Growth Marketing VS. Traditional Marketing
marketingBy: Mehak Vohra Date: 7/18/21
Overview
As marketing continues to evolve, the call for growth marketing over traditional marketing is quickly rising. In traditional marketing efforts, it can be hard to track effectiveness and ROI which can lead to low customer retention and leave you with no way to know exactly why.
Growth marketing focuses on collecting and analyzing data you can use to improve your product as well as the companies’s key performance indicators. By collecting all of this information you can use data-backed decisions on future marketing campaigns and strategies.
Metrics
A growth marketers main job is to retain and acquire users or customers for a company. You can tell if you’re acquiring and retaining users by continuously growing the companies North Star Metric. This metric captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. For example, Facebook’s North Star Metric would be daily active users. High level growth marketers raise their North Star Metric by reducing churn, watching user behavior, and keeping the users that they have acquired. (NSM)
Customer Journey Funnel
Following the customer journey funnel is essential to continual growth for your company. While traditional marketing mainly focuses on the awareness and acquisition portions of the customer journey funnel, growth marketing includes the entire funnel. **The customer journey funnel includes awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.** By following through the entire funnel, growth marketers are able to not only generate leads and sales but retain customers for a longer life-time value turning them into advocates for your brand that will bring more customers directly to you.
Product Management
Growth marketers also have a lot more influence on the product team and builds a marketing strategy into the product itself rather than just working with what the product team gives them. Traditional marketers take the product that they are given and have to influence the customers perception of the product to generate leads and conversions. A growth marketer will interact directly with the customer to test the product fit within the market, gather feedback, and repeat these steps until they have developed a product that the consumer wants.
Product Market Fit
The goal of a growth marketer (and the rest of the company) is to find product market fit. Product market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy the market. The process to find product market fit usually does not happen overnight. It takes many small steps and product testing to find. You can tell when you have found product market fit when customers are buying fast and your business is growing at an extremely fast rate. However, product market fit is not always obvious when found and can even be lost. Markets and customers are always changing so your business must always be growing to adapt to these changes.
Growth marketers are expected to have wide skill set that can branch into many areas of the business. They will have a strong overview of their product to better hypothesize and test ways to continue collect data and sustain growth. Traditional marketers may be data-informed as well, but most marketing decisions are made through opinion rather than metrics. This approach requires large advertising budgets to create awareness and can produce barely any measurable results. A growth marketer knows how to track everything that they do and is data-driven in each marketing decision. They are keen to finding low cost or free channel alternatives to attract and acquire new customers.
Overall both forms of marketing are trying to achieve the same goal and many of the same skills are required in each form to get there. It is the mindset of how to accomplish that goal that really sets apart growth marketing from traditional marketing.
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