments need further attention. Groove used behavioral segmentation to identify people who have gone dormant in their subscriber list and reduced their  churn rate to 1.6% . 

Old Navy is an excellent example of a company using re-engagement tactics to its advantage. When customers stop clicking on email campaigns and making purchases, they send messages asking customers to update their email preferences, so they can send more valuable content. They also ask customers for their birth date in exchange for a free treat on their birthday.

8. Event Marketing

As the digital world grows more crowded and consumers seek more emotional connections following the pandemic, event marketing has become increasingly popular. According to some studies, 48% of brands  achieve ROIs of up to 500%  with the right event campaigns. 

Event marketing can be particularly useful for business owners who want to achieve growth in the B2B landscape. Around  97% of B2B marketers  believe live events have a significant impact on their business outcomes. 

Events deliver a number of benefits to businesses searching for growth. They offer an opportunity to connect with customers in a more face-to-face environment than most advertising campaigns. Plus, they’re a great way to demonstrate thought leadership. 

In today’s world, events don’t have to be in-person to deliver excellent results. Around  93% of event marketers  say they’re planning on hosting virtual events going forward, which include online video streams, webinars, conferences, and even AR and VR-based events. 

For instance, the  Microsoft team  runs a host of regular events, both in-person and online, for anyone to attend. Each event is tailored to the needs of a specific audience, from business leaders to developers and even everyday consumers. 

The events give the company an opportunity to share updates about its latest releases and products, as well as a way to build buzz about business news. 

9. Disruptive Marketing

Business hand using tablet with Digital Disruption icon on virtual screen

As mentioned above, many growth marketing strategies focus on experimentation. Sometimes, generating rapid growth means finding ways to think outside of the box and connect with your customers on a different level. Disruptive marketing is all about flipping the script with traditional marketing techniques, using experiential experiences and new technology. 

While the initial results of disruptive marketing campaigns may be short-lived, they’re an excellent way to demonstrate thought leadership and build excitement around your brand. Disruptive marketing can also be a powerful way to set yourself apart from the competition.

The key to disruptive marketing is to find ways of reaching your audience that haven’t been done before. A great example comes from Netflix, which knows how to connect with its audience both online and offline. After the success of  Squid Game in 2022 , Netflix began installing “red light, green light” dolls in various locations around the world to celebrate the renewal of its popular show.

The dolls interacted with people, allowing them to win prizes if they were able to complete the game successfully. This gave Netflix an excellent opportunity to build hype for a show that would only be released again a year later. 

10. Influencer Marketing

The rise of the creator economy in recent years has only made  influencer marketing  more powerful. As mentioned above, today’s consumers are looking for guidance from reputable sources to help them determine which products and solutions they should buy. 

By 2025, influencer marketing is set to have a value of  around $24.1 billion  as more companies partner with innovators to help them reach their target audience. TikTok and Instagram have even launched creator marketplace tools, making it easier for brands to collaborate on campaigns. 

Investing in influencer marketing for growth in 2023 will require companies to take a slightly different approach. There’ll be a greater focus on micro-influencers and more natural, authentic content in the years ahead. 

Instead of simply paying celebrities to support pre-designed campaigns, business leaders will need to think about how they can collaborate with influencers more effectively to create content. 

Fashion Nova home page

For instance,  Fashion Nova  has grown its brand considerably over the years, thanks to its investment in influencer marketing. The company has around 5,000 influencers working with it to share content that feels authentic, realistic, and natural. In fact, the marketing strategy has been so successful for the brand; the company managed to sell more than $500 million in 2021 alone.

11. Empowering Existing Customers

Since a strong growth marketing strategy focuses on customers throughout their entire purchasing lifecycle, it’s important for brands to think about how they can empower existing users. Traditional marketing efforts only concentrate on capturing sales. 

However, effective growth marketing efforts look for ways to delight and engage customers after they’ve made a purchase. Creating a powerful onboarding strategy, leveraging concepts like gamification, can be an excellent way to increase the customer lifetime value of each of your consumers and improve your results over time. 

Teaching customers how to use your products with the right onboarding strategy means they’re more likely to feel loyal and committed to your brand. A good way to get started is to evaluate the issues your customers might have with your product or service, then create an onboarding program that allows them to seamlessly address those concerns. 

For instance, the Shine company boasts an onboarding completion  rate of around 80%  by providing customers with progress bars to help them move through the process and offering step-by-step guidance every step of the way. They even shower their customers in digital confetti when they complete a stage of the onboarding process. 

12. Social Proof

We’ve already mentioned that customers are relying more heavily on input from other consumers to help them make purchases these days. They want to see genuine evidence that every company they work with can actually deliver the results they’re looking for. That’s where social proof comes in.

Social proof in your growth marketing strategy makes it easy for customers to make intelligent purchases, using reviews, quotes, and testimonials to guide them. You can generate social proof in a range of ways, from using branded hashtags to encourage user-generated content to recruit brand  ambassadors and influencers  to work with your company. 

One excellent example of a company that knows how to leverage the power of social proof comes from Airbnb. The company found around half of its guests generally visit a host profile at least once before making a booking. A host without reviews was four times less likely to get a booking.

With these insights,  Airbnb decided  to make it easier for consumers to leave reviews. Using a double-blind review system, Airbnb allows visitors to review the hosts they book with, but it also encourages hosts to review their customers. The parties are also both encouraged to write a review within 14 days so the experience is still fresh in their mind.

13. Using Freebies to Increase Sales

trueNorth home pag

Everyone loves getting something for free. As consumers become more concerned about how they spend their money, they’re increasingly looking for ways to ensure they’re going to get a good deal before they pay for anything. 

Demos and free trials can be an excellent way for companies to drive growth, particularly in the SaaS industry. With a “freemium” product strategy, organizations give their customers a chance to trail their product or service, see its benefits, and develop an interest in the solution. 

For instance, True North gives companies access to a  free trial  of its growth marketing platform, where they can access all of the most valuable tools the business has to offer. The idea is that by the end of the trial, customers will be so reliant on the software they won’t want to lose it. 

Free tools can also be an excellent way to showcase the credibility and value of a business. For instance, CrazyEgg offers a range of free tools customers can access to help with keyword research and other marketing tactics. All they need to give in exchange is their email address, which means the company accesses leads it can nurture in the future. In a similar vein, if you're operating an online shirt printing business, offering a free design tool can hook potential customers.

14. Solving Problems

The businesses that grow the fastest, and retain their growth the longest, are generally the ones that can actually solve crucial problems for their target audience. Most companies start with a focus on a specific pain point that they want to address for their target audience. 

However, as your customers evolve and the market grows, you may find the priorities of your buyers change over time. That’s why it’s so important to invest in consistently collecting data from your customers in the form of a consistent feedback loop. Asking customers to share their concerns, issues, and problems with you on a regular basis can drive amazing opportunities for growth. 

With feedback from customers, businesses can invest in new strategies and solutions that set them apart from the competition and ensure ongoing loyalty. For instance,  Microsoft is constantly  upgrading its Teams platform based on feedback from its community. 

The company creates open platforms and environments where customers can ask questions, request new products, and even track the innovation timeline of the business. Using this strategy, Microsoft is able to constantly stay up to date on what its customers really need. 

Microsoft’s feedback loop and approach to problem-solving have turned Teams into one of the most popular apps of all time, with more than  280 million monthly  active users as of 2023. 

15. Cross-Channel Marketing

marketing strategy business growth

Finally, one of the best ways to enhance your growth marketing strategy in 2023 is to expand beyond the basics of your marketing mix. Digital transformation has accelerated in the last few years, leading to customers finding a host of new ways to connect with their favorite brands and enhance their purchasing journey. They expect companies to take a multi-channel approach to engagement. 

With cross-channel marketing, you connect with customers on all of the channels they use on a regular basis, using tools like SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app messages, social media, direct email, and other channels. This ensures you can connect with your audience regardless of where they are and maintain a relationship over time. 

The key to success with cross-channel marketing is understanding where your customers actually interact with your industry and your business. Mapping the customer journey with data analytics and insights will allow you to determine touchpoints for growth. 

For instance, Mercedez Benz has a fantastic cross-channel marketing strategy that combines paid, owned, and earned media with a  community-building strategy . The company also ensures its connection with its customers on social media, using key influencer campaigns. 

The company uses  branded hashtags on Instagram  and micro-influencer accounts to connect with customers on a deeper level and keep them up to date on product releases. 

Bonus Tip: Constantly Track and Measure

With every growth marketing strategy mentioned above, business leaders should be able to not only increase their access to new customers but retain more of their existing buyers. However, it’s important to remember that growth marketing requires consistent work. 

With growth marketing, you don’t just implement a campaign and then review your results several months later. You need to be committed to constantly collecting data from every campaign and experimenting with different strategies. 

Constant A/B testing is essential to a strong growth marketing strategy. You’ll need to experiment with your content, your marketing methods, and even the targeting tools you use to ensure you’re getting the best ROI from each campaign. 

Growth marketing requires an investment in constant measurement and the use of the right KPIs and metrics to track the results of your efforts. Make sure you’re investing in the right tools to ensure you can constantly analyze the outcomes of your campaigns. 

More importantly, make sure you’re willing to make changes rapidly based on the results you gather. Don’t be afraid to experiment constantly to upgrade your results. 

Choosing the Right Growth Marketing Strategy for 2023

Growth is something every business wants to achieve. While it’s not the only metric worth monitoring when you’re building your company, it’s something you should constantly focus on with your marketing efforts. Investing in the right growth marketing strategy could be crucial to unlocking the true potential of your business and connecting with new and existing customers. 

The methods outlined above are all tried-and-tested examples of growth marketing strategies that can help you to form deeper relationships with your target audience and increase your revenue. Used correctly, they can ensure you not only achieve your growth goals but maintain exceptional growth for years to come. 

If you’re struggling with unlocking the potential of growth marketing, connecting with the experts can help. Reach out to Growth Collective today to find a growth marketing professional who can work with your business to deliver new opportunities. 

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The Complete Guide to Building a Growth Marketing Plan

Want to minimize risk when running campaigns? Learn how to build a repeatable growth marketing plan that helps you reach your marketing goals.

Jeanna Barrett

Jeanna Barrett

Aug 14, 2021

You’ve just taken a pretty big step in plotting out your brand’s growth journey. You know the destination (long-term, sustainable, and measurable growth), and your vehicle (your brand) is serviced and ready to hit the road. What you’re missing now is the map — and without one, you can expect to take a lot of detours.

Consider this your roadmap. Creating a growth marketing plan will give you a trip itinerary that puts you on the most direct route to achieving brand growth. Sure, there will be pit stops along the way, but by following the path we’ve outlined here — and making good use of our growth marketing plan template — you’ll be ready to put your brand into high gear.

So, pack your bags and grab the keys, because we’re ready to roll.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a long-term, strategic methodology that works to help brands achieve sustainable, measurable growth. It is a holistic and data-driven approach that leverages end-to-end funnel optimization to find, attract, convert, retain, and grow buyers into loyal brand advocates and evangelists.

While traditional marketing generally focuses on the wide end of the funnel, growth marketing meets consumers at every stage of an extended “Pirate Funnel.”

growth marketing pirate funnel

How to build a growth marketing plan for your b2b brand.

Once you’ve decided which strategy or strategies will help you achieve the growth you’re looking for, it’s time to lay out your roadmap and design your growth marketing plan. Here is where you begin to take a tactical approach to reaching your goals, setting out checkpoints along the way to make sure you’re on track to reach your final destination. 

Define Your Product Vision and Set High-level Goals

Your product vision defines your ideal future state for the product or service you’re marketing. Good product visions should be both aspirational and attainable, and they should solve a key pain point your buyers have.

product vision statement

Jeanna is the Founder & Chief Remote Officer for First Page Strategy, an award-winning, fully distributed marketing agency. Jeanna has a combined 17 years of inbound marketing experience at venture-backed startups, digital agencies and Fortune 500 companies, with an expertise focus on business and tech. She's been named 'Top 40 Under 40' of brand marketers and 'Best in the West' for financial technology marketing. In 2016, Jeanna left the U.S. to lay roots and build her business in Belize, and in 2021 First Page was named #43 in fastest growing private companies of Inc. 5,00 Regionals: California.

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  • Growth Marketing

13 Growth Marketing Strategies for Your Business Success

  • 11 min read
  • Last updated December 20, 2022
  • By Jessica Huhn

growth marketing strategies

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Only about two-thirds of businesses stay open for more than two years. Only half of businesses make it to their fifth year, and only a third make it to their tenth year. Sustaining growth is key to making sure your business stays around for the long haul.

If you want your business to thrive for years to come, you’ll need to select the right growth marketing strategies for  scaling your business . Today, we’ll break down 12 growth marketing strategies you can use to sustain your business.

What are growth marketing strategies?

Growth marketing strategies are centered around retention and keep an eye on the long-term success of your business. After all, true growth also entails retaining your existing customer base. And when you select a growth marketing strategy, you’ll probably use it for the long haul.

We go over 12 different growth marketing strategies, so you can choose the ones that will work best for your business.

Foundational growth marketing

We’ll start with the foundational strategies you need even before selecting specific growth marketing strategies. First, you’ll need to create buyer personas, understand the marketing funnel’s mechanics, and set goals for your growth efforts.

1. Create buyer personas

To know which growth marketing strategies will work best, you need to know your target audience and what motivates them. The best way to start is by creating buyer personas. Buyer personas help you understand how to best tailor growth marketing strategies to satisfy your customers.

Remember each persona describes a very specific customer and their position, but you can still create multiple buyer personas to cover all your bases. The following is some information to help guide you in creating your buyer persona:

  • Relevant demographic information (age, gender, education, employment position, location, etc.)
  • Overall goals and values
  • Needs they seek to meet
  • Challenges, problems, and pain points
  • Sources of information buyers trust most (specific print or digital media outlets, influencers, peers)
  • Buyer’s role in the purchase process (i.e., Are multiple stakeholders involved in purchasing your product?)
  • Any obstacles and objections that might keep them from buying (or that might lead to existing customer churn)

Now that you know what motivates your audience, you have a better idea of how to both gain and keep your customers.

2. Understand the buyer’s funnel

Growth marketing strategies are largely focused on retention – but that’s just one part of the marketing funnel. As a whole, growth marketing looks at all five stages of the buyer’s journey:

  • Acquisition

These are also known as the pirate metrics, or AARRR . It’s vital to understand all five stages of the buyer’s journey and how a customer moves from one stage to the other.

How does a buyer enter your funnel? What convinces them to move through it? While answering these questions, make sure to always keep your created buyer personas in mind.

3. Set SMART goals

You know your buyer personas and how they move through the funnel. Now, you have one step left to establish strategic foundations for growth – that step is setting the concrete goals you want to accomplish.

In most effective goal-setting, make sure your goals are SMART : specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Smart Goals

Specific: Your goals should not be vague. For example, growth marketing goals often  include increasing the customer retention rate or referral rate by a specific amount.

Measurable: It’s best to use a set metric to track your success. A good metric for growth goals may be tracking customer retention rate or customer lifetime value, while referral goals can include the percentage of customers who refer friends, or the percentage of successful referrals.

Attainable: Ambition is awesome, but be sure the goals you set are ones you can realistically achieve. .

Relevant: To be effective, your goals must be truly worthwhile and applicable to your business.

Timely: In what timeframe do you need to achieve the goal – within the next quarter? The next year? Goals work best when they have a set date and can be realistically reached in the given timeframe.

To give you an example of how to turn a general goal into a SMART goal, say your growth goal is to simply increase customer retention. The SMART version of this goal would be to “Increase customer retention rate by 10% in the next quarter.” The goal will also define the steps necessary to achieve the goal. And that’s where the growth marketing strategies below come in!

Specific growth marketing

You’ve laid the foundations for successful growth marketing strategies. But which strategies will best help you meet your retention and referral goals? Let’s dive into the different types of growth marketing strategies below:

4. Focus on customer retention

We can’t say this enough: customer retention is vital for any business.

Retention-focused strategies aim to increasing a customer’s lifetime value , and come into play during all aspects of a customer’s journey and experience. Ultimately, they help increase the likelihood of a customer staying loyal to your business.

In this section, we cover data-driven growth marketing strategies for encouraging retention at every stage of a customer’s journey.

5. Gamify onboarding and usage

After a customer buys something from you, onboarding is the first experience they will have with your product, especially if you offer a software, app, subscription, or other service.

It’s important to make your onboarding process as seamless as possible. After all, one of the  business benefits  of having a customer who knows how to use your product are more likely to continue using it.

One smart growth marketing strategy is to gamify your onboarding process by breaking it down into steps. Consider the following:

  • The features you want your users to be acquainted with
  • The actions you want them to complete to encourage repeated use
  • The ways you want them to share your brand with friends (particularly via social media)

These will be the steps customers can complete to advance in your onboarding “game.” In this game, you’ll also need to give rewards for each step or milestone a customer completes. The rewards could be tangible (i.e., unlocking more features or time with the product), or they could be badges and achievements that mark the customers’ progress. Or, you could use a bit of both!

Additionally, the  best gamified onboarding process should extend well past the beginning of users’ time with the product and encourage them to become a “pro user.”

Integrating fun and familiar game elements into a non-game environment is a great way to keep users engaged.  Think about how Duolingo revolutionized the language-learning environment with addicting game elements , or how apps like LinkedIn use levels to encourage users to advance from “beginners” all the way to “pros.”

Some apps, like Waze, even require continued usage for users to earn and keep higher ranks, as they have to compete against others for their ranks.

waze points

6. Provide quality educational resources

You already know content marketing works well for building trust and gaining new users. Well, the right content can also go a long way in encouraging retention.

A good way to do this is by creating a detailed knowledge base, with resources in varied mediums, so your customers can access the information they need for continued success.

Software marketing company HubSpot goes above and beyond, by encouraging retention through free detailed courses and certifications. The site produces over 50 pieces of content every week, providing its users with plenty of actionable and  educational insights to guide their marketing strategy. Not to mention their HubSpot Academy and countless inbound certifications they offer all for free!

Through their free content, podcasts, webinars, and events, HubSpot was able to grow a cult-like following. And they don’t show any signs of slowing down, with their last valuation coming in at over $6 billion. So, take a cue from HubSpot, and don’t be stingy with your educational resources to promote growth!

hubspot academy

7. Create a brand community

When you create a community for your customers, they feel more connected and invested in your brand. This emotional bond formed with their peers and your brand can lead to more retention and referrals.

A brand community also adds value, as it encourages members to help and answer each other’s questions. An additional strategy is integrating a community element into your product, as Github did.

Github lets coders come together to work on projects and solve problems in an open-source environment. The contribution-tracking feature and ability to follow projects adds elements of both team-building and competition – Appcues describes the platform as “a social network for coding.”

Github grew to 100,000 users within its first year, mainly because people realized the product became better and better the more people were involved. What are they ways you can create this feeling with your own product?

Giving customers a chance to test your product or service before buying, and therefore using the product-led growth method will significantly help you gain customer loyalty.

8. Use behavioral analytics to reduce churn

Having a solid customer relationship management software (CRM) to collect and analyze customer behavior is key to retention.

A customer satisfaction survey, for example, can help you find out why customers stick with you and why they churn. Unfortunately, many customers won’t tell you when they run into difficulties.   And if they struggle for too long, they’re likely to churn.

To counter customer churn , you have to carefully analyze your customers’ behavior patterns to decipher the common behavior that lead to retention versus behavior that lead to churn.

Then, based on these types of behavior, you can send targeted messages to those at risk of churn to help them get past the snag. By being proactive, you’ll be able to increase retention.

Customer support platform Groove really nails this customer retention strategy. The company used Kissmetrics to compare the behavior of loyal customers to those of customers who churned. It found that users who were able to create a support widget in just a few minutes were more likely to stick with the platform. But those who couldn’t grasp how to complete this task quickly tended to churn.

Groove then sent targeted emails to those who were struggling, containing information that helped them along with widget creation and back to using the platform. With this strategy, the company successfully reduced their churn rate from 4.5% to 1.6%.

9. Encourage users to mirror the behavior of loyal customers

Just like it’s vital to identify and stop behavior that leads to churn, it’s crucial to encourage the prime behavior that creates customer retention.

Gamification is one way to encourage this behavior. But even better is to simply embed them into common use patterns. In other words, create habits.

Slack provides an example of how this works. They studied which types of behavior most often led to retention, and found that teams that sent over 2,000 messages were extremely likely to stick with Slack.

This narrowed the focus: How to get teams to send this many messages on their platform? The team came up with as many ways as they could to get people to send messages back and forth. They also used the Slackbot for onboarding, as a way to show new users how to start conversations, send files, and use shortcuts.

Slack’s goal was to make messaging as easy as possible, and get users to replace processes such as sending emails with the quick messaging.

slack example

Referral-focused growth marketing

Referral strategies encourage existing customers to tell their friends about you, effectively turning the AARRR funnel into a loop of growth. Customers who find out about your business through a friend are more likely to remain your customers. In the long run, referrals drive growth through customer acquisition and customer retention!

10. Use social proof

What is social proof? Coined by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence , it’s described as “informational social influence.” People who aren’t sure about how to act usually tend to follow the behavior of others in that situation. (Learn more about social proof marketing. )

In a business setting, social proof helps guide people when they aren’t sure whether or not to make a purchase. Many times, they look to the opinions of others who have had experience with the product.

ways to use social proof

Social proof marketing strategies make it easier for people to find trusted, positive opinions about your product. These strategies include:

  • Making it easy for customers to leave reviews of your business
  • Focusing on getting reviews from your most satisfied customers, so you’re more likely to get positive reviews
  • Using quotes from reviews as testimonials on your website
  • Encouraging user-generated content  and social media sharing about your brand
  • Recruiting brand ambassadors
  • Recruiting influencers

Airbnb knows reviews are key to driving customer trust, and in turn, driving their company growth. Around half the number of guests visit a host profile at least once before they finalize an Airbnb booking. “ A host without reviews is about four times less likely to get a booking than a host that has at least one ,” and properties with more than ten reviews are ten times more likely to be booked.

Knowing this, Airbnb made leaving reviews both easier and more honest, as a way to encourage authentic social proof. Airbnb’s review system is also double-blind. The traveler leaves a public review and star rating of a property for their host, and the host reviews how the guest treated the property. But , they can’t view each other’s feedback until both have written their reviews. The parties also must write a review within 14 days, so their experience is still fresh in mind.

airbnb reviews

11. Harness word of mouth as a channel

Word of mouth is a guaranteed way to drive growth, as people trust the word of their peers. Yes, word of mouth can be unpredictable, but there are some reliable ways to help drive it. Collectively, these ways are known as “word of mouth as a channel,” and there are some key characteristics they must have:

  • Must be measurable: You must be able to track its success through data and prove its ROI.
  • Must be improvable: A marketer needs to be able to improve the results of a channel through tactics and strategies.

Thus, when we talk about word of mouth as a channel, we’re talking about the word of mouth that you can orchestrate and measure. So while organic word of mouth isn’t part of the channel, any measurable channel that influences word of mouth is.)

Strategies involved in word of mouth as a channel include referral programs, customer reviews, user-generated content, and creating brand ambassadors, influencers, and affiliates. (As you may notice, many of these strategies also fall under social proof strategies – and yes, social proof and word of mouth go hand in hand!)

All word of mouth is driven by four pillars: product, customer service, value, and story. To learn how these drivers work, and see stories of how companies have used them to their full advantage, check out Word of Mouth Uncovered and our roundup of B2B referral stories .

12. Create a viral loop

Start a referral program, configure it properly, and you’re well on your way to creating a viral loop. A viral loop is a mechanism that drives continuous referrals for continuous growth. It’s how you drive your existing customers to refer others to your brand, and in turn, get those newly referred customers to tell even more people about you. This creates a lasting loop that can lead to potentially exponential growth. (Get all the details on how to create successful viral loops here .)

Dropbox referral program

All referral programs have the goal of creating viral loops, but perhaps the most successful loop was the one Dropbox created through its referral program. They offered 500MB of free storage space to each referrer and their friend whenever the friend signed up for Dropbox. Within the first 30 days of their referral program, they generated close to 3 million new users.

While this type of growth doesn’t happen every day, you can effectively apply the strategy to your company.

  • Create a two-sided referral program, which rewards both the referrer and friend
  • Allow customers to earn cumulative rewards for referring multiple friends
  • Tie the rewards back to your business (with discounts, store credits or free features) to give both new and existing customers a reason to stick around
  • Make your referral program easy to share

Viral loops and viral growth are closely connected. Be sure to check out our pieces on strategies to drive viral growth .

13. Create a growth team to generate growth marketing strategies throughout the funnel

A growth team is a group of employees with diverse disciplines who are dedicated to driving business growth. The team examines how to drive growth across all business departments, and runs growth experiments, or growth marketing strategy tests, to improve processes within all parts of the funnel.

Wrapping things up

Use these growth marketing strategies to focus on customer retention and referrals, and you’ll lay solid foundations to sustain your business. Start by encouraging the customer behaviors that lead to retention, create a community, and then use the social proof to your advantage. And remember, growth marketing strategies are meant to last through the long term. All the best in implementing the strategies that are right for your business!

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What Are the Major Growth Marketing Strategies? | McGRAW

marketing strategy business growth

When you’re a business leader, you’re always looking for ways to grow your company. However, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd in today's competitive market.

That’s where growth marketing comes into play. Growth marketing is a data-driven marketing strategy that focuses on acquiring and retaining customers at scale. It focuses on all aspects of the customer journey.

In this blog, we’ll cover the basic growth marketing strategies and how they can help grow your business. We’ll go over the basics of a growth marketing strategy, why it’s important, and how you can create your own effective plan.

What is a Growth Marketing Strategy?

marketing-strategy-meeting-office

A growth marketing strategy is a   data-driven strategy to acquire and retain customers in large numbers . It’s a holistic approach that captures all aspects of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase to loyalty. The ultimate goal of growth marketing efforts is to create sustainable, long-term growth for your business.

Unlike traditional marketing strategies focusing on short-term methods or one-off campaigns, growth marketing is an ongoing process. It’s all about testing and constantly refining different tactics and strategies. This will help you find the most effective ways to reach and engage with your target audience.

Successful   growth marketing strategies require using data to make informed decisions . Moreover, a growth plan involves constantly adapting to changes in consumer behavior and market trends. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach since every business is unique and requires its own custom strategy.

Benefits of a Growth Marketing Strategy

businessman-presents-marketing-results

Implementing a growth marketing strategy can lead to numerous benefits   for your business, including:

  • Increased brand awareness:   By taking a targeted and data-driven approach, you can introduce your brand to more potential customers.
  • Improved return on investment (ROI):   Constantly testing and refining different strategies can help you find the most cost-effective ways to acquire and retain customers. This, in turn, results in a greater return on investment
  • Improved customer acquisition:   You can experiment with different strategies and constantly adjust to find the best ways to acquire new customers.
  • Better engagement and retention:   A growth marketing strategy considers the entire customer journey. This enables you to create personalized customer experiences that keep existing customers returning.
  • Customized targeting:   With data-driven insights, you can better understand your target audience and create more targeted campaigns that resonate with them.

Four Major Growth Marketing Strategies

businessman-analyzes-business-growth-digital-augmented-reality-graphics

While there are many strategies and tactics for growth marketing, four main ones have proven effective:

1.Product-Led Growth

This strategy focuses on creating a product that drives organic growth through referrals and word-of-mouth. By prioritizing customer satisfaction and retention, businesses can create a viral effect that leads to sustainable growth. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies often use this approach. However, it can be applied to any business offering a product or service.

The effectiveness of a product-led growth strategy is often determined by a variety of techniques, including:

  • A/B Testing:   Comparing two versions of a marketing material to see which one performs better.
  • Adoption Tracking:   Examining the user acceptance of a new product.
  • Net Promoter Score:   A customer satisfaction survey that measures loyalty and likelihood of recommendation.
  • Referral Programs:   Encouraging customers to refer others to use your product or service.

2.Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is all about attracting potential customers with valuable and relevant content. Companies can establish authority and attract website visitors by creating informative blogs, videos, and social media posts. Inbound marketing can turn these visitors into leads and customers through strategic lead management and conversion strategies.

Some key elements of an inbound marketing strategy include:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO):   Optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • Content Marketing:   Creating valuable and informative content that appeals to potential customers.
  • Social Media Marketing:   Using social media platforms to share and promote your content, connect with your audience, and build relationships.
  • Email Marketing:   Using B2C or   B2B customer databases   to nurture leads through targeted email campaigns.

inbound-marketing-magnet-new-customers

3.Social Media Marketing

With billions of active users, social media is a powerful way to reach and engage with potential customers. Through targeted ads, promotions, and community building, businesses can use social media to achieve their goals. These include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, and acquiring new customers. 

Some of the most popular social media marketing strategies include:

  • Influencer Marketing:   Partnering with influencers to promote your brand or products to their followers.
  • Hashtag Campaigns:   Encouraging users to share content tied to a specific hashtag, increasing brand visibility and engagement.
  • Targeted Ads:   Creating ads to show to specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

4.Growth Hacking

Growth hacking involves creative and unconventional techniques for driving growth. It often uses technology and data to find unique ways to reach and engage with potential customers. This approach is popular with start-ups and small businesses with limited budgets thanks to its affordability and efficiency.

Some examples of growth hacking techniques include:

  • Viral Marketing:   Creating content designed to be shared and go viral, increasing brand exposure.
  • Guerilla Marketing:   Using unconventional methods to promote a product or service.
  • User Experience (UX) Optimization:   Using data and user feedback to improve a website or mobile app's overall experience and conversion rates.

What to Consider for Your Strategy

Once your growth marketing strategy is in place, it's important to monitor your results. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t so you can adjust your schedule as needed.

Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to help   measure your return on investment (ROI)   is vital. These metrics allow you to assess the effectiveness of your strategy, identifying what’s working and what needs adjusting. Here are a few to consider:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC):   This measures the cost of convincing a potential customer to purchase a product or service. The lower the CAC, the better your ROI.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV):   The CLTV determines the revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer. A high CLTV compared to your CAC indicates a strong ROI.
  • Retention Rate:   This measures the percentage of customers you have over a period of time. Higher retention rates mean higher customer satisfaction, which can lead to increased referrals and improved ROI.
  • Conversion Rate:   This is the percentage of users who take a desired action. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or becoming a lead. Higher conversion rates tend to yield better ROI.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS):   NPS measures customer loyalty and satisfaction. These are important indicators of the effectiveness of your growth marketing strategy.

Remember to align your KPIs with your business objectives to ensure they deliver actionable insights. Regular monitoring and analysis of these metrics is essential to optimize your growth marketing strategy continuously.

Unlock the Advantages of a Personalized Growth Marketing Strategy From McGRAW

Companies must continue to innovate and grow to stay ahead in today’s business environment. A growth marketing strategy can help you achieve this goal. With a data-driven approach to customer acquisition and retention, it can help your business reach the next level.

At   McGRAW , we specialize in developing custom marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. We use our proprietary " Swell Strategy " to create a 12-month growth plan tailored to your business needs. With our expert team and advanced technology, we can help you achieve sustainable business growth and achieve your goals.

If you're ready to start growing your business,   contact   McGRAW   today.   We will help you create your growth marketing strategy that drives results.

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10 Effective Marketing Strategies For Business Growth

Ashleigh McCabe

Developing a successful marketing strategy is a critical task for overall business success. But knowing what marketing strategies to employ to grow your business can be tricky. That’s where we can help. 

First off, let's debunk the myth that marketing operates in a vacuum. It's not a single, fleeting act but rather an intricate dance of multiple moving parts. Each plays its role at different stages of your journey, from long before a transaction even occurs to the grand finale of converting your customer and everything that’s required post purchase. 

To do this well, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience and offer them something of value. And you need to be offering this at the right time, in the right places and in the right way in order to grow your business. Of course, the activities used to do this effectively will vary between business and industry, but to get the most from your marketing and to reach a wide audience, it’s vital to consider and test out a number of different strategies. 

Here Are 10 Effective Marketing Strategies For Business Growth:

1.social media .

Yes, it’s an obvious one, but it can’t be ignored considering the majority of people are on social media - 60.6% to be exact . Social media marketing presents an opportunity for businesses to get their product or service in front of their target audience and find new customers. Your existing customers will also expect a social presence, whether it’s to answer their questions or show them who you are as a brand. And now more than ever, people use social media like a search engine , so it’s imperative you don’t get left behind. 

Before you jump onto every social media platform going, you first need to figure out what are the right channels to use. Do some research and find out where your target audience hangs out. Is it on TikTok , Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn? Once you know this, then you can research the best types of content to post on each. Whether it’s product-focused, customer testimonials, behind the scene, company culture, or industry-relevant news, make sure you regularly analyse what content works well and what doesn’t. Top tip - an analytics dashboard is a great way to do this. 

Related reading: The 11 Social Media KPIs You Should Really Be Tracking

Top Tips to Grow Your Business Using Social Media 

Show the human side of your brand.

With the emergence of AI tools now, it can be tempting to throw together a social media content calendar using chat GPT. The problem with this is though that you could risk sounding robotic and impersonal. The point of social media is to be social (the clue is in the name) so make sure your brand comes across as authentic and relatable, injecting personality into your posts and comments where possible. 

Use your social media as a useful resource, not a sales channel 

Nobody wants to be sold to constantly. While it’s still useful to post some of your special offers and product-focused content, make sure you don’t overwhelm people with constant sales and pushy offers. Social media is the opportune place to build brand awareness, but this doesn’t happen by shoving your product in people's faces. It happens by sharing valuable, relatable and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. Your social media channels are also the first touchpoint for many potential customers, so you want to entice them in with useful resources, rather than dozens of posts screaming “sell, sell, sell”. 

Be consistent 

Research suggests that consistency is key for social algorithms. Those who have engaged with your content in the past or who follow you, are more likely to be shown your content in future. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule will allow you to increase your followers and engagement, leading to a broader reach for your content. 

10 effective marketing strategies for business growth

2. Get The Most Out of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing and converting leads and still remains one of the most effective ways to reach customers and generate revenue. In order to make the most of email marketing, you need to ensure you have a list of prospects to email in the first place. 

Top Tips to Growing Your Email List:

  • Make signing up easy - Ensure there are clear email CTAs on your website or app, landing pages , social channels and anywhere else your customers are to make it easy to sign up. 
  • Offer an incentive - People are more likely to sign up for your emails if they are getting something of value in return. Consider giving discounts, vouchers, ebooks or downloadable guides as a reward for signing up. 
  • Don’t be too pushy with sales - Just like we mentioned above on social media, don’t spam people with sales emails constantly. Provide value in your emails, sharing top tips, how-tos, industry news and anything else that would be of interest to those on your email lists. 
  • Segment your lists - Create different lists based on a range of criteria for example interests, behaviour or demographic information and send different emails to each list. For example, you might make a list of people who have purchased a specific product, then email them to recommend another product that they might be interested in. This type of email will only be relevant to a specific subset of people in your overall list, so there is no point in sending that email to everyone. Another example could be if someone clicks on a specific link, they've clearly expressed an interest in something in particular. Mark that person as a subscriber, so you may market to them later. If someone makes a purchase, mark them as a buyer. Identifying your buyers' and subscribers' interests is critical for segmentation.
  • Automate your emails - Any good email service provider (ESP) will have the ability to set up automated email workflows and sequences, which will form part of any good sales and marketing funnel, helping create strong relationships with subscribers. You could set up welcome emails for new subscribers, re-engagement emails for those who haven’t opened your email for a certain period of time, winback emails for those who haven’t bought from you in a certain period of time or feedback emails for those who have bought a product from you. While these are automated, be sure that they sound human and include personalisation tokens such as first name or company name. 
  • CTAs - Make sure each campaign has a clear and compelling CTA. This doesn’t always need to be a sale, it can be a website visit, ebook download, social media follow or read more button. Encouraging people to click CTAs within your emails will increase engagement, keeping potential customers interested and more likely to continue opening your emails in future. 
  • A/B testing - Split test everything because you never know what will be the most effective until you put it to the test. This can help you better understand what your audience responds to, allowing you to communicate more effectively and sell to your customers.

3. Take Advantage of Co-branding, Affinity, and Cause Marketing

What is co-branding.

Co-branding is a marketing strategy in which two or more companies collaborate to promote and sell a new product or service. The result is that consumers are often prepared to spend extra because the brands give their collective credibility to raise the impression of the product or service's value. 

You also have the opportunity to use the other brands' existing customer base, meaning you can grow your market share by gaining a new demographic of customers in new locations and regions. Co-branding can be an expensive strategy, however, when the costs are split across both brands, it can be a much more achievable and worthwhile strategy to grow your business. You will also be presented with a great learning opportunity as you will be doubling your resources, which means double the knowledge base to help you both grow.  

A great example of this is when BMW partnered up with Louis Vuitton to design an exclusive, four-piece set of suitcases that fit perfectly into the BMW i8 sports car's back parcel shelf. 

co branding BMW louis vuitton

Source: Louis Vuitton

What is Affinity Marketing?

Affinity marketing, on the other hand, is a collaboration between complementary brands and businesses and brings together people who share similar interests. Examples include coffee shops that sell goods from a local bakery, car repair shops that offer a discount on local car insurance companies or an airline company partnering with a hotel to offer package deals. 

Red Bull and GoPro are both associated with high-adrenaline adventures, so it seems only fitting that they have a partnership together. The GoPro brand gains access to more than 1800 Red Bull events across more than 100 countries and includes content production, distribution, cross-promotion and product innovation. The partnership works because both brands share similar interests in high energy, extreme sports so they are a natural fit for each other and their target audiences. 

Source: GoPro

What is Cause Marketing?

Cause marketing is a partnership between a for-profit company and a non-profit organisation. The aim is to promote and benefit social and other charity causes, leveraging and improving brand reputation. It offers several benefits to both parties including increased brand loyalty, positive PR, getting ahead of competitors and building trusting relationships with customers. Marketing relationships like these give customers the feeling that you share their goal to make the world a better place. 

Bandcamp Fridays is a great example of cause marketing. On designated Fridays, online music distributor Bandcamp waives its artist fees in order to support the independent artists who use their platform. 

4. Start Blogging For Your Business

Anyone can start a blog, but If you're going to blog (especially as a business), be sure you're doing it effectively. Similar to what we said about social media, you should consider how you can add value for your customers. The goal with business blogs isn’t selling, it’s providing useful content that will position you as a thought leader. This is one of the most effective marketing methods for any company and comes with a heap of benefits. 

Benefits of Starting a Company Blog:

Driving traffic to your website: .

By regularly posting and updating relevant content to your blog, you can attract more visitors to your website. It’s vital however that you create content that attracts your target audience and you utilise SEO methods to ensure your blogs are getting in front of the right people. Focusing on keywords with a high search volume but low competition from other content creators will increase the likelihood of your content ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, blogging leads to 55% more website visitors . 

Lead generation: 

Once you successfully have visitors to your blog, you can use this opportunity to capture them as leads. By adding pop-ups or gated content like downloadable ebooks or guides, you can capture basic information like the names and email addresses of your target audience in return for the free content. 

Reusable content: 

You can repurpose your blogs as a valuable source of content to share on your social media channels and email campaigns, creating a valuable opportunity to create engagement with your target audience.

Cost effective marketing: 

Blogging is a relatively inexpensive method of inbound marketing compared to some other forms of marketing, and once published can always be updated and used in future, providing long-term marketing value. 

Establish authority: 

If you consistently post high-quality, useful and educational content on a specific subset of topics within your industry, you can establish credibility and demonstrate your expertise. This helps to create trust with your audience. Share your articles on networks like Medium, Quora, Reddit and LinkedIn to reach as many people as possible. 

7ps free template download

5. Use Videos as Marketing Tools

Video is a quick and effective way to get your message through to your audience. 86% of marketing professionals reported that they used video as a marketing tool, and 78% of those say that video has directly increased sales for their business. 86% said videos helped to boost traffic to their website. Video is a great way to demonstrate to your customers exactly how you can solve their problems. It is also extremely effective for brands with complex ideas, concepts or product features - the adage is "show, don’t tell" for a reason However, not every video needs to be pushing your product. Think outside the box and make entertaining videos that both inform and entertain i.e. how-to videos, customer reviews, behind-the-scenes, tutorial-style videos or even animated videos. 

Where you host your videos is also important. You can't ignore YouTube's visibility and reach - it is the world’s second-largest search engine . That’s because YouTube is used in the same way as Google, where people search for solutions and answers to their questions. Use your videos to answer these questions by offering valuable, useful information, and solving a problem for your audience. The more value you provide, the faster you will be able to increase your visibility, and as a result, your sales. Not only will this help to market your business and establish a great social presence but also help you earn money through YouTube. Once you’ve started with this strategy, you can diversify further and add content to various platforms so that you can market as well as  monetize your videos even without YouTube and are not dependent on any specific platform.

Like blogs, your videos can be repurposed across your social channels to increase visibility and embedded directly within the blogs themselves. 

Video production doesn’t have to be an expensive task. All you need is an idea, a camera and an online video editor to help you put everything together. Video marketing doesn’t have to be limited to just YouTube. If you’re not considering TikTok, you probably should. In 2022, TikTok was the second most downloaded app globally, so there’s a pretty high chance that your audience are using TikTok. We’ve written a full blog dedicated to starting a company TikTok channel, so check it out here .  

6. Start Creating Podcasts

Podcasts are an excellent marketing tool as they are generally a low-cost way to reach new audiences, engage with customers and build brand authority. They can be used to position your company as a thought leader while disseminating information about your products. 

We think the best way to do this is to engage in brand storytelling, a well-known communication structure to engage customers emotionally. Rather than simply regurgitating statistics and data, storytelling allows you to tell a compelling story about your business, what it does, what it values, what you value as a business leader, how you engage and contribute to your community, and how you resolve issues and problems. Adding that sort of human impact to your brand stories will emotionally affect your target audience, helping them engage with your business.

Podcasting  offers a much more personal way to engage with audiences. Listeners often feel a stronger connection after hearing someone's voice, their stories and get a sense of their personality. Podcasts present a great opportunity to create a loyal base of listeners, who are most likely to trust and recommend your brand to others. Just remember to create high-quality, engaging content that your target audience will be interested in. Identify their pain points, interests and goals, and create content that is specific to each. 

Collaboration is also a great strategy for podcasting. By collaborating with other brands and inviting guests on to your podcast, you can also reach new audiences - y ou can host and record collaborative podcasts virtually without compromising on HD quality content . Fans of your guest speaker are likely to tune into your podcast, giving you the opportunity to expand your audience, similar to affinity marketing as mentioned earlier. 

The marketing slice by Hurree. This is Marketing Slice. The podcast that gives you marketing insights, hints and tips that you can action immediately. Within these episodes, the team here at Hurree take you through a deep dive of the marketing strategies and methods that will deliver results right now. These podcasts are complemented by a whole host of other guides, videos, blogs and infographics that can be found at throughout our resources section.

7. Understand the Power of SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) might be intimidating, but it can also be extremely effective. And when you know how to master SEO properly or you have the help of an SEO agency, the sky truly is the limit. 

SEO is the process of improving your website so that it performs better on search engines like Google and Bing. The thinking behind it is, the better your visibility or ranking on these search engines, the better your overall website traffic will be. 

There are generally two types of SEO:

  • Technical SEO: This is optimising the technical aspects of your site like load time and URL structure.
  • On-site SEO: This is what people most often think of, and refers to the content on your website. Think of keywords and blog content. 

One of the reasons people are hesitant to engage with SEO beyond not having the right knowledge, is the shady history of some SEO tactics. Previously, some companies focused on how to "trick" Google with dubious private blog networks ( PBNs are websites that exist only to provide backlinks ) and other link schemes. These are known as black-hat SEO tactics, and while they may produce short-term results, it will get you in hot water in the long run.  Using these types of strategies can actually get you banned from Google, essentially tanking any SEO chances you may have. And it’s not easy to rectify. 

So how do you implement SEO properly? Prioritise your audience. Google specifically has updated its algorithm to prioritise helpful content, so make sure you are publishing quality content. And don't overuse keywords - this is one of the most common blunders people make. While they are important, it’s more important to create content that is readable and not stuffed with repetitive words and phrases. Also, create material that is both human-friendly and search engine-friendly. This is especially important in the world of generative AI. While Google won’t specifically punish you for using AI, human-centric content is generally thought of as better. Most importantly, be sure that whatever you're saying is entertaining, informative, unique and it delivers value to your audience.

Remember that search engines will direct your content to a user's search result page if you optimise the content you offer on your website, blog, or YouTube channel. SEO allows you to increase organic traffic to your website and improve your ranking in search results.

9. Use AI 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that AI seems to be more popular than ever, and for good reason as when used effectively, it can help businesses grow substantially. While integrating AI into your strategy might seem daunting, it can offer several advantages to help grow your business. Here are just some ways AI can improve various processes in a business, freeing up valuable time and resources to be able to focus your efforts on growing your company.

Benefits of AI for Marketing:

Accelerated decision-making: AI algorithms possess the capability to quickly process and analyse large volumes of data, far outpacing human capacities. This means business leaders can quickly make data-backed decisions, increasing operational efficiency and minimising periods of inactivity.

Effective personalisation: Through the analysis of customer data, AI can better understand customer behaviour and preferences, and suggest the most relevant products and offers, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Enhanced customer service: AI-powered chatbots can provide instant customer support 24/7, answering frequently asked questions, guiding users into making a sale, reducing wait times and improving overall customer experience. This reduces waiting times, improves customer experience and frees up valuable time for your customer support team to focus their efforts on more challenging or complex customer support enquiries. 

Content generation: AI can help to create blog posts, social media captions and even your email campaigns. Just remember that relying completely on AI to create content can be risky. It doesn’t always understand the context of the prompts you give and can make your brand sound very robotic and impersonal. Always proofread and edit content generated by AI to fit your brand. 

Accurate demand forecasting: AI models can analyse historical sales data, market trends, and external factors to provide accurate demand forecasts. By predicting future demand accurately, businesses can optimise their inventory levels, reduce the costs they have tied up in unused stock, and minimise the risk of stockouts or overstock situations.

10. Referral marketing  

If a friend recommended a brand to you, chances are you are much more likely to purchase from them, rather than if you just saw an ad for that brand, right? That’s what referral marketing assumes anyway. The concept of referral marketing is that existing, satisfied customers recommend your company to their friends and family, with the aim of generating new customers for the business. You can’t rely alone on the good intentions of your existing customers, however, so you need to actively encourage the referrals, usually by incentivisation. This could be by rewarding them with cash back, discount codes, vouchers or service upgrades. For example, online cloud storage company Dropbox rewards customers who have referred someone else with 1 GB of extra storage space.

effective marketing strategies for business growth

Source: Nielsen

In the ever-changing world of business, mastering effective strategies is critical for sustainable growth. From harnessing the power of social media to embracing the personalised touch of AI-driven campaigns, the strategies explored in this blog provide a comprehensive toolkit to get you started. By adapting these approaches to your unique goals and industry, you can create a compelling brand presence, foster meaningful customer relationships, and seize opportunities for business expansion. Remember, the key lies in continuous adaptation, experimentation, and analysing your results. All the information you gain from analysing, tracking, and measuring will help you find areas for improvement. This will also help you understand the ROI of your marketing strategies. One of the best ways to track this is by using a Hurree dashboard. Get started with your free trial today . 

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10 Business Growth Strategies + Successful Examples

10 Business Growth Strategies + Successful Examples

Casey O'Connor

What Is a Business Growth Strategy?

How to develop a business growth strategy, 10 business growth strategies explained, examples of successful growth strategies, tips for business growth in 2023.

All businesses, regardless of size or industry, hope to achieve growth in their lifetime. 

The specific intended outcomes of business growth goals will vary depending on the size of your company, its strengths and needs, and its position in the market. 

Unfortunately, although all businesses aim to grow, only 25% of them make it to 15 years of operation. Effective methods and strategies must be executed correctly in order to expand; this is where business growth strategies come into play.

A business growth strategy is a framework of the actions a business will take to meet their growth goals, and can help your organization achieve them for scalable success. 

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about business growth strategies, including what they are, how to develop one, and ten of the most effective ones available for businesses today. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  • How to Develop a Business Growth Strategy 

A business growth strategy is an outline of the methods, tactics, and specific actions an organization will use to meet business goals. 

Business growth strategies can help businesses achieve a variety of different goals. 

Some business growth strategies are focused on revenue, while others prioritize the size of the customer base. 

Some business growth strategies are all about increasing an organization’s physical presence (opening a new store location, for example), while others are about developing new products or marketing to new audiences. 

A business growth strategy is basically an action plan, based on relevant market research, that explains exactly how your business will grow. It’s designed to help businesses capture more market share.

The specifics of your business growth strategy will depend on the unique needs of your business.

That being said, the process of developing the framework for new business growth strategies is more or less the same each time. 

how to develop a business growth strategy

1. Perform Market Research

Solid business growth strategies are always based on recent and relevant market data. 

Thorough market research will give you insight into current and potential customer preferences, industry trends, and your company’s position in the market relative to its competitors. 

It’s extremely important to get the lay of the land, so to speak, before you design your business growth strategy. Effective business growth goals need to be created using context from the overall market.

2. Establish Goals

You can’t have a business growth strategy without concrete goals. 

business growth strategies: SMART goals

In the beginning, try to plan short-term goals. Your business growth strategies should be focused on month-long or quarter-long periods as you get started. This will enable your team to go through the goal-setting and strategy-planning process quickly and frequently.

3. Identify Your Growth Strategy

There are a number of different specific growth strategies for your team to consider that may meet your growth needs. The growth strategy you choose will ultimately depend on your organization’s budget, opportunities, competition , and goals. 

We’ll go over some of the most effective business growth strategies in the next section of this article. 

4. Map Out Your Execution Plan

Once the high-level planning is complete, it’s time to outline the exact actions your team will take to meet your growth goals. 

business growth strategies: go-to-market-strategy

5. Create a Forecast

business growth strategies: sales forecast

6. Monitor, Measure, and Optimize

Once you start executing your business growth strategy, you need to monitor its progress in real-time. 

Make sure you’re measuring your activities and their results at regular intervals, and follow a standardized process for tracking and analyzing data.

Tip: Ensure you have the right tools in place to ensure growth with our free blueprint below.

The Optimal Technology Stack for B2B Sales Teams

Following are 10 of the most effective and common business growth strategies. 

business growth strategies

1. Market Penetration

A market penetration strategy is designed to help your organization increase its market share. The goal is to sell more of an existing product in an existing market.

One way to achieve a market penetration strategy is by lowering prices or offering promotions and discounts. 

Market penetration is a particularly effective strategy for SMB businesses because it is low-risk. 

Other effective tactics in a market penetration strategy include:

  • Discounts for bulk/volume purchases
  • Increase the number of distributors/dealers you work with 
  • Offer free trials
  • Direct marketing 

The bottom line is to sell more of your product in your existing market. In a market penetration strategy, the company is aiming to reach the maximum number of customers in the market until it becomes saturated.

2. Market Development

A market development strategy is all about selling existing products to new markets. This business growth strategy is aimed at growing the customer base. It works well for companies who are still working to find their position in a strong existing market. 

Market development relies on astute and thorough market research. Succeeding with this strategy is about more than just beating out your direct competitors. You may need to explore new geography, new customer segments, or new channels. Franchising is also a good option for certain industries.

Market development can be very lucrative; most companies achieve the most profitable growth when they’re able to move into an adjacent target market.

3. Product Expansion 

A product expansion business growth strategy relies on the creation of new products and services. These new offerings help your organization increase their market share. 

Many teams get creative with a product expansion strategy. It doesn’t always mean that you need to create brand-new products. You could also add updates to existing products, or add new varieties. You could also create bundles of existing products. 

Market research and marketing strategy analysis will help you determine the market needs and how you can most effectively tweak your offerings to meet those needs. 

4. Acquisition

Most people are very familiar with acquisitions. An acquisition is a business occurrence in which one company purchases another company. 

Acquisitions are sometimes lumped together with mergers, but the two are actually slightly different concepts. In an acquisition, one company takes over another one. In a merger, two companies join together. 

Acquisitions can be extremely profitable, but they require a lot of capital upfront, healthy cash flow, and significant debt capacity. For those reasons, acquisitions are usually completed by mature companies. 

If your organization can manage the expenses, though, they’re a great business growth strategy. Acquisitions reduce competition, give you access to proprietary technology, and expand your customer base.

5. Alternative Channels

One cost-effective business growth strategy is marketing on alternative channels. 

This strategy allows you to potentially reach new markets without creating any product changes. Exploring alternative channels is a very popular business growth strategy for small businesses who are just getting off the ground.

Consider the following alternative channels as you grow your business: 

  • Website presence
  • Yelp business page
  • New platforms for sales, like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy
  • Paid search ads
  • Wholesalers
  • Email marketing
  • Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram)
  • Business blog 

Omnichannel marketing is growing in popularity and is a very effective way to meet sales goals in the 21st century.

6. Strategic Partnerships

In a strategic partnership, two companies join forces for mutual benefit, while each still maintaining their own brand identity and operations. 

Partnerships allow each company to access the other’s customer base. It also allows for the shared use of critical resources like manpower, equipment, and technology. 

Because there’s less at stake, partnerships are more common than mergers or acquisitions.

7. Market Segmentation

With a market segmentation growth strategy, sales and marketing teams work to carefully segment their markets based on factors such as geography, demographics, or buying preferences. 

This highly-targeted segmentation allows sales teams to focus on and specialize in segments that are less explored than others already served by the competition. 

business growth strategies: personalization is key to winning business

8. Organic Growth

The most ideal business growth strategy is known as organic growth. 

Organic growth requires little to no advertising, mergers, or acquisitions, and instead represents an optimized set of conditions that allow your marketing campaigns and products to reach many parts of your target audience without much effort on your part. 

business growth strategies: customer acquisition cost

9. Diversification

This type of business growth strategy can be risky, but also has a high return when executed correctly. 

Diversification means that sales teams sell either new products, or sell to new markets — or, in some cases, both. 

  • Horizontal diversification: sales reps sell a new product to the current market.
  • Vertical diversification: a business starts competing with its suppliers or customers. 
  • Concentric diversification: a company creates a new product that’s similar to an existing product.
  • Conglomerate diversification:  sales reps sell new products to new audiences.

Diversification requires a lot of capital and has the highest risk of failure out of all of the business growth strategies outlined in this article.

10. Cost Reduction

A cost reduction business growth strategy relies on organizations to reduce their operating costs. This frees up cash for reinvestment into growth opportunities and improves your overall bottom line.

Here are some strategies for implementing a cost reduction strategy: 

  • Use accounting software to reduce or eliminate errors
  • Go paperless
  • Consider automation and/or outsourcing where possible
  • Reduce traditional advertising methods and go digital instead

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to business growth strategies. You may find that several could fit the needs of your team, or that your needs change over time. It’s perfectly okay to use a variety of strategies over time — or even simultaneously.

Every brand with even an inkling of name recognition has successfully used a business growth strategy. Here’s a look at how some of the world’s most well-known companies have used popular business growth strategies to succeed.

Market Penetration: Facebook

business growth strategies: Facebook market penetration

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, he shared the platform with only his fellow Harvard students. He later opened it up to Stanford, Yale, and Columbia. Later, again, he went on to share it among all the Ivy League schools, and some select Boston ones as well.

This is a perfect example of market penetration. Zuckerberg took his existing product and maximized the number of customers he “sold” it to within his market.

Strategic Partnership: Lyft & Taco Bell

business growth strategies: Lyft and Taco Bell strategic partnership

Lyft & Taco Bell joined forces for one of the most memorable (and delicious) strategic partnerships in pop culture history. 

During the partnership, Lyft offered riders free access to “Taco Mode,” during which passengers could make a pit stop at Taco Bell on the way to their destination. This drove sales up for Taco Bell, and drew hungry customers away from competitor Uber and into the backseat of a Lyft.

Diversification: Amazon

business growth strategies: Amazon diversification

It’s a well-known fact that the online retailer Amazon started as a books-only e-commerce platform. 

Over time, the company expanded to sell toys, DVDs, music, furniture, and — eventually — just about anything you could ever want. 

This is a textbook example of a diversification business growth strategy.

Here are some of our best tips for business growth in 2023. 

Carefully Consider and Combine Strategies

There are many more than the ten business growth strategies outlined here in this article, and each one has advantages and drawbacks. 

Take time — and even trial and error — discover which meets the needs of your specific business goals at any given time. 

In many cases, it’s also appropriate to use more than one business growth strategy at the same time. 

Understand Your Brand Identity 

In order for your business to grow, you need to have a very nuanced and thorough understanding of your brand, its identity, and its position in the market. 

Your business’s strengths, differentiating factors, unique selling points (USPs) , and core competencies will all help your business grow in a sustainable way.

Be Ready to Pivot

Successful and scalable business growth requires flexibility. 

Business growth strategies are great because they help sales and marketing teams stick to a plan, but they also allow teams to monitor progress and adapt strategies as needed. 

The most successful businesses are the ones that keep a careful pulse on their business progress and are ready to make changes as needed. 

Automate Everything 

Truly scalable growth requires capable systems running behind the scenes. 

Sales reps can’t afford to waste time entering data, manually setting appointments, and collating buyer insights into something actionable. 

Sales software like Yesware can help reps save time by automating administrative tasks, so they can focus on revenue-generating sales activities. 

What business growth strategies have been successful for your business?

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How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?

  • Gary P. Pisano

marketing strategy business growth

Growth—in revenues and profits—is the yardstick by which the competitive fitness and health of organizations is measured. Consistent profitable growth is thus a near universal goal for leaders—and an elusive one.

To achieve that goal, companies need a growth strategy that encompasses three related sets of decisions: how fast to grow, where to seek new sources of demand, and how to develop the financial, human, and organizational capabilities needed to grow. This article offers a framework for examining the critical interdependencies of those decisions in the context of a company’s overall business strategy, its capabilities and culture, and external market dynamics.

Why leaders should take a strategic perspective

Idea in Brief

The problem.

Sustained profitable growth is a nearly universal corporate goal, but it is an elusive one. Empirical research suggests that when inflation is taken into account, most companies barely grow at all.

While external factors play a role, most companies’ growth problems are self-inflicted: Too many firms approach growth in a highly reactive, opportunistic manner.

The Solution

To grow profitably over the long term, companies need a strategy that addresses three key decisions: how fast to grow (rate of growth); where to seek new sources of demand (direction of growth); and how to amass the resources needed to grow (method of growth).

Perhaps no issue attracts more senior leadership attention than growth does. And for good reason. Growth—in revenues and profits—is the yardstick by which we tend to measure the competitive fitness and health of companies and determine the quality and compensation of its management. Analysts, investors, and boards pepper CEOs about growth prospects to get insight into stock prices. Employees are attracted to faster-growing companies because they offer better opportunities for advancement, higher pay, and greater job security. Suppliers prefer faster-growing customers because working with them improves their own growth prospects. Given the choice, most companies and their stakeholders would choose faster growth over slower growth.

Five elements can move you beyond episodic success.

  • Gary P. Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation (PublicAffairs, 2019).

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JUST RELEASED: View the 2024 Franchise 500 Ranking

Here Are the Essential Tools Every Entrepreneur Needs to Succeed in 2024 Boost your business in the upcoming year with these valuable tools.

By Roy Dekel • Dec 19, 2023

Key Takeaways

  • Essential tools ranging from project management, marketing automation, analytics, SEO, scheduling, freelancing, communication and design to help your business succeed in 2024

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of entrepreneurship , leveraging the right tools is crucial for efficiency, collaboration and growth. As we navigate through 2024, entrepreneurs have at their disposal an array of powerful tools that can streamline operations, enhance marketing efforts and foster seamless communication.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore essential tools every entrepreneur should know about, spanning project management, marketing automation, analytics, SEO, scheduling, freelancing, communication and design.

Related: 17 Essential Tools for Entrepreneurs

1. Project management

Trello and Asana: Trello and Asana stand out as indispensable project management tools , helping entrepreneurs organize tasks, track progress and foster collaboration among team members. Trello's intuitive card-based system allows for easy project tracking, while Asana provides robust features for project planning, task assignment and team communication. Both platforms offer flexibility and scalability to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.

2. Marketing automation

Mailchimp: For entrepreneurs looking to streamline their email marketing efforts, Mailchimp is a go-to tool. With features like email campaigns, audience segmentation and analytics, Mailchimp simplifies the process of creating and managing effective email campaigns. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible to entrepreneurs with varying levels of marketing expertise.

3. Analytics

Google Analytics: Understanding user behavior and website performance is integral to business success. This robust analytics platform provides comprehensive insights into website performance, user behavior and the effectiveness of online marketing efforts. Entrepreneurs can track key metrics such as website traffic, audience demographics and conversion rates, enabling them to understand what resonates with their audience and refine their strategies accordingly.

With the ability to analyze the success of marketing campaigns, identify high-performing content and uncover areas for improvement, Google Analytics empowers entrepreneurs to make data-driven decisions, optimize their digital presence and ultimately drive business growth in an increasingly competitive online landscape.

SEO tools (e.g., SEMrush or Ahrefs): Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is paramount for online visibility, and tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs offer comprehensive solutions. Such tools empower entrepreneurs to conduct in-depth keyword research, analyze competitor strategies and optimize their website content for search engines. By understanding the intricacies of search engine algorithms and trends, entrepreneurs can tailor their online presence to rank higher in search results , attract organic traffic and stay ahead of competitors.

This not only amplifies brand visibility but also increases the likelihood of attracting qualified leads and customers. In essence, an SEO tool is an indispensable ally for entrepreneurs aiming to strengthen their digital footprint, improve website performance and foster sustainable growth in the highly competitive online marketplace.

5. Scheduling

Calendly: Efficient scheduling is crucial for entrepreneurs juggling multiple tasks. Calendly simplifies the appointment and meeting scheduling process by allowing entrepreneurs to share their availability and let others book time slots that suit both parties. This eliminates the back-and-forth of scheduling emails, saving valuable time.

Related: 20 Time-Saving Tech Tools for Solopreneurs that Boost Efficiency, Productivity and Business Growth

6. Freelancing

Upwork: Entrepreneurs often need specialized skills for specific projects, and Upwork connects them with a global pool of freelancers. From graphic design to programming, entrepreneurs can find qualified professionals to meet their project requirements. Upwork streamlines the hiring process, ensuring entrepreneurs can quickly assemble the right team for their needs.

7. Communication

Slack: Effective communication is the backbone of any successful business, and Slack facilitates seamless team collaboration. With features like channels, direct messages and integrations with other tools, Slack provides a centralized hub for communication. Entrepreneurs can create channels for different projects or teams, keeping conversations organized and accessible.

8. Marketing design

Canva: Entrepreneurs often find themselves in need of visually engaging content for marketing materials, social media or presentations. Canva simplifies the design process with its user-friendly interface and a vast library of templates. Entrepreneurs can create professional-looking graphics without the need for extensive design skills.

9. Online advertising

Google AdWords: For entrepreneurs looking to expand their online reach through paid advertising and drive targeted traffic to their websites, Google AdWords is a game-changer. As a powerful online advertising platform, Google AdWords enables entrepreneurs to create targeted and highly customizable ads that appear in Google search results. By strategically bidding on relevant keywords, entrepreneurs can ensure their advertisements are presented to users actively searching for products or services they offer. This not only enhances visibility but also allows for precise targeting, maximizing the return on investment.

With detailed analytics and performance metrics, entrepreneurs can refine and optimize their ad campaigns in real time, ensuring their marketing budget is effectively utilized to attract potential customers. Google AdWords is a pivotal tool for entrepreneurs seeking immediate and measurable results in the competitive world of online advertising.

Related: 10 Free Marketing Tools Every Entrepreneur Can Use

In the dynamic landscape of entrepreneurship, staying ahead requires not only vision and dedication but also the right set of tools. Trello, Asana, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, SEO tools, Calendly, Upwork, Slack, Canva and Google AdWords represent a curated selection of tools that cater to various aspects of running and growing a business . Whether managing projects, optimizing online presence or fostering team collaboration, entrepreneurs can harness the power of these tools to navigate challenges and propel their ventures toward success in 2024 and beyond. As technology continues to evolve, entrepreneurs should stay vigilant for emerging tools that can further enhance their operations and contribute to their business growth.

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  1. What Is Growth Marketing? Examples & Strategies

    Targeting the Right Customers Cidre: The type of marketing that growth marketers do is directly tied to the bottom line of the business. It's not just about attracting new customers or acquiring new people into your database.

  2. Company Growth Strategy: 7 Key Steps for Business Growth & Expansion

    Published: April 17, 2023 A concrete growth strategy is more than a marketing strategy, it's a crucial cog in your business machine. Without one, you're at the mercy of a fickle consumer base and market fluctuations. So, how do you plan to grow? If you're unsure about the steps needed to craft an effective growth strategy, we've got you covered.

  3. How to Do REAL Growth Marketing (22 Strategies & Examples)

    Eduard Klein Last Updated: January 8, 2024 | Marketing Ideas Home — Blog — What Growth Marketing Really Means (+22 Strategies to Do It Right) To many business owners and marketers, the term "growth marketing" may seem redundant. Marketing is what you do to grow a business, so isn't all marketing growth marketing?

  4. 8 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2023

    Published: October 26, 2023 Creating a marketing strategy is essential to effectively nurture your customers, improve your business's bottom line, and increase the ROI of your efforts. A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to use the highest ROI trends for 2023: short video, influencer marketing, and branded social media.

  5. 10 Growth Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Business

    While a growth marketing strategy emphasizes sustainable, long-term growth through comprehensive data-backed marketing efforts, a growth hacking strategy focuses on rapid experimentation and unconventional tactics to achieve quick, scalable results. Growth hacking and growth marketing strategies operate on different timelines and methodologies.

  6. How A Fine-Tuned Marketing Strategy Can Accelerate Business Growth

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    1 C-suite growth leaders share a common series of mindsets and behaviors from their communications to their willingness to learn through failure. Those who display at least three of the five key growth mindsets are 2.4 times more likely to profitably outgrow their peers (Exhibit 2). 2

  8. Managing business growth strategies

    In earlier research, we explored three broad profiles that describe how companies achieve organic growth. 1 "Investors" tap new sources of funding or reallocate existing funds to capture new growth for their goods and services. "Creators" build business value with new products or through business-model innovation.

  9. Business growth articles: Mindset to action

    October 23, 2023 - Fewer than one in four companies outpace their industry peers on revenue and profit growth. New McKinsey research reveals the six mindsets and strategies that set these growth outperformers apart.

  10. What is Growth Marketing? Building a Strategy

    Key aspects of growth marketing include: 1. Data-Driven Decision-Making. Growth marketing heavily relies on data analysis to inform the decision marketers will take. It involves collecting and analysing large amounts of data to understand customer behaviour, identify trends and uncover new opportunities. 2.

  11. What Is Growth Marketing? A Beginner's Guide

    Growth marketing is a holistic and data-driven approach to marketing. It focuses on the entire funnel (rather than just the top of the funnel) and applies the scientific method—formulating hypotheses, testing these hypotheses, then refining or eliminating them.. Originally known as growth hacking, Sean intended for the term to mean " creative, collaborative idea generation and problem ...

  12. The New Role Of Marketing: Drive Business Growth By ...

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  13. 10 Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth

    10 Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth You need more than one strategy. You need a strategy for every opportunity. By R.L. Adams • Sep 12, 2017 Opinions expressed by...

  14. 30+ Growth Marketing Strategy Examples

    Growth marketing is an evidence-based approach to marketing that prioritises maximising business growth by focusing on the entire funnel. This contrasts to traditional marketing, which is often opinion-based and siloed around specific areas of the funnel (e.g. marketing must drive X many leads).

  15. 15 Growth Marketing Strategies that Work in 2024

    In a growth marketing strategy, companies add layers to their marketing campaigns, using A/B testing, cross-channel strategies, and innovative technology to unlock greater benefits. Strategies for growth marketing evolve over time based on the evolution of industry trends, customer requirements, and new technology.

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  18. The Complete Guide to Building a Growth Marketing Plan

    The Complete Guide to Building a Growth Marketing Plan Product Vision: The Key to Building a Successful Marketing Plan Share Watch on Want to minimize risk when running campaigns? Learn how to build a repeatable growth marketing plan that helps you reach your marketing goals.

  19. 13 Growth Marketing Strategies for Your Business Success

    Last updated December 20, 2022 By Jessica Huhn Only about two-thirds of businesses stay open for more than two years. Only half of businesses make it to their fifth year, and only a third make it to their tenth year. Sustaining growth is key to making sure your business stays around for the long haul.

  20. A Complete Guide On Growth Marketing

    However, growth marketing is data-driven and takes a more flexible approach, unlike digital marketing. Where digital marketing is about implementing social media and SEO strategies, growth marketing applies these strategies after testing different forms and tracking analytics to learn what is working best for the business.

  21. What Are the Major Growth Marketing Strategies?

    A growth marketing strategy is a data-driven strategy to acquire and retain customers in large numbers. It's a holistic approach that captures all aspects of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase to loyalty. The ultimate goal of growth marketing efforts is to create sustainable, long-term growth for your business.

  22. 10 Effective Marketing Strategies For Business Growth

    Here Are 10 Effective Marketing Strategies For Business Growth: 1.Social Media Yes, it's an obvious one, but it can't be ignored considering the majority of people are on social media - 60.6% to be exact.

  23. 10 Business Growth Strategies + Successful Examples

    Following are 10 of the most effective and common business growth strategies. 1. Market Penetration. A market penetration strategy is designed to help your organization increase its market share. The goal is to sell more of an existing product in an existing market.

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  27. How to Start an Ecommerce Business: A Simple 7-Step Guide

    Further reading: 8 Tactics to Add to Your Ecommerce Growth Strategy. Gear Your Ecommerce Business Up for Healthy Growth. Launching your ecommerce business is just the start of your journey. Make it a practice to continuously test different digital marketing strategies to better understand what works best for your business—and what doesn't.