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There are several ways agencies can market products, but the tricky thing is, there is no one-size fits all solution. What works in terms of successful marketing for a dental office will differ drastically from a company introducing a new, hip skateboard, or some sort of new marketing tech.

Marketing and ad agencies have a tall order when it comes to producing growth because it's complex and nuanced.

This article will present an in-depth look at a sure-fire way to produce results. At the end of this article, you'll have a strong hold on what growth marketing is, different types of strategies, some stats to consider, and how you can determine ROI.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing cycle

Growth marketing is largely an experimental strategy that produces a certain type of desired business engagement. Each business wants different types of engagement and each business can leverage one of the many growth marketing tactics.

In short, growth marketing is different from traditional marketing because it focuses on the whole sales funnel to create loyal customers as opposed to focusing only on the top of the funnel.

Since growth marketers don't already have a solidified customer profile for a new or particular brand,they don't yet have a cookie cutter marketing plan. Producing results requires work across channels, funnels, and departments.

Let's say a business owner has a new product or service to introduce to the market. They've done market research, they know of their need in the industry, and they have the funding for their startup.

What they don't have, however, is a solid plan for how to get their product or service out to the right audience. They may not know where to find customers, who will buy the product, the best ways to reach those individuals, and how to sustain growth.

This is where growth marketing comes in to play.

Growth marketers are interested in finding the best way to produce growth as quickly and effectively as possible.

As such, it's vital for any marketing or ad agency to have an efficient way to collect, store, and interpret data. In other words, marketers must have an eye on key metrics.

Perhaps the most important way to grow is not even located within inbound or outbound marketing as much as its about nurturing what you have. I'm talking about,customer loyalty.

And, this where the difference between the popular term growth hacking and growth marketing comes into play.

Growth hacking includes specific strategies that will boost engagement with a client's brand. There are hundreds of growth hacking techniques including displaying an embed code on a popular infographic, including more than one call to action in an email, using intent pop-ups on your website, and so much more.

Growth hacking is basically smart marketing strategies that boost engagement, while growth marketing is an overall marketing strategy that produces long-term growth and promotes customer loyalty.

It can definitely include growth hacking strategies, but it's important to remember that not all growth hacking strategies will produce the same level of results for every client.

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Expert Opinions

We already addressed how marketing is about more than just producing a short-term buzz, increasing temporary engagement, or even going viral. You must change the way marketers think about driving demand and creating loyal customers.

To give you a better idea of how growth marketing can produce better results, let's look at what some of the experts say. Here are some interesting tips from industry leaders amalgamated in a recent SlideShare presentation from Drift:

  • Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers. -Mike Volpe, Angel Investor & Former CMO, HubSpot.
  • For meaningful growth, startups must completely change the rules of traditional channels or innovate outside of those growth channels. They are too desperate and disadvantaged to adapt to the old rules of marketing. They have to dig deep creatively, and relentless test new ideas. If they don't figure out quickly, they will go out of business. -Sean Ellis, Founder & CEO, GrowthHackers.com
  • Growth starts with a deep understanding of a product value and is about moving new users to the Aha! Moment as quickly as possible, measurable in seconds. -Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO, Social Capital

Some Important Statistics

Growth Marketing Stats

Now that we know what growth marketing is, let's look at some stats into why people should care about growth marketing. In other words, how does focusing on finding your audience, increasing long-term results, and driving consistent engagement to affect a client's bottom line?

Since there are no one-size fits all approach to growth marketing, it's difficult to measure growth marketing as a whole. Instead, it makes more sense to look at the separate elements and see how they contribute to a boost in business.

For the purposes of this article, let's keep in mind growth hacking are strategies that are involved in producing growth.

It's worthy to note, fast-growing companies like Groupon have gained millions of users in just a few short years using growth hacking strategies. Let's look at stats that show the importance of customer engagement, customer journey, and customer retention.


Customer engagement stats

  • Companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above the market.
  • Over half of all customer interactions happen during a multi-event, multi-channel journey.
  • Companies with the strongest omni channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni channel strategies.

Customer journey stats

  1. Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also to lift revenue by up to 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%.
  2. Increasing customer journey satisfaction will lift customer satisfaction by up to 20% as well as revenues by 15% while keeping the customer serving cost lower by 20%.
  3. McKinsey suggests that one of the key facets of good CX is consistency and that measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction.

Growth Marketing Customer Retention Statistics

  • Businesses that adopt omni channel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to business that don't.
  • If a typical SaaS business loses 2-3% of their customers each month to churn, the business must grow by at least 27-43% annually just to maintain that same revenue.
  • 80 percent of your future profits will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers.

Based on these stats, the key to successful marketing lies in establishing an approach to appeal to the right customers at the right time and encourage repeat business.


The Types

Now that we've talked about the what, let's talk about the different types of growth marketing.

When it boils right down to it, growth marketing can include any number of different growth hacking and marketing strategies. And remember, different marketing strategies will produce results for your various clients.

Rather than talking about the hundreds of strategies you could employ, let's take a more holistic approach and talk about the importance of an experimental approach across channels, funnels, and departments.

  1. Growth marketers work cross-channel:A good growth marketer recognizes different channels provide different benefits. As such, they may run any and/or all campaigns across the various channels: email, paid search, social, mobile, and more. With the help of smart data collection and data monitoring, growth marketers make adjustments for various clients.
  2. Growth marketers work cross-funnel:Another type is to work across the funnel. Rather than focusing 100% of efforts on top of the funnel strategies, they will focus efforts on various parts of the funnel. One campaign may focus on increasing acquisition while another focuses on reducing churn. Again, through the use of monitoring actions and metrics with live data analytics dashboards and smart reporting, the growth marketer can make specific and individual adjustments that make sense to each client.
  3. Growth marketers work across departments:Everyone who works at an agency knows that marketing is not the only department that contributes to the success of a client. It requires collaboration with marketing, product teams, sales teams, fulfillment teams, and more. A smart growth marketer will use a tool to automate processes, streamline communication, and make collaboration quick and easy.

How to determine success

Now, the most vital part of this article is how to make your particular marketing strategy work. In other words, how do marketers successfully run various campaigns for several clients and know what needs to happen to great a marketing strategy that results in targeting long-term customers?

It's impossible to track this manually, so it follows that adopting an automated data collection and reporting tool with the ability to monitor real-time activity is required.

This is why TapClicks exists. (Shameless plug But nonetheless true)

TapClicks is a tool built for marketing and ad agencies, media companies, and enterprises to help marketers be successful.

With TapClicks, marketers have the ability to connect all their data sources to monitor successes, surface failures, and connect marketing efforts to ROI. It's powerful to show clients exactly how campaigns are performing and how the efforts of your agency are paying off.

With automated reporting, you don't even have to think about how to show your clients your value, because the reports do it for you. When clients know the value of your agency to their business, they stick around.

For growth marketers to be successful, not only do they have to keep an eye on campaign performance and produce smart reporting, but they also have to communicate effectively with other departments. TapClicks solves this problem as well.


Conclusion

This particular type of marketing involves running campaigns across channels, funnels, and departments for various clients to see what is working and what is not. The best way to ensure positive results is to adopt a tool, like TapClicks, that does the hard work for you. The quicker you can determine where your clients' audience lives and what they respond to, the faster you'll be able to produce results. And, remember, when you produce results, you retain customers.