What is Growth Marketing & Why Does Your Business Need it in 2021?

“Growth marketing is where all the people in a company focus on making the numbers go up. From sales to design to product, everyone can impact growth.”
– Neil Patel

More than 4.35 million new business applications were submitted in 2020. When compared with 2019, the numbers have grown by 24.13%.

More and more businesses have begun kickstarting their online ventures. As a result, entrepreneurs are finding it incredibly difficult to stand out.

In this crowded environment, marketers are struggling to break through the noise.

They are finding it tough to attract high-quality traffic to their website.

Gone are the days when marketers used to set up long-winded, gut-driven, and expensive marketing campaigns and pray for them to work.

But, in today’s competitive market, such spray and pray marketing campaigns don’t work anymore.

However, there’s always an exception.

Sylvester Stallone’s the only person on Earth this kind of approach has worked for. That’s all.

These days, if you want to meet your goals, you need to build a growth-driven marketing strategy for your business.

This strategy should be iterative, creative, and compelling.

Hence, you need to make sure that it isn’t just limited to attracting and converting new customers.

Instead, it should also focus on attracting customers that’ll stick around and retaining them.

Building a breeding ground for organic growth, word of mouth, and virality will help you break through the noise.

And that’s what Growth Marketing is all about.

Welcome to Marketing 2.0!

Recently, growth marketing has become a force to be reckoned with.

And trust me: this approach has revolutionized the way marketers think.

Gone are the days when marketers used to focus on just the top of the funnel. Instead, they believe in delivering memorable customer experiences.

Mike Volpe, one of HubSpot’s founding team members, said, “Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing for enabling every aspect of the customer experience, helping businesses attract more engaged customers.”

It’s one of the hottest topics in the marketing industry.

Growth marketing has helped countless businesses achieve robust and sustainable growth.

This blog post clearly explains what growth marketing is and why businesses need it now more than ever.

So, let’s dive in straight away.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is an advanced data-driven marketing approach that takes the traditional marketing model and fills it with layers like:

  • Data-driven marketing campaigns
  • Value-adding blog posts
  • A/B testing
  • SEO optimization
  • Technical analysis of different aspects of consumer experience
  • And more.

This approach doesn’t focus on a single part of the funnel.

Instead, it looks at the complete customer lifecycle and is dedicated to driving more engaged customers.

Growth marketing will allow you to look at your business’ existing condition. Also, it will help you find the bottlenecks that may be preventing you from achieving your business goals.

Traditional marketing is more of a “set it and forget it” approach.

It is limited to attracting traffic to the top of the sales funnel.

But, growth marketing goes way beyond the top.

This methodology will help you add value throughout the marketing funnel.

Also, growth marketing focuses more on the data aspects of marketing rather than the creative side.

Growth marketers are called “master experimenters” and are responsible for:

  • Determining the areas to improve upon
  • Designing and developing experiments for optimizing the identified processes
  • Conducting experiments for testing major improvements
  • Tracking metrics and carrying out further experimentation

These experiments are aimed at optimizing processes for scalability and growth. And there’s always the element of randomness attached to them.

Some may work, while others may not.

Hence, while conducting these experiments, growth marketers are comfortable with failure. They keep themselves prepared.

Moving forward, let’s look at why growth marketing is crucial for businesses in 2021.

Why Does Your Business Need Growth Marketing in 2021?

Following are the reasons why your business needs growth marketing in 2021:

  • High Turnover Rates
  • Unmatched Insights into Customers
  • Competitive Landscape
  • Consumers are Taking the Non-Linear Buying Journeys

High Turnover Rates

These days, businesses invest thousands of dollars to attract and convert new consumers.

The success rate of selling to a new consumer is 5-20%. Whereas the success rate of selling to an already-existing consumer stands at 60-70%.

On top of this, acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than what it does to retain an already-existing customer.

Most businesses don’t realize that retaining already-existing customers is way cheaper than acquiring new ones. Hence, they keep it at the bottom of their priority list.

This results in high consumer turnovers. It impacts businesses in numerous ways.

Growth marketing will help you build a well-planned strategy focused on customer retention. This strategy helps build trust and customer loyalty.

It’s a data-driven proactive approach leading to word-of-mouth recommendations and positive online reviews.

Unmatched Insights into Customers

“Focusing on the customers makes a company more resilient.”
– Jeff Bezos

86% of the buyers are willing to pay more for a memorable customer experience.

Delivering an outstanding customer experience should be any business’s first priority. Brands can build a solid foundation by creating a highly converting customer-centric strategy for their business.

But to do just that, they need to get their hands on customer data and use it in an efficient manner.

Customer data allows you to tap into your audience demographics. Moreover, it helps you gain valuable insights into your audience from different funnel stages.

Growth marketing involves acquiring user data via:

  • User surveys
  • Digital marketing
  • Website analytics
  • Google Analytics
  • User account activities
  • Or a completely different approach.

Once acquired, you can use this data to retain more customers and expand your reach.

Competitive Landscape

The number of new business applications being submitted each year is growing exponentially.

In this competitive landscape, you can’t afford to run straightforward marketing campaigns.

Businesses should try different approaches and conduct numerous experiments. Alongside this, they should track the important metrics and improve the areas where they are currently lacking.

This will help them stand out from the competition and increase:

  • Brand awareness
  • Boost search engine rankings
  • Enhance existing campaigns
  • Prevent PPC overload
  • Retain customers while also attracting new ones.

Consumers are Taking the Non-Linear Buying Journeys

Consumer behavior and interests have changed, and businesses need to keep up with them. They are taking non-linear buying journeys across tablets, smartphones, and desktops. Hence, businesses are finding it tough to understand how modern consumers work.

Growth marketing helps them tackle this problem. It delivers valuable insights into the ever-changing consumer behavior and interests. With this approach, you can get into the minds of your consumers. Also, you can figure out the steps they take before and after purchasing a product or service.

Conclusion

Growth marketing is the vaccine for failed marketing campaigns and poor ROI. Unlike old-school marketing, growth marketing promotes iterative learning. It focuses on:

  • Systematic optimization
  • Incremental increase of retention, acquisition, and lifetime value of consumers.

Businesses like Dropbox, Airbnb, Instagram have driven incredible growth using this approach.

And so should you!

OBT Creative is a growth-driven HubSpot Partner agency.

We are the Growth Marketing experts. Our team would love nothing more than to help you achieve the desired results.

So, what are you waiting for?

Skyrocket your marketing efforts today.

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