Developing an effective growth marketing strategy helps businesses drive user growth and engagement. It helps growth marketing teams leverage data-driven insights to identify opportunities for improvement and then execute strategies to capitalize on those opportunities.
Going beyond traditional marketing, growth marketers use a variety of tactics to drive user growth, such as A/B testing, personalization, segmentation, content optimization, and more.
They also use analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of their strategies and make adjustments accordingly.
In this article we will highlight the best growth marketing strategies that companies have been using to increase their customer acquisition and retention rates.
What Is Growth Marketing And How To Develop A Growth Marketing Strategy?
Growth marketing is an analytical way to acquire new customers and grow a business. It uses data, experimentation, and evaluation to build and grow profitable customer acquisition channels.
Traditional marketers are gradually moving away from traditional marketing and embracing growth marketing tactics to help prospects in their customer journey and increase customer lifetime.
Successful growth marketers incorporate tactics, like SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising. The aim of marketing growth strategies is to detect the most successful paths for attracting and maintaining customers, and then improving and expanding those paths over time.
Why Do Companies Need To Make Use Of Growth Marketing Tactics?
Businesses need growth marketing to increase customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and revenue.
Growth marketing tactics help companies understand their target audience better so they can create more effective marketing campaigns and optimize their products or services for maximum impact during a prospects entire customer journey.
By using data-driven insights to inform decisions, growth marketing can help you quickly identify areas of opportunity and develop strategies that will help your company achieve its goals faster.
Growth Marketing Strategy Examples
#1: How Zendesk used SEO for brand awareness and increased traffic from search engines
Zendesk is a customer service software company that used search engine optimization with a twist for exponential business growth.
When Zendesk saw that people were searching for the term "Zendesk alternative" on Google they knew that they needed to somehow rank for this search query to bring the searchers back to their platform.
The marketing geniuses at Zendesk created a fake band website named "Zendesk Alternative" with the same domain name and using SEO techniques ranked it at the top for the search query "Zendesk alternative".
The fake band and the band video embedded on their homepage helped the company bring the searchers back to their platform as well increase their brand awareness immensely.
#2: How CloudHone.com used A/B testing to increase conversions
Cloudphone.com runs a cloud-based phone system for small businesses that helps them make telecommunications easier and less expensive.
When they launched their initial marketing campaign they encountered a churn rate issue which was affecting their conversion rates negatively. Only a fraction of their target audience was signing up for their service. The challenge was to identify where exactly the prospects are dropping off.
Cloudphone.com used a combination of A/B testing and surveys to discover that their users were dropping off because one of the key time-saving feature that could have convinced the users to sign up for the service was not being promoted properly.
By using the insights gathered through A/B testing Cloudphone.com revised their onboarding flow to draw attention to their critical time-saving feature. Doing that reduced their churn rate and increased the conversions considerably.
#3: How Xero used market development as a growth strategy
Xero offers cloud-based accounting software to SMBs and accounting firms. Most small businesses however hire accounting firms and bookkeepers to manage their accounts. So if Xero were to be successful they needed to have those accounting firms buy into their products as well.
To accomplish that, Xero devised an extensive partner program. Through this partner program Xero helped accounting firms and bookkeepers to secure more clients.
This approach worked in Xero's favor and multiplied their business in a very short period of time. They developed their existing market base by helping a segment of their target personas get more business using their own software.
#4: How Kissmetrics used free trial with email marketing to drive growth
Kissmetrics is a customer behavior analysis service that provides users tools to increase engagement, conversions, and retention on the Web.
Their biggest competitor is a free tool by Google called Google Analytics. Kissmetrics entered the under-educated market with a paid product. That was a complicated situation for the company.
To compete against the giant and to attract the right users, Kissmetrics created high quality guides that educated their user base and provided them with valuable insights.
They offered those guides to people who signed up for their free trial. Using the power of email marketing they were able to become the first option for marketers considering investing in a paid behavior analytics tool.
#5: How Intercom used content marketing for business growth
Intercom offers users a suite of apps to manage their sales, marketing, and support communication. They wanted their content marketing efforts to not only distinguish them as a powerful player in the market but also to attract the right leads for business growth.
To accomplish this goal they focused on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to guide their content marketing efforts. This approach helped them create content that focused on solving their target audience's problems.
They answered their customer's questions helping them solve their problems while providing them with actionable insights through very targeted content on their blog. Using this approach helped Intercom generate a lot of business because their content was not only attracting the right users but also helping them solve the problems that they were trying to solve.
#6: How Wise used their existing customer base to promote their service
Wise, previously known as Transferwise, is a big player in the fintech industry. That was not always the case though.
Since moving money around involves trust issues, fintech companies operate in a very low trust market.
To combat this challenge Wise devised a strategy that helped the company encourage their existing user base to promote their offering. They used every touch point with their customer to their advantage and created a very delightful customer experience for their users.
Increasing their Net Promoter Score (NPS) and reducing the cost of doing business with them helped Wise quickly become the market leaders in the vertical they operate in.
#7: How Slack used their freemium model to become indispensable
Slack has become the market leader for corporate communications in recent years but that was not always the case.
At launch, Slack needed to find a way to be indispensable to teams. That's when they decided upon their Freemium structure. It wasn't something revolutionary, yet Slack used it in a unique fashion, granting them the upper hand over competitors.
Rather than launching an unfinished product, they provided something that their customers could not live without after using it. Coupled with customer support levels equal to those of the premium subscriptions, they addressed any potential reasons that a user might want to leave the product.
This also opened up possibilities for increased virality. Slack users enthusiastically talked about the product in many places like social media networks and blogs. That helped increase brand awareness and brought in new customers.
#8: How Hubspot used a free tool to attract new leads
HubSpot offers users marketing tools that can help them with inbound marketing. They not only needed to attract new customers but also to educate them on how to use their suite of marketing tools in a way that can help their businesses grow fast.
Their strategy was to create a tool that can help them acquire qualified leads while providing real business value to their target audience. In 2007 they launched a tool called website grader as a free resource and that changed the game for Hubspot.
The tool graded a customer's website and gave clear and practical recommendations on how to improve their website. Hubspot's website grader tool attracted a lot of new customers and generated millions of top-of-funnel leads for the platform.
The tool also boosted Hubspot's own website rankings by attracting a lot of backlinks and eventually ranking at the top for the relevant search queries in the SERPs.
Key Takeaways
- In the modern competitive landscape companies need to utilize a variety of growth hacks.
- There are many growth opportunities available to businesses today with growth marketing channels like social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, and influencer marketing among others.
- Businesses should implement A/B testing to optimize their website and marketing campaigns for maximum conversions.
- Companies should invest in content marketing to establish thought leadership and drive organic traffic to your website.
- Businesses should utilize data and analytics to track marketing performance and make informed decisions about future growth strategies.
