Growth marketing is a data-driven, full-funnel approach to building a repeatable, sustainable system for acquiring and retaining customers. A growth marketer tests ideas across the whole customer lifecycle and keeps what compounds.
That looks like constantly asking where demand is currently coming from, what is converting, and how to compound results over time.
If you lead a marketing team or shape your company’s strategy, this guide covers how growth marketing works, how it compares to related disciplines, and how to build a strategy of your own.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing. Instead of asking “how do we promote this product?” a growth marketer asks “what does this customer need at each stage, and where are we losing them?” They start with the customer and keep them in focus at all times.
What does a growth marketer do?
Growth marketers approach marketing from a different perspective. They don’t see marketing as a formula or set of steps. They treat it as a system to test and improve, one that reaches past awareness and acquisition into activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
A strong growth marketer can:
- Coordinate several channels at once instead of owning just one
- Tell which data matters and analyze it
- Think like the customer at every stage of the journey
- Point to results across content, SEO, and digital PR
- Communicate clearly about what’s working and what isn’t
Growth marketing is a science
Growth marketing relies on agile, evidence-based decisions. Instead of optimizing one stage of the funnel in isolation, it looks at the entire customer lifecycle.
Much like a scientist conducting an experiment, a growth marketer regularly tests their techniques. For instance, they might compare the design and content of one landing page versus another. From there, they can make further marketing decisions based on the results. This allows marketers to lean on clear, calculated data instead of over-relying on their gut instincts.
Growth is also a system
As growth marketers test ideas, they let the results guide the next move. This influences teams and activities, helping to build sophisticated and effective marketing systems over time.
Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge and former VP of Growth at HubSpot, describes growth as a system that connects acquisition, retention, and monetization. Those parts aren’t silos. They’re interdependent, and changing one part of that system affects the others.
Growth marketing takes this into account and focuses on building systems that support a full-funnel, lifecycle-oriented approach rather than treating growth as “more traffic” or “more ads.”
Growth marketing needs data
Data is a growth marketer’s North Star. It provides them with a path to follow and then helps them stay on course throughout their journey.
By properly tracking and analyzing data, you can make sure your growth marketing decisions are working. As you go along, you’ll find that some things are a hit. Others will be less inspiring or even a downright failure. That’s perfectly normal, but when it happens, you want to know as quickly as possible so that you can tweak your strategy.
The AAARRR growth funnel
The AAARRR growth funnel is a six-stage model of the customer lifecycle: awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. It expands the AARRR “Pirate Metrics” framework that investor Dave McClure introduced in 2007 by adding awareness at the top. Mapping your funnel this way shows where people drop off, so you know which stage to fix first.
Here’s what each stage covers:
- Awareness: PR, SEO, and content that put your brand in front of the right buyers.
- Acquisition: Paid, organic, and referral channels that bring them to you.
- Activation: Onboarding and the first moment a customer gets real value.
- Retention: Email and in-product touchpoints that keep customers coming back.
- Revenue: Upsells, expansion, and pricing.
- Referral: Community and referral programs that turn customers into a channel.
Across our client work, a few patterns show up again and again. Improving activation and retention usually does more than adding top-of-funnel leads. SEO, content hubs, and digital PR are slower to start, but they compound, and the healthiest accounts use paid to accelerate what’s already working organically. Teams that coordinate SEO, PR, paid, and product across the full funnel tend to outperform siloed teams. And continuous testing of landing pages, messaging, and creative works better than a fixed annual campaign calendar.
One test changed how I think about content. For Gabb Wireless, we’d written a long-form guide to buying a kid’s first phone, mostly for SEO. When we tested the homepage without the tiles linking to that guide, revenue per session dropped 30%. Moving the tiles higher made the page perform 7% better. Content most teams file under top-of-funnel was doing real conversion work. If you only measure it by traffic, you’ll never see that.
The framework works whether you sell products or services, in e-commerce or SaaS. Use it to find the stage where you’re losing the most customers, then start there.
Growth marketing vs other approaches
Growth marketing overlaps with most marketing disciplines. The difference is usually scope and time horizon: growth marketing covers the full customer lifecycle and judges success over the long term. Here’s how it compares.
| Marketing type | Focus | Horizon | Funnel scope | Best for |
| Growth marketing | Data-driven, lifecycle growth | Long term | Full funnel | Sustainable acquisition, retention, and revenue |
| Traditional | Broad awareness and selling | Campaign-based | Awareness, acquisition | Mass reach and brand recognition |
| Digital | Digital channels and tactics | Varies | Any stage; often channel-specific | Online audience reach and campaigns |
| Performance | Measurable paid results | Short to medium | Acquisition, conversion | Scalable, trackable paid campaigns |
| Product | Positioning, launches, adoption | Medium to long | Consideration to retention | Communicating product value |
| Growth hacking | Rapid experimentation for growth | Short term | Acquisition, activation | Early traction and quick tests |
| Demand gen | Awareness, interest, and trust | Medium to long | Awareness, consideration | Educating buyers and building pipeline |
Growth marketing vs traditional marketing
Traditional marketing is typically company-focused and aims to sell a product or service. In contrast, growth marketing zeroes in on the customer and what they need at each stage.
Traditional marketing is often strongly focused on customer awareness and acquisition. It tends to measure success with statistics like the number of views a digital ad receives or the reach of a particular print magazine.
A growth marketer uses data-driven decision-making to go beyond gaining new customers. They want to retain them and even create brand ambassadors in the process.
Growth marketing vs growth hacking
Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” in 2010. Growth hacking aims for the most growth in the least time, usually at the top of the funnel, and it’s often driven by a “grow or die” mentality.
The two approaches share a lot: experimentation, data-informed decisions, and constant iteration. The difference is the time horizon. Growth hacking fits early startups still testing products, audiences, and pricing. Quick wins don’t always hold up, like a viral spike that brings in users who never activate.
Growth marketing addresses the entire funnel from start to finish. It fits brands with proven demand that need growth to hold, so it adds activation, retention, and customer lifetime value (CLV) to the scorecard.
Growth marketing vs performance marketing
Growth marketing and performance marketing both aim to drive revenue, and they share a lot of tactics. The biggest difference is scope. Performance marketing focuses on paid campaigns. Advertisers pay for specific actions, like clicks, leads, or sales, and optimize spend against those numbers. It’s ideal for time-sensitive pushes, like a seasonal sale. The tradeoff is that results usually stop when the spend stops.
Growth marketing uses performance channels too. Paid can build early momentum while SEO and content ramp up, then accelerate what’s already converting. The difference is that growth marketing pairs paid with visibility you own, through SEO, content creation, and PR, to create customer loyalty, brand awareness, and sustainable growth.
Growth marketing vs product marketing
Product marketing has a narrower focus. Rather than building a full-funnel strategy, it positions a specific product for defined customers through messaging, launches, and adoption. Those are all parts of growth marketing. The difference is that product marketers look at the offering, while growth marketers look at the whole brand and customer lifecycle.
Growth marketing vs digital marketing
Digital marketing is a broad term for the online channels, tools, and techniques a brand uses, and growth marketers use many of them. The two overlap more than they differ. Digital marketing describes the channels. Growth marketing describes how you use them, organized around the customer lifecycle rather than any single channel.
Growth marketing vs demand generation
Demand generation goes in a different direction from a product- or performance-driven approach. Instead, it emphasizes awareness, interest, and trust from potential buyers. Things like audience education and building customer pipelines are key here.
Demand generation is one piece of the larger growth marketing approach.
Authority, credibility, and visibility in search and AI
At Relevance, we organize growth marketing around three pillars: authority, credibility, and visibility. Visibility now covers AI answers as well as search rankings, which changes how you measure it.
Growth marketing: Authority
Building a cohesive content strategy helps your brand establish itself as an industry leader. This authority positions you as someone who can offer informed and effective solutions. Authority builds trust, and third-party credibility strengthens it.
Growth marketing: Credibility
Digital PR helps you build a brand people can trust. Being mentioned alongside other key figures in your field and being part of the conversation is vital to becoming an influential part of your industry. But none of it matters if people can’t find you.
Growth marketing: Visibility
If you want your traffic to grow, you need to get in front of more people. A targeted SEO strategy helps you show up in search at the moments your buyers are looking.
The pillars reinforce each other. PR placements make your content more credible, and credible content is easier to rank and more likely to be cited.
AI search has changed what visibility means. Ranking no longer guarantees clicks. In a July 2025 study of March 2025 browsing data, Pew Research Center found that Google users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when one didn’t. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits. That’s why growth marketing now tracks whether AI answers mention and cite your brand, not only where you rank.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your brand easier for AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews to find, understand, and cite. GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It builds on it, which is why some marketers now read SEO as “search everywhere optimization.”
The first thing I’d change on a growth team is how you measure success. If your dashboard only shows rankings and traffic, AI answers are invisible to you. For our clients, we start with the prompts that matter most to their buyers and look at what AI tools cite for each one. Is that source mentioning a competitor? Is it mentioning you? If it’s not mentioning you, that’s your outreach list. Attribution gets messy, too. Someone might see your brand in an AI answer, then search your name in Google, so we watch for rising direct traffic, not just referrals from AI tools. You can’t improve what you can’t see.
Growth marketing tactics and channels
A growth marketing channel is any path that brings customers to your brand and keeps them there. Unlike a single-stage tactic, it supports acquisition and retention across the entire customer journey.
There are several different growth channels a brand can use to build its customer base, including:
Content
Content is the foundation of growth marketing. You want this to be optimized and built for both onsite (resources, blog posts, how-tos, sales pages) and off-site (guest posts, social media) use. Content helps you rank for new keywords and attract the traffic you want.
SEO
Search engine optimization is critical to organic traffic. You always want to weave keywords, backlinks, internal links, technical SEO, and other search engine-friendly elements into your growth marketing efforts. Without a solid foundation and optimized content, your site won’t be doing you many favors when it comes to seeing actual growth.
Digital PR
You can talk about your business on your own content assets all day long. But at some point, you need third-party sites and sources to mention you, too. Digital PR helps you build authority through the endorsement of those who already have it. This can help give you a snowball effect with your other efforts, and show search engines, AI tools, and potential leads or customers that you are an authority in the space.
Social media
Social platforms help you create buzz and community. They give you direct contact with your audience and a steady stream of feedback. The right social media scheduling tools help you stay consistent without burning out your team.
From drip campaigns to newsletter updates, emails put you right in the pocket of your target consumer. Choosing the right email marketing platform is critical to making this channel work. Even better, an email list consists of those who have opted in to hear your message and are willing to engage with you.
PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising puts budget behind your growth efforts. It reaches people already searching for solutions like yours, and it can speed up results while organic channels ramp up.
Influencer campaigns
Influencers come with an audience that already trusts their endorsements. Partnering with the right creators can earn quick attention and trust from followers who match your target audience.
Webinars and podcasts
Webinars and podcasts give you a chance to share your advice as an authority in your industry. They position you as a thought leader in the eyes of your target audience. They also give your audience a multimedia way to access your content.
The role of testing and channel integration
These channels shouldn’t operate independently. Two practices keep them working together.
A/B testing helps with optimization
As growth marketers build and execute each growth strategy, they use data to make sure everything is performing well. A/B testing is a powerful data-driven tool that allows you to compare how different tactics work. This enables you to make both minor and major tweaks depending on the success or failure of each campaign.
Cross-channel marketing makes each channel stronger
A successful growth marketer doesn’t focus on a single area. They weave together content, social, paid search, organic SEO, PR, and customer service so each one strengthens the others. For one consumer tech client, the founder was worried a single bad story could define the brand in search. So we combined three channels: digital PR to land him bylines in Entrepreneur and Forbes, link building around his name, and regular posting on his and the company’s social accounts until those profiles ranked on page one. No single tactic would have done it alone. Together, they meant the first results anyone saw for the brand and its founder were ones we’d helped shape.
Understanding growth marketing content by funnel stage
Along with integrating multiple marketing channels and techniques, growth marketing matches content to each area of the marketing funnel.
For instance, a social post or splashy stat might help generate top-of-funnel awareness. So can a guest post on a respected industry publication.
From there, educational blog posts, white papers, case studies, and webinars can move someone down the funnel. Eventually, a product demo or sales deck can convert them. At that point, onboarding guides, tutorials, FAQs, and troubleshooting resources become important for retention.
How to build a growth marketing strategy
A growth marketing strategy has to cover the full funnel and adapt as results come in. Start by getting the terms straight.
Understand your terms
Strategy, plans, campaigns, tactics: what is each term in relation to your strategy? Let’s break them down.
- A growth marketing strategy is a customer-focused, data-backed roadmap that aligns your team and tools with your marketing goals and plots out the basic path to get there.
- A growth marketing plan is a foundational document that serves as a repository for your marketing goals, vision, research, data, and budget. Basically, it holds all of your growth marketing resources.
- A growth marketing campaign is a detailed, time-bound iteration of your strategy that attempts to accomplish a specific goal.
- Growth marketing tactics and techniques are the tools you use (growth marketing channels, apps, content, etc.) to execute your campaigns.
A step-by-step strategy roadmap
Here is a step-by-step guide to get you started.
- Diagnose the constraint: Start by finding where your growth efforts fall short. Are you struggling to attract the right people, convert interested buyers, or keep customers after they purchase? Review your customer journey and current results. This will help you decide where to focus first, rather than adding more traffic to a funnel that already has problems. Top-of-funnel work brings more traffic, but less of it converts. Bottom-of-funnel work brings fewer visitors who are closer to buying. Your constraint decides which matters more right now.
- Research customers, competitors, and budget: Start with a baseline. Look at traffic, conversion rate, retention, keyword rankings, and how fresh your content is. Then compare against competitors and be honest about the budget and team you have. The gaps between that baseline and your goals tell you which tactics to prioritize.
- Set goals, KPIs, and your key data points: Tie each goal to the constraint you diagnosed. If retention is the problem, a traffic goal won’t fix it. KPIs provide benchmarks you can use to gauge success and make adjustments over time. Flesh each objective out into a SMART goal with a baseline, so you can tell later what actually changed.
- Pick one wedge and your channels: Choose a specific niche, and anchor your strategy on the one product or feature that solves a sharp customer pain point especially well. Then pick the two or three channels that reach that customer at the stage you diagnosed. Add more once those are working.
- Assign owners: A good growth marketing strategy contains many moving parts. In some cases, IT and the C-suite might step in to help you achieve certain goals. At a minimum, you’ll want to appoint someone to own digital PR and someone else to own content and SEO.
- Test and review monthly: Review your analytics at least once a month. Start with the metric tied to your constraint, whether that’s activation, retention, or conversions. Then check rankings, organic traffic, and whether AI tools mention your brand for your priority prompts.
Growth marketing for B2B and SaaS
B2C brands often see early signals sooner, since buying decisions are shorter and involve fewer people. (You should still expect weeks to get things in motion and months for real numbers to review.) If you’re in B2B or SaaS, though, plan on a longer timeline.
Longer sales cycles, more layers, and multiple decision-makers mean B2B and SaaS strategies need more touchpoints and more patience. Prioritize content for buyers already evaluating solutions, and build product education that answers the questions each stakeholder will raise. Because many of these businesses run on recurring revenue, onboarding, activation, and retention deserve as much attention as acquisition.
Growth marketing examples
Here’s what growth marketing looks like in practice, from three Relevance client engagements.
Nurx enhances authority and visibility
When Nurx came to Relevance, organic search drove just 4.8% of its user acquisition. The rest leaned heavily on paid, which left the telehealth brand exposed to rising ad costs in a competitive, regulated market.
Using a holistic growth marketing approach, we created a search engine optimization strategy that helped Nurx rank for the condition- and treatment-related searches its patients were already making. At the same time, we used the effort to enhance their content strategy.
Organic traffic grew 49.7% year over year, and organic’s share of acquisition rose from 4.8% to 28.7%, nearly 6x. That shift gave Nurx more control over acquisition costs and less dependence on paid. Read the full Nurx case study.
Gabb Wireless builds search authority in a category dominated by carriers
When Gabb Wireless came to Relevance, the kids’ cellphone brand was as impressive as it was relatively unknown. It ranked around position 30 for terms like “phone for kids,” behind major carriers with far more domain authority.
We paired digital PR with a search and content strategy built around the questions parents ask when choosing a first phone. Placements in outlets like Entrepreneur and Forbes built third-party credibility, while hub-and-spoke content earned rankings.
“Phone for kids” climbed from position 30 to 3. Over 10 months, monthly recurring revenue grew 279%, from $12,233 to $46,477.
7:47 improves digital PR during the pandemic
During the pandemic, Relevance helped 7:47 make a major pivot with its growth strategy. Brand founder Chris Schembra was already popular in his own circles due to his wisdom and ability to encourage human connection.
During the isolation of the pandemic, we helped the relationship and experience brand build up a digital PR element to their growth marketing strategy that included placements and mentions on USA Today, Entrepreneur, The Good Men Project, and other major sites. We also helped get Chris’s book onto Forbes’s “8 Books That Will Help You Spark Human Connection in 2020” list. Chris also repurposed much of this new credibility and authority into onsite and social content, beefing up his visibility in the process.
The end result was a stronger, more impactful brand with a clear growth strategy that came from adapting a pre-existing vision to align it with the current conditions.
Do you need growth marketing? A decision framework
The right approach depends on your goals and where your funnel is leaking. Growth marketing is probably the right fit if:
- Your growth has stalled, or recent data doesn’t show steady gains.
- Quick-win tactics produced spikes that didn’t last.
- Your channels produce activity you can’t connect to revenue.
- Paid carries most of your acquisition, and you need visibility you own.
If you’re unsure whether this is the best option, book a free strategy assessment. We’ll review your data, products, and goals with you and show where a growth marketing strategy could make the biggest difference
FAQ
What is the AAARRR framework?
AAARRR is a customer lifecycle model with six stages: awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. It builds on Dave McClure’s 2007 AARRR “Pirate Metrics” by adding awareness at the top, so teams can see where customers drop off and fix that stage first.
How long does growth marketing take?
It depends on your starting point, channels, and sales cycle. Paid and conversion tests can show signals within weeks, while SEO, content, and digital PR usually take several months to build momentum. Set a baseline at the start so you can track progress, including the ROI of SEO.
Growth marketing vs performance marketing: which do I need?
It’s rarely either-or. Performance marketing drives measurable paid conversions quickly, and results usually stop when spend stops. Growth marketing is the full-funnel system that decides where paid fits alongside SEO, content, and PR.
