What is Growth Marketing? How to Build an ROI-Boosting Strategy

Growth marketing is a results-driven approach that uses continuous testing and optimization to attract and engage customers throughout the marketing funnel. The goal is to gain long-term customer value and scalability. This guide shows you how.

Marketing has come a long way since its inception. We no longer rely solely on word of mouth or billboards to get our message across.

Now, with an abundance of data and analytics at our fingertips, marketers can pinpoint exactly what makes a campaign effective and what leads to bottlenecks.

Referred to as growth marketing, this strategy involves tactics like A/B testing, data analysis, and search engine optimization (SEO) to create more effective campaigns.

HawkSEM Co-founder and CEO Sam Yadegar shares his insights on how to create growth marketing campaigns that boost the biggest return on investment (ROI).

Growth marketing can help significantly increase a brand’s audience and revenue. (Image: Adobe)

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a data-driven approach to digital marketing that focuses on experimentation and optimization for long-term, full-funnel success.

Using tactics like A/B testing, customer behavior analysis, and cross-channel marketing, growth marketing can help significantly increase a brand’s audience and revenue.

Benefits of growth marketing

Yadegar says customer acquisition is the most important result of a sustainable growth marketing strategy, but it also includes:

1. Long-term growth: Growth isn’t just about finding new customers through referral programs or PPC ads; it’s also about retaining existing ones and enhancing customer lifecycle, or customer lifetime value (CLV).
2. Cost efficiency: Growth marketing optimizes the price of advertising by identifying high-performing channels and tactics.
3. Data-driven decisions: Analytics and data guide campaigns.
4. Scalability: Over time, growth marketing builds measurable processes that can be repeated to grow with your business.
5. Brand awareness: Growth marketing helps increase your brand’s recognition and exposure with a blend of pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing (SMM), and search engine optimization (SEO).
6. Innovation: continuous testing and creativity help uncover new growth opportunities.

We know what you’re thinking: isn’t this what traditional marketing models aim for, too?

Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing

While growth marketing focuses on experimentation and data to improve performance throughout the sales funnel, traditional marketing relies on campaigns that drive awareness or sales.

Yadegar explains that traditional marketing is a checkpoint on the route to significant growth:

“Traditional marketing may be more of a straight line where you maintain or only grow a certain fixed percentage year over year,” he says. “Growth marketing aims to create a compounding effect over time.”

For example, a traditional marketing model might include scheduled social media posts and PPC campaigns that have yielded consistent results for the last quarter.

On the other hand, growth marketing might focus on refining those existing tactics, resulting in uncovering strategies that bring even more revenue and reach.

In other words, growth marketing is an enhanced, optimized version of traditional marketing. It ups the ante with more substantial audience engagement and revenue growth.

So, what constitutes an effective growth marketing plan?

Key components of a growth marketing strategy

We know growth marketing expands on traditional marketing tactics and requires a little more TLC to get you those exponential revenue gains. As for what that looks like, here are some key components:

1. Marketing funnel stages

Growth marketing isn’t a short-term affair. The right content in front of the right audience can build your brand authority and move previously interested audiences to brand advocates in no time.

The only caveat? Those marketing tactics won’t look the same for audiences in different funnel stages.

Here’s a quick look at marketing efforts for each funnel:

• Awareness: Pillar page content, industry blog articles, social media infographics
• Consideration: Service pages, website content, organic social media posts
• Decision: Product ads, comparison articles, feature breakdowns, product demos
• Action: Limited-time offers, landing pages, referral bonuses, upsells, retargeted ads

So, which marketing channel do you post all this funnel content to? If you have a growth mindset, you won’t stop at just one.

2. Cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing creates a cohesive customer experience on every marketing channel to build multiple touchpoints and conversion opportunities for your audience.

If you rely on just one marketing channel to deliver your messaging (like Facebook Ads), you might miss out on growth opportunities from other avenues (like Google Search Network or paid ads).

Other channels to consider for growth marketing include:

• Organic social media
• Social media marketing ads
• Google Ads (including YouTube)
• LinkedIn
• Email marketing
• SMS marketing
• Microsoft Ads
• TikTok Ads
• Content marketing

A cross-channel marketing strategy lets you capture audiences from all angles and customer journey stages.

3. A/B testing

A/B testing is the process of testing two versions of the same variable in front of your target audience to determine which is more effective.

These could be headlines, visual elements, ad copy, keywords, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, or any other marketing assets.

“A/B testing helps brands expand by testing ideas and theories, and [making] data-backed decisions,” explains Yadegar.

Just don’t test too many variables at once, or it can muddle your data on what’s more effective.

4. Customer feedback and analysis

Growth marketing requires consistent data to inform the best possible path toward more revenue. But how do you source data to beef up your marketing funnel?

Turn to your existing customers. Learn more about them so you can better market to similar audiences.

Research might include:

• Social listening – Review comments, likes, and other engagement on social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Purchase behavior – Consider what your customers buy, how often, and how much they spend.
• Customer chat logs – Peruse through customer chat logs and phone calls for common denominators on points of praise and criticism.

You can also use platforms like Facebook Analytics or Google Analytics to learn more about your audience, including:

• Website traffic – Who visits your website, and where do they most often click or bounce
• Email analytics – Who opens your emails, shares them, or responds to them
• Ad performance – Who sees versus who clicks or acts on your ad campaigns

Brainstorm with your growth marketing team on what potential adjustments could make an impact. (Image: Adobe)

How to create a growth marketing strategy

Ready to build a growth marketing strategy? Here’s how to get started:

1. Complete your prerequisites

Like any marketing campaign, you need to first:

• Define your goals: Outline clear, measurable campaign objectives and align them with business growth metrics.
• Research your audience: Conduct research to identify who your ideal customers are, their pain points, and what drives their decisions.
• Outline your customer journey: In order to pinpoint where your customer base drops off or where opportunities for growth lie.

2. Collect and analyze existing data

Use tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and HubSpot to track user behavior, customer data, and campaign performance.

3. Hypothesize and strategize experiments

Brainstorm with your growth marketing team on what potential adjustments could make an impact. Identify which experiments to implement accordingly.

4. Run experiments

Test your hypotheses across your marketing channels and use A/B testing to determine what leads to the highest conversion rate or performs best.

5. Measure the results

After sufficient data collection, analyze the results to double down on successful tactics and learn from poor performance.

6. Scale

After identifying strategies that can be consistently replicated, establish systems and automations to achieve scalable and reliable results.

Proven examples of growth marketing (and why they work)

Growth hacking looks different for every brand. For a small mom-and-pop restaurant, 30 new customers over a busy weekend might signify business growth.

For an established finance SaaS startup, an influx of 1,000 new users might be its definition of expansion.

Here are some highlights of successful growth marketing from HawkSEM’s case studies:

Thriftbooks (ecommerce business)

Imagine your audience clicked on your ads 35% more, and existing customers spent 50% more than they do now.

These are real results from our growth strategy for our client, ThriftBooks, an online purveyor of new and used media.

ThriftBooks had a solid stock of inventory, but its existing campaigns fell short of actually moving that inventory. So we A/B tested different PPC elements and launched a customer acquisition strategy that focused on nurturing the most qualified audience segments.

“Ecommerce is about creating an audience and keyword expansion strategy to accelerate growth,” Yadegar explains.

That means finding every potential keyword that could reach new buyers — a classic customer acquisition strategy. However, some industries need more emphasis on customer retention.

eThink (SaaS brand)

eThink, an e-learning SaaS platform for organizations, struggled to expand its audience with an outdated SEO strategy.

We came on board and upgraded them to a high-powered performance marketing strategy that zeroed in on their target audience.

We started with a content marketing audit that scoured an additional 17 pillar pages and a technical error cleanup to improve user experience.

Then, we published new blog posts that our keyword research predicted would appeal to both their bottom- and top-of-the-funnel audiences.

The results? A 205% hike in site traffic and 3x more closed deals from website visitors.

Rachel’s Challenge (non-profit business)

Named after Columbine High School shooting victim Rachel Scott, Rachel’s Challenge is a nonprofit that combats bullying, self-harm, and school violence.

The company boasts stellar educational materials they wanted to share, but they lacked the staff and assembly bookings to follow through.

They looked to HawkSEM for a data-driven SEO and PPC strategy focused on growth. We quickly found in the onboarding stage that this would only be possible with optimized keywords to expand ad reach.

This was in addition to a robust new blog strategy to hit audience pain points, boost high-quality lead generation, and inspire more assembly signups.

After hitting go on their new strategy, we cut their acquisition costs by 50% and bumped lead generation by a staggering 415%.

The takeaway

The key to more revenue and potential customers lies in your customer feedback, marketing funnel, A/B test results, and performance data. All fundamental ingredients of a potent growth marketing strategy.

Only hiccup? It takes serious time and teamwork to sift through the data and fire up the business growth you desire.

That’s why growth marketing agencies like ours exist.

Our marketing experts have decades of experience creating and optimizing growth marketing strategies for big and small businesses in pretty much every niche.

Partner with us, and you’ll have your very own growth marketing manager to oversee all the moving parts for you in real time.

Let’s create a growth marketing strategy for you that soars.

This article has been updated and was originally published in May 2024.