Last Updated on January 29, 2020 by Larious

Are you looking to grow your business? You might have heard the term ‘growth hacking’. There’s no actual ‘hacking’ involved in growth hacking, it is data-driven marketing used as a method to enhance demand generation.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing is the process of performing experiments to improve the results of a target area. If there’s a certain metric that you want to increase, growth marketing can be used to achieve that.

The Role of Growth Marketing:

• Determine areas to test and improve upon
• Develop and design experiments to enhance processes
• Conduct experiments based on the hypothesis
• Analyze results and conduct follow-up experimentation as needed

Growth marketers use data related scientific methods to construct and carry out experiments.

Within a business, growth marketing is an analytically-based process that focuses more on the data side of marketing over creative aspects.

Although experiments are performed in order to improve the rate of growth and expansion, growth marketers need to be fine with failing and even plan for it. If you create an experiment and it doesn’t yield the results you expected, you need to have the next option on standby.

Growth marketers should have multiple solutions and be ready to address experiments from different angles. If one fails, the next approach is ready for testing.

Application of Growth Marketing in Business

Growth marketing can be implemented in many aspects of your business.

These aspects are abbreviated in the acronym ‘AAARRR’, which expands to; Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral.

Awareness

A key aspect of growth marketing is increasing awareness, which are the efforts made towards the exposure of your brand to potential prospects as well as creating a culture around it.

This involves tactics such as social media marketing, SEO optimization, and many more.

To achieve this, marketers experiment with social media strategies. They test what frequency of posts is most effective in increasing blog traffic and what type of content gets the most attention.

Acquisition

The acquisition is the process of acquiring new customers through chatbots, gated content, freemium subscriptions, and other processes. For instance, Slack gains new users through email collection forms.

A growth marketer tries to boost the number of forms submitted by experimenting with the button orientation, color, and page orientation.

Activation

Activation is the process of getting people to activate the products or services they purchase as soon as possible. For instance, Facebook noticed that if the new users added at least seven friends in the first week, they were highly likely to return and keep using Facebook.

Growth marketers research ways to make sure that happens through streamlining the process of how users find and add friends.

Revenue

Revenue involves all the processes done to make the company money. These are things like customer purchases, signing up for a service, upgrading current products or services.

Growth marketers address revenue-associated metrics by conducting experiments on pricing strategies, how prices are advertised on the pricing page. They also experiment with upselling tactics, which are sales techniques where a seller coaxes the customer to purchase more products, services or add-ons on them.

Retention

Retention is the process of retaining customers on a platform and continuing to buy goods or subscribing to their services.

To improve retention, growth marketers look at methods to offer personalized support for their customers in order to increase the value users get from the product. Personalization helps users gain a deeper relationship, thereby increasing product value.

Referral

When customers are satisfied with your products or services, they will refer them to their friends. To improve referral processes, marketers set up referral schemes or programs that incentivize referrals so customers are encouraged to refer prospective customers in order to earn a small commission. For instance, Tesla offers supercharger miles for free to users in exchange for their referrals. Growth marketers experiment with incentives or promotional strategies based on the referral system in order to increase results.

What is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the process of selling and promoting products to customers in a market in order to increase sales revenue. Product marketing acts as the link between improving product awareness and development.

Role of Product Marketing and Product Marketing Managers

Product marketing addresses the following aspects of a business.

• Which products or product line requires marketing.
• Who are the target customers and where are the target markets?
• Determine the distribution channels to use in order to ensure a profit and maximize customer reach.
• Establish good product pricing strategies to capture the market and maximize profits.
• Promote the key attributes of a product in a way that suits the needs of the customer.

A product marketing manager acts as a bridge between the company and the customer’s perspective. This includes having a sound understanding of the customer’s engagement and satisfaction with the product line.

Product marketing managers collect customer perspectives through the use of surveys, interviews, as well as for analytics for product usage and competitive data to monitor and come up with marketing strategies.

Managers also use analytics to create a product roadmap to document the history of the product so they can see where they stand, and what they can do to benefit sales revenue. They also emphasize on customer-product education to promote the customer’s engagement with their products.

Project marketing managers use the following strategies in order to evaluate the position of their products in the market.

• Data analysis – PMMs evaluate internal and external data.
• Product validation – Testing and validating product ideas before committing to the use of engineering resources.
• Customer insights – This is done through interviews, surveys, focus groups, and customer observation.
• Market testing – optimal prices and marketing programs are developed through A/B testing of elements including language (copy), prices, product line-ups, visuals.