What Is Growth Marketing?
Congratulations on taking the first step towards growing your brand! You’ve already accomplished so much by acknowledging the importance of long-term, sustainable, and measurable growth, and ensuring that your brand is well-prepared for the journey ahead. However, as with any adventure, having a clear and reliable map is crucial to your success. Without it, you might find yourself wandering aimlessly and wasting valuable time and resources. That’s where we come in – we’re here to provide you with the roadmap you need to get your brand where it needs to go.
By creating a comprehensive growth marketing plan tailored specifically to your brand’s needs, you’ll be able to streamline your efforts and stay focused on the most effective path towards growth. So, get ready to hit the road with confidence, armed with our proven growth marketing plan template and all the tools you need to achieve success. Let’s get started!
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.”
Need help remembering? Just say, “AAARRR, matey!” Cheesy? Yes. Effective? Also yes. If you need another handy analogy to remember the overarching goal of growth marketing, just pick up a hockey stick. Yep, a hockey stick. If you want your brand to have an inspiring underdog story a la The Mighty Ducks, you want your growth trajectory to look like this:
What Are the Four Major Growth Strategies?
Growth can be a slow, painful slog, especially for SaaS, fintech, and startups whose sales cycles are extensive. Some brands will spend significant time on a single tactic, and when it doesn’t work, they find themselves back at square one. That’s where growth marketing comes in. When you build a growth marketing roadmap, you account for the time it takes to achieve your goals — now, tomorrow, and in the future.
Market Penetration
Market penetration is a widely adopted growth strategy which revolves around capturing an existing market. It could either be the market where your business is already operating or the market where your competitors are offering similar products or services. This strategy falls under the famous Ansoff Matrix, which comprises four strategies to expand businesses’ reach. Market penetration can be your pathway towards successfully launching a growth marketing strategy.
The key element of market penetration is identifying your brand’s unique selling points and differentiators that help you stand out from the competition. This strategy sets the foundation for your overall business expansion roadmap. Leveraging the potential of the market and product you already have can eventually open doors for further expansion and profitability. Therefore, adopting market penetration can be a promising step for businesses that aim to thrive in competitive markets.
Market Development
Market development is also included in the Ansoff Matrix. In this strategy, you focus on bringing the products you already have to new markets by targeting underserved customers. The approach is often two-fold: targeting new customer segments and buyer personas and expanding into new geographic regions.
Product Development
This strategy is critical to SaaS, fintech, and tech brands, and you’ll see it in action among all the top players across these industries.
Product development doesn’t just come in a one-size-fits-all strategy. To achieve maximum growth, you’ll likely want to utilize several product development tactics:
- Product Updates: Like most smartphone makers, the biggest brands release a new, updated version of their product every year or so to much fanfare and anticipation from loyal customers.
- New Products: When you have dedicated brand fans, you can diversify your product offerings and market them to the same diehard buyers. For example, Apple loyalists will often buy any product the brand releases…whether it’s something they “need” or not.
- New Features and Upgrades: Especially effective for SaaS brands, you may choose to add new premium features to your existing products and encourage buyers to upgrade their subscription plan.
Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations
The Ansoff Matrix can offer valuable insights on the potential growth strategies for businesses. Specifically, when businesses direct their efforts towards expanding their product offerings to new markets, it is known as the “Diversification Strategy.” Our take on this strategy involves tapping into either existing products or markets, but with a unique twist. We aim to establish symbiotic relationships with other brands that share similar expansion goals.
Through this collaborative approach, we can work with other brands that offer complementary products to our existing market to develop comprehensive solutions that address pain points that customers face. This opens the door to new revenue streams by tapping into the established audience of our partner, and presents the opportunity to create new products that cater to their specific needs. By leveraging the power of strategic partnerships, we can implement a growth strategy that is mutually beneficial for all involved.
How to Build a Growth Marketing Plan for Your B2B Brand
Growing a business takes a lot of effort, dedication, and planning. It requires businesses to know their target market, their products or services, and the best way to reach their customers. Once they have established all of these factors, it is crucial that they decide on the right strategy or strategies that will help them achieve their goal of growth. This process involves a lot of research and analysis to understand the available opportunities and the competition in the market.
After deciding on a strategy, businesses need to create a roadmap for their growth marketing plan. This includes setting checkpoints and designing a plan of action to ensure that they stay on track to reach their end goal. Through careful planning and execution, businesses can develop a tactical approach to their marketing efforts and maximize the potential for success. By following these steps, businesses can make significant strides towards achieving their growth objectives and building a sustainable future for their business.
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.
Use your product vision to establish your goals by filling in these blanks:
- Who: This should be your buyer persona or a segment found within your persona.
- Why: What are the pain points your product is going to solve for them? What are their needs and wants?
- What: This is the vehicle that delivers your product or service to the buyer.
- How: This details how your product works to ease the buyers’ pain points.
Establish KPIs and Metrics of Success
How do you know your growth marketing plan is working? If you have to ask, chances are it’s not being used to its full potential. Aligning your goals with business KPIs and growth metrics is the surest way to see if you’re on the right track toward achieving long-term growth.
It’s important to set up metrics for every step of the funnel, then outline what “growth” looks like at each stage. Revenue may be the easiest phase to measure, but how will you track your performance in other areas, like activation and referral? Detail each part of the AAARRR funnel, and clearly outline how you’ll measure success by including optimal conversion rates and overall value.
Once you have this, you’ll have found your “North Star” — the metrics that will guide your growth marketing strategy toward achieving success and reaching your goals.
Get Inspired By Your Competitors Growth Strategy
As a business owner, have you noticed that your competitors are growing at a faster pace compared to your brand? It can be frustrating and demoralizing, but instead of giving in to those negative emotions, why not turn the tables and learn from their success? A competitor audit is a great way to learn how they are growing and to define your own brand’s unique selling proposition (USP).
To start, include your top competitors on a list and then do thorough research such as visiting their websites and trying out their products through demos or trials. The audit should cover important aspects such as product and pricing tiers, features and upgrades, marketing campaigns, copy, and CTAs, value proposition, similarities and differences in comparison to your brand, and your USP (how you win). After finishing the audit, take time to analyze it and focus on your brand’s differentiators to move your business to the head of the pack.
Who Is Your Ideal Customer and What Problems Do They Face?
Here is where you’re going to dig into your buyer personas. This will help you identify and understand the customers you already have and the customers they want.
Remember, while demographics are important, you’ll also want to take a deep dive into psychographics. What motivates them to make a purchase? What keeps them up at night? What are they passionate about?
In addition to demographics and psychographics, you’ll also want to look at geographics (where they’re making purchasing decisions) and behavior (how they act on their wants and needs).
A good buyer persona will look at all of these factors to build a complete profile of your ideal customer, which you can then use to segment by attitude, behavior, interest, and more.
Evaluate Your Customer Journey
The buyer’s journey is a pretty straightforward, point-A-to-point-B map of how your customers interact with your product.
Looks simple, right? In reality, your buyers enter the funnel at various points and move through it in different ways. To effectively utilize the buyer’s journey, you have to understand where your buyers are and how that corresponds to their needs.
- In the awareness stage, your persona is in the top of the funnel. They know they have a problem, but they may not know what that problem is or how to address it.
- In the consideration stage, they are in the middle of the funnel. They know they need a solution, but they’re still looking at all the options.
- In the decision stage, they’ve reached the bottom of the funnel. They’re ready to make a purchase, and depending on how you’ve met their needs throughout their journey, they just might end up choosing you.
Take a close look at your buyer’s journey to better understand the type of content you should be delivering at every stage of the journey and how it corresponds to your funnel.
Brainstorm Ideas with Your Team Members
Brainstorming is an effective way to get creative and spark new ideas. If you’re looking to brainstorm some tactics that will move the needle as you build and implement your growth marketing plan, round up your colleagues and leverage their brainpower for maximum impact.
Just remember, while brainstorming sessions are fun and productive, there are some rules you need to keep in mind:
- No judgment. All ideas are good ideas. At least for right now.
- Keep an eye on the time. Brainstorming sessions that drag on are less effective. Stick to around 30 minutes.
- Write everything down. If someone comes up with a million-dollar idea and no one writes it down, you’re likely to be kicking yourself when you can’t remember what it was.
- Bounce off of each other. Building on other people’s ideas is a great way to keep the energy flowing and generate even more tactics.
- Stay focused. Getting off-topic can derail a brainstorming session faster than anything. Come up with a single question or problem for your brainstorming, and stick to it.
- Aim for quantity over quality. Less isn’t more at this stage. Aim for a large number of ideas, rather than honing in on a narrow few.
Once your session is completed, you can analyze the ideas and begin to thin them out until only the best, most actionable ideas remain.
Prioritize Which Objectives Will Help You Reach Your Goals
Your objectives should reflect your KPIs and should incorporate your North Star metrics to give you a good idea of how effective your growth marketing plan is and to identify any gaps.
Lay out your objectives, and look at your current performance to find where there’s the most room for growth. Be sure you prioritize objectives that drive growth across your established timeline — now, near-term, and in the future. Also refer back to the growth strategies detailed above and ensure your objects are aligned with the ones you’ve chosen.
Choose Tactics to Test
Welcome to the world of experimentation! May I suggest you put on your fabulous lab coat and get ready for an exciting journey? We all know that testing and experimenting are the keys to unlocking optimal growth in marketing efforts. Effective growth hacks stem from a foundation of trial-and-error – keep trying until you find what works, then establish a process to repeat it and maximize sustainable growth.
Given there are countless growth marketing tactics, it’s vital to hone in on the ones that specifically target your ideal customer base, alleviate some of their pain points, and align with your chosen growth strategy. Whether you’re testing various channels, messaging, or mediums, remember that every experiment is a valuable learning opportunity. So don’t be afraid to take risks, challenge assumptions, and continuously iterate!
Set a Budget
How much you spend on growth marketing depends on a lot of factors, not the least of which is how much you can afford to spend. Overall, industry recommendations indicate 2–5 percent of revenue should go toward marketing, and most B2B brands fall into this estimate. However, that number changes depending on the type of business and the maturity of the company.
Ultimately, in order to achieve growth, you’ll want to focus on maximizing ROI. Look beyond just the cost of implementing your growth tactics, and evaluate the value they will bring to your brand.
Use the Scientific Method to Build a Process for Growth Experiments
ometimes, growth marketing will make you feel as if you’re back in high school chemistry class. Proper measurements, careful hypotheses, and strict adherence to every step of the process will help you avoid potentially explosive situations. The tried-and-true scientific method should be your go-to when you’re ready to begin experimenting with growth.
The scientific method is a tried-and-true process that scientists use to investigate a variety of phenomena across many different fields. It involves starting with a question or a problem that needs to be solved, and then performing a series of experiments or observations in order to try and find an answer. The method is characterized by its iterative nature, which means that scientists must be willing to test and refine their hypotheses as they go along.
Although the scientific method is not as complex as rocket science, it can still be a challenging process to navigate. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the inevitable failures that occur along the way. Despite our best efforts, not every experiment will yield the desired results. However, these failures are not a total loss. In fact, the insights and data gained from failed experiments can inform future tests and ultimately make it more likely for scientists to achieve successful outcomes. Overall, it is a method that requires patience, diligence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
If It Works, Go Bigger, If Not, Run the Steps Again
Experiment, rinse, repeat. Growth marketing is built on a cycle of testing, analyzing, and repeating the winning tactics. When you find something that works, do it again, but do it bigger. If it doesn’t, go back to your hypothesis and make adjustments before designing a new test.
Optimize Your Sales Cycle for Growth
Traditional marketers tend to have funnel vision. That is, they focus almost entirely on the top of the funnel, favoring customer acquisition over bottom of the funnel conversion. However, some growth marketers fall into a similar trap, believing that the only customers driving growth are hanging out at the bottom of the funnel.
An effective growth marketer understands that success can only be achieved by addressing the needs of buyers in every stage of the AAARRR funnel. This end-to-end funnel optimization is what separates the good growth marketers from the amazing growth marketers.
In the example above, we can see that marketing has evolved to take on a larger role throughout nearly all stages of the funnel. But while this chart draws a hard line between marketing and sales, in reality, that line is (and should be) blurred. A symbiotic relationship between your marketing and sales teams is crucial to achieving long-term growth. Marketers should have a clear understanding of the sales cycle and how it corresponds to each stage of the funnel. They should also be leveraging sales enablement strategies to provide support and ensure a seamless handoff to the sales team.
Make Sure Growth Is Scalable
What’s worse than not achieving your growth goals? How about not being able to scale your marketing efforts to match your growing brand? Scalability is key to growth marketing, and its basic premise is that your revenue grows quicker and at a steeper incline than your costs.
Costs will rise as you begin to invest more in growing your brand, but when your revenue rises even higher, you’ve achieved scale.
Here again, growth hinges on repetition. Once you’ve found the right product and market fit, you can begin testing your growth strategies to find what’s successful and scalable. From there, the sky’s the limit.
Examples of Successful Growth Marketing Plans
As someone who is interested in growth marketing, it is important to understand the key principles that contribute to successful implementation of growth strategies. One of the most effective ways of doing so is by learning from the experiences of those who have not only succeeded in their growth journey but have also helped organizations achieve their growth objectives.
Here, we have compiled some of the insights and lessons that have been learned by some of the top growth marketing leaders in the industry. By examining their experiences, we can uncover the principles they applied and the strategies they used to achieve impressive growth. By incorporating these lessons into your own growth marketing plan, you may be able to optimize your efforts towards achieving your goals. So, take a closer look and see how you can benefit from their knowledge and experience.
Stripe: Identify a Need and Define a Niche to Stand Out
To achieve growth in market penetration, the founders of Stripe, a payment processing platform, went after an incredibly targeted niche market: developers. Rather than going directly to consumers or even to the business owners who would use their product, Stripe set out to increase early adoption among the developers building ecommerce websites, offering them a service that answered their biggest pain point: the need for a comprehensive payment system that would apply across all of their clients’ websites and platforms.And it worked. Stripe now commands more than 19 percent of market share in the industry. Not easy to do with mega-brands like PayPal and Amazon Pay as your biggest competitors.
Tesla: Turn Customers into Brand Evangelists
You can’t achieve growth without spending money. Or can you? Tesla set out to prove they could be an industry leader…with a $0 marketing spend.
Probably the most shocking part of this is that they actually pulled it off. How? By developing relationships with customers, implementing a strong referral program, and outperforming competitors on social media — a hotbed for Tesla’s ideal buyer.
Ultimately, Tesla proved that you can grow a brand with no ad spend, instead focusing on organic growth, word of mouth, and social proof. Today, Tesla has the highest customer loyalty rate of any car brand, with an overall satisfaction rating of 90 percent.
UberEats: Test Small Before Going Big
However, instead of mounting a massive challenge against Grubhub, UberEats instead targeted a select few cities across America where it believed it could make the greatest impact. The results were astounding – UberEats was able to surpass Grubhub in these test markets by narrowing its focus and experimenting with specific strategies.
The most impressive part was that not only did UberEats become a major player in the industry, it also garnered a large pool of repeat customers who made up a staggering 41% of their customer base compared to Grubhub’s 17%. Now, UberEats is growing rapidly and, despite being behind Grubhub in total revenue, they are quickly closing the gap, demonstrating the power of customer loyalty and positive feedback through word of mouth and referral programs.