Growth Marketing 101: What Is It & How Does It Work?

by The MNTN Team

7 Min Read

Fully committing to a traditional marketing method can leave you stuck in a never-ending cycle of customer acquisition, only to have most of them churn out of your funnel shortly after their first purchase. Fortunately, there are better ways to build your business.

Perhaps the most notable among these is growth marketing, a far more holistic approach that addresses each phase of the purchasing funnel, including post-transaction retention.

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the growth marketing definition and explore the many benefits of this brand-building strategy.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is an advanced marketing strategy focused on the entirety of the customer lifecycle.

Conventional marketing models often prioritize customer acquisition. Growth marketing aims to drive sustainable business growth by optimizing every stage of the customer journey, from brand awareness to retention.

Quick Note: If you’re in the B2B space, our guide on B2B growth marketing may be more applicable.

Growth Marketing vs. Demand Generation

Demand generation aims to drive business growth by targeting users at the top of the sales funnel. In other words, it is a strategy that involves raising awareness of your products, then making consumers want what you’re selling.

In theory, demand generation should produce a steady stream of quality leads and keep the sales revenue flowing, but it doesn’t address post-purchase retention.

Growth marketing, on the other hand, closes the gap by tackling the entire funnel at once. A proper growth marketing strategy takes steps to nurture customer relationships, cultivate feelings of loyalty, and minimize churn. The result is better retention and higher customer lifetime values (CLVs), both of which are great for your bottom line.

Growth Marketing vs. Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is all about driving specific, measurable actions like clicks, leads, and sales, ensuring every marketing dollar is well spent. It uses data and analytics to optimize campaigns in real time, delivering high ROI by targeting the right audience at the right time.

With clear metrics and KPIs, performance marketing allows for precise budget allocation and quick adjustments to maximize results. The key difference lies in its intense focus on short-term goals, whereas growth marketing takes a more holistic, long-term approach to the entire customer journey.

Benefits of Growth Marketing

Like any savvy business owner, you probably want to know what benefits growth marketing provides. You’ll be happy to learn that there are plenty of perks to adopting a long-term growth mindset, including the following:

Data-Driven Decision Making

One of the core principles of growth marketing is that every decision should be made with real-time, relevant data. By leveraging analytics tools and techniques, you can gain actionable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. Altogether, such a data-driven approach allows for more accurate targeting and takes the guesswork out of campaign planning.

Just remember that a data-centric approach requires balance. You need to incorporate a mix of short-term and long-term metrics that are relevant to your big-picture goals and consistently focus on them.

Continuous Experimentation

Growth marketing thrives on continuous experimentation. Don’t be afraid to mix things up and try new approaches. You never know when you’ll uncover the next big trend that mobilizes your audience to action.

Of course, you’ll need a standardized process to guide your experiments. Use A/B testing and other experimental methods to find out what works and what doesn’t. Continuous testing will help you stay nimble and adapt to changing market conditions.

Sustainable Business Growth

Growth marketing ensures that your marketing efforts aren’t geared toward quick wins but instead concentrated on building long-term relationships with customers. As such, embracing the framework will help you break free from the churn-and-burn nature of traditional marketing strategies, becoming more skilled at nurturing loyalty and maintaining strong customer relationships as a result.

Improved Customer Retention

Retention represents a critical component of growth marketing. By delivering exceptional customer experiences and consistently meeting customer needs, your business can improve retention rates. Happy, loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, provide valuable feedback, and refer others to your brand, making for a true win-win scenario.

Enhanced Revenue Generation

Through growth marketing, you can maximize your cash flow and revenue. First, keeping customers on board for longer increases their CLV, which means your average earnings per customer will increase. Additionally, you’ll be able to spend less on new customer acquisition, which can boost your return on ad spend (ROAS) and improve your profit margins.

How Does Growth Marketing Work?

As mentioned, growth marketing relies on a full-funnel approach to customer acquisition and retention. Instead of just focusing on a single stage of the funnel, such as raising brand awareness, your campaigns will address every stage of the decision-making journey. By viewing the entire journey holistically, you’ll be able to identify and remove points of friction that are impacting your revenue and retention rates.

Additionally, growth marketing gives you an opportunity to promote loyalty, experiment, and continuously optimize your content to address specific consumer pain points.

Growth Marketing Channels

Many different growth marketing channels are at your disposal for a variety of different approaches, such as:

Content Marketing: Involves producing educational or informative materials that nurture relationships with consumers
Email: A cost-effective tool for delivering marketing content
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing content to improve rankings and drive organic traffic
Paid Ads: Offers an immediate boost in traffic
Social Media: Engaging with customers on platforms like Facebook and X
Influencers: Collaborating with social media personalities to reach new audiences
Affiliates: Partnering with entities who promote products in exchange for a commission

While you won’t need to use all of these strategies, you will need to maintain a healthy mix of some of them to effectively target consumers in every stage of the sales funnel.

Growth Marketing Metrics and Measurement

Understanding the inner workings of growth marketing is one thing. You also need to be able to determine whether your growth marketing strategy is working.

In order to do so, you’ll have to monitor key metrics like:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost of acquiring a new customer
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue someone generates over their time with your brand
Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a specified period
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action

The above isn’t an exhaustive list of metrics. You’ll need to identify those that are most relevant to your specific goals and use them to obtain a complete picture of the customer journey.

Growth Marketing Best Practices

Above all, you need to ensure that you build your growth marketing strategy around the customer and the value you offer them. Putting their needs and pain points ahead of your sales goals will set the stage for lasting relationships and increased revenue in the long term.

Next, you must maintain a well-rounded mix of marketing channels. While you don’t have to use every channel you can think of, you should be connecting with your audience through multiple touchpoints. Simply using lots of channels isn’t enough, either; your content and voice must be consistent across every platform.

Marketing channels aren’t the only aspects of your strategy that need to work together, though. You’ve got to ensure alignment between your marketing, sales, and product development teams, too. When everyone is on the same page, they’ll be able to provide a full-funnel experience.

Growth Marketing Examples

You’ve likely encountered (or been targeted by) numerous growth marketing campaigns without even noticing it. Airbnb is a great example of growth marketing in action, as it made use of referral programs and user-generated content to grow its user base rapidly early on.

Dropbox is another good example. The platform’s referral program rewards users with free storage for referring friends and coworkers. Users can effortlessly send referral links by email, ensuring they get credit when someone they know signs up based on their recommendation.

Using Connected TV to Achieve Growth Goals

If you want your growth marketing strategy to stand out, consider integrating MNTN Performance TV into your mix of tools. With MNTN, you’ll gain access to premium inventory, precision targeting capabilities, our Creative-as-a-Subscription™ service, and everything else you need to generate sustainable results.

Unlike traditional TV advertising, MNTN allows you to measure everything and tie actual outcomes back to your CTV advertising campaigns. From the top down, MNTN Performance TV is designed to deliver real results.

Growth Marketing: Final Thoughts

If you are ready to break the endless customer acquisition and churn cycle, integrate growth marketing into your business strategy. By focusing on the entire customer lifecycle, you can achieve sustainable results and steady revenue that support long-term business growth.