Driving Growth Marketing for software companies or startups can feel like a losing battle. You have enough to focus on with the day-to-day operations and development, let alone growth.
But growth needs to be on your mind all the time. Brands like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Instagram took their users from zero to millions or hundreds of millions using growth marketing – and so can you.
What is Growth Marketing?
Marketing is focused on different goals, but growth marketing is focused entirely on one goal: growth.
Growth hacking strategies are intended to increase the customer base as quickly as possible, while also keeping the marketing spend to a minimum. The three main types of growth marketing are:
- Content marketing: Using content to promote brand awareness
- Product marketing: Promoting products to increase sales and brand awareness – this may also include marketing within a product
- Advertising: Paid promotions, such as ads
The main growth marketing strategies are content marketing, product marketing, and paid advertising.
Also known as “pirate metrics,” growth marketing focuses on optimizing the Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral (AARRR) funnel.
- Acquisition: Find a cost-effective channel with the target audience
- Activation: Entice people to try your product
- Retention: Engage with customers to nurture loyalty and long-term relationships
- Revenue: Invite existing customers to refer your product to others
- Referral: Build a constant revenue stream for manageable growth
Best Examples of Growth Marketing
Dropbox
Dropbox is the poster child for growth marketing. Now worth over $10 billion, Dropbox began as a humble startup with a tiny marketing budget. It reached its current success without marketing spend – instead, the company created a wildly successful referral program.
The program offers users 250mb of additional storage space to any customer who invited a friend, as long as the friend created an account. Each new user only cost Dropbox 500mb of space for a low cost of acquisition.
Airbnb
Like Dropbox, Airbnb began with a humble team of guys who allowed strangers to use their homes when the hotels were booked, leading to the idea of a rental by the owner. The marketing strategy included word-of-mouth and PR coverage at first, then they reached out to the target audience by attending tech events that were likely to have sold-out hotels.
Along with this marketing strategy, Airbnb increased the number of bookings by improving the image quality of the rental photos by traveling to the homes and taking photos themselves. Airbnb also used a Craigslist API reverse engineering hack to cross-post listings and tap into the huge customer base.
Instagram is one of the ultimate examples of a growth marketing strategy with product-market fit. The platform launched at the perfect time, in the perfect place, and in the perfect context. Unlike other social media, Instagram provided a spot for friends to interact and share photos instead of text posts or tweets.
Note that this wouldn’t have worked before everyone had a smartphone with an excellent digital camera and numerous photo-editing apps. More than ever, people wanted to document their lives and share it with others. Users enjoyed what they had, so the referrals came naturally.
Uber
Uber is a stellar example of how to enter new markets. In each new city, Uber takes a tailored approach and considers the events, weather, taxi services, nightlife, and tourism. In doing so, the company can guarantee that there’s a market demand for its services.
In addition, the whole model is designed around taxi services’ pain points, such as payments, high costs, and the need to hail a cab in the middle of the night in the rain. The service was a success, and referrals happened automatically. Uber took it a step further, however, and offered a $20 incentive to new users to take a ride.
Growth Marketing Best Practices
Set Clear Goals
Goals and objectives should be the guideline for any marketing strategy. It’s not enough to have an idea of what you want to accomplish – set realistic and specific goals that you want to achieve within a certain amount of time.
Learn What Isn’t Working
Metrics help you determine if your efforts are aligning with your goals. If you notice something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to scrap it. Even if you spend a lot of time and effort on a campaign, you won’t get any better results by hoping things will turn around. Start over and modify your strategy.
Don’t Rely on One Channel
It’s unlikely that the whole of your target audience hangs out in one place, so why should you focus on only one channel? While it’s smart to keep your efforts targeted, at least at first, try a few different channels that have the majority of your audience or the most valuable segments. From there, you can expand as you see what works.
Collect Data from Customers and Prospects
Communicating with customers and prospects is a huge advantage in the modern, connected world. When you have your customers’ email contact and access to them through social networks, you can ask for feedback, suggestions, and recommendations to improve your campaigns and your products.
Create Good Content and Repurpose Old Content
Good quality content is a must for any marketing effort. If you provide value, customers will stay on your site longer and trust your brand more. In addition, the internet is bombarded with new content every day – effective content is the only way to stand out.
Growth Marketing Techniques and Tips
- Have an experimental mindset: Growth marketing is all about experimenting and learning what works and what doesn’t.
- Nurture customer relationships: A key component of referrals and retention is maintaining strong, value-driven relationships with customers.
- Improve SEO: SEO is still one of the most effective (and cheapest) strategies to boost brand awareness and should be used alongside your growth marketing campaign.
- Build partnerships: Businesses aren’t a one-way street anymore. You must rely on partners, distributors, and suppliers to make your business run, so foster and grow these relationships through interaction and networking.
- Learn from competitor strategies: Your competitors offer a lot of insight into the audience and what works for them. Check out what your competitors are doing and let it inspire your own marketing efforts.
Key Takeaway
Growth marketing goes beyond the goals of traditional marketing and seeks to grow the business in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Take inspiration from these examples, best practices, and techniques to develop your own strategy for your business.
