What Is Growth Marketing, and How Does it Impact Revenue

Revenue isn't just about sales — marketing matters more than ever in cultivating an enjoyable, personalized experience that customers demand. As competition within your market space increases, it's essential that you create an excellent customer experience from their first touchpoint with you through becoming a brand advocate.

A big part of that is getting out in front of your competitors and wowing your target market so you become their first and only resource. Growth marketing focuses on acquiring that audience (and ultimately, customer base) through constant testing, experimentation, and implementation of new marketing practices to grow your brand and revenue.

In this guide, we'll explore exactly what growth marketing is, how to do it properly, and how it ties into explosive revenue growth.

Intro to Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is about infusing art with science and approaching every action in a prescriptive and data-oriented manner. To be a great growth marketer you must be willing to test (and adapt) every aspect of your marketing process to find the optimal approach.

This practice encourages marketers to drill into principles and test every aspect of the marketing process to find the optimal approach. Those premises are also constantly optimized so changing consumer trends don't outpace marketing practices.

This new approach to marketing is a deliberate departure from traditional marketing practices and time-tested procedural playbooks that have worked for decades. But it doesn't swing abruptly in the opposite direction into untested, spontaneous marketing.

As part of growth marketing, marketers might:

• Develop A/B testing to examine granular elements of their layouts, messaging, and marketing offers
• Use multivariate testing to assess actions taken by different user segments as a result of different touchpoints
• Create very detailed buyer personas that map to target market groups and present a clearer understanding of buyer motivations
• Personalize every interaction with custom communication tracks, sequential marketing assets, and robust analysis of the results

Growth marketers rely extensively on analytics to optimize campaigns for success and identify weaknesses or low engagement points that can be improved. They maintain personalized engagement with leads and customers long after the acquisition stage to turn shoppers into lifetime customers and brand ambassadors.

Three Keys to Successful Growth Marketing

Making the switch from traditional marketing or establishing a growth marketing team when you're a startup isn't easy. Whether you're hiring a new group of marketers or you and your current team are making the transition, it's important to develop the right mindset for a successful growth marketing approach. Train your marketing and revenue team employees (or look for applicants) with these characteristics:

1. Be Data-Driven

The cornerstone of effective experimentation is data. Every change and marketing initiative needs to be done in a measurable way that ultimately allows your team to determine if the action was effective — and then, how effective it may have been.

Based on the quantitative outcome of your frequent experiments, your team can then modify your existing campaigns and create new ones that take the results into consideration. These changes, in turn, generate more data that you can use to fine-tune and create marketing endeavors that are proven to work.

This is a challenge for marketing teams stuck in a traditional mindset, as it means people have to be willing to let go of opinions that are being proven wrong by data. By using the data to make decisions instead of seniority or the most persuasive opinion, your team will routinely make better and better decisions. Data can also convince the rest of your executive team about taking big risks on new practices and costly marketing ventures that will position your brand on top.

2. Be Prescriptive

By being willing to step outside the bounds of traditional thinking and constructing flexible mindsets that govern new marketing practices, your team will be better able to respond to — or even preempt — challenges in the future.

It's important that you train and incentivize your team to think critically instead of just completing process checklists. They should constantly be proactive, willing to experiment, and not reliant on following orders without understanding the reasoning behind them.

However, those checklists and processes need to exist. Without clear-cut best practices and detailed processes that demystify marketing, there will always be waste and missed opportunities. Also, without clear processes, every successful marketing campaign will be an unrepeatable fluke. But with proper documentation and guide-building, you and your team should be able to replicate and scale every venture so you can achieve better marketing while optimizing your ROI and ROAS.

3. Be Vulnerable

Growth marketing practices rely on experimentation, and many times, experiments don't pan out. It's important for your team — from the individual employees ideating new tests and collecting data to each member of your executive team — to realize that failures are part of the process.

In every A/B test, either the 'A' or the 'B' (or both) is going to have unsatisfactory results. But that's not just part of the cost. That's also part of the value. Every poor result is a missing part of the puzzle to what your target market actually responds well to.

Having the mindset that bad results will occasionally happen is part of developing a healthy culture with employees willing to take risks and accept 'good enough' in pursuit of ongoing improvement. Just as importantly, it means your team can openly report on all results and freely discuss what doesn't work instead of being afraid of the results.

How Does Growth Marketing Impact Revenue?

While every marketing venture is ultimately in the service of increasing revenue, growth marketing is valuable because it switches the conversation from short-term wins to long-term strength. Your company can only scale (rather than intermittently grow) if you know what works and why it works. With this approach, every campaign adds to your company's growing body of knowledge about how to engage with customers year after year.

Transform Your Team into Data-Driven Revenue Generators

Growth marketing is a tricky endeavor, and it's an equally tricky transition. House of Revenue is here to help you turn your marketing and revenue teams into data-loving scientists that are ready to experiment, analyze the results, and craft new marketing strategies with a foundation of evidence. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you scale.