Growth marketing may be a trendy topic, but what does it really mean? The obvious element here is the emphasis on growth. (It’s in the name, after all.)

What does growth-focused marketing look like, though? Just to clear one thing up, it isn’t a glamorous way to refer to normal promotional marketing. Growth marketing is a thoughtful, sustainable, long-term approach to marketing that, when done well, can build momentum over time and turn any brand into a customer-focused industry powerhouse. 

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing. Traditional marketing tends to focus on a business and how it can promote its products and services. In contrast, a growth marketer starts with the consumer and keeps them in focus at all times.

This may sound like a minor difference (both approaches to marketing are trying to promote a brand to close sales, after all). However, the simple act of approaching your marketing by putting all of your attention onto your customer can be a game-changer.

Tactics like crazy sales and referral programs tend to be flashy and exciting. Known as growth hacking, each tactic could result in rapid growth, but it won't last long. Focus more on creating a better customer experience to increase organic growth opportunities and overall customer retention. 

With the customer always in mind, growth marketing takes on a new sense of purpose and mission. Growth marketers use Google Analytics and other data analysis tools to observe the customer journey, their interests, and their reception (or lack thereof) of a brand’s offerings. They use this information to adapt and make agile and evidence-based decision-making over time.

Growth marketing doesn’t stop with customer acquisition, either. While that’s an important first step, the art of growth marketing focuses on the entire customer lifecycle. From demand generation through to conversion and on to client retention, growth marketing considers the entire sales funnel from top to bottom to create sustainable growth.

The Three Pillars of Growth Marketing

At Relevance, we find that you can generally split your growth marketing activities up into three primary areas:

• Credibility uses Digital PR to gain third-party credibility, establish brand awareness, and boost your marketing effort.
• Authority harnesses the power of a good content strategy to showcase knowledge in topical areas and provide helpful content.
• Visibility utilizes an SEO strategy to optimize content and make it easier for your content to rank in search engines and answer searchers questions.

Together, these three focal points allow you to use digital marketing to own your industry.

The Synergy of Cross-Channel Marketing

Growth marketing uses a variety of different marketing channels — especially  digital marketing channels. Growth marketers incorporate onsite content, social media, emails, influencers, guest posts, technical SEO, and more to execute their growth strategy. These aren’t utilized individually but woven together into a single, cohesive strategy designed to optimize the effect of one other. 

For instance, consider a scenario where you create a piece of content for your blog. As you write, you make sure to focus on certain keywords, links, and other back-end technical SEO techniques. Once complete, you link to that in a guest post that you write for a popular industry publication. By taking a holistic approach, you have simultaneously tapped into all three growth marketing pillars by:

• Improving your brand authority through quality content (content strategy)
• Increasing visibility by optimizing your content for search engines and their users (SEO strategy)
• Growing your credibility by connecting your brand to a well-known publication (digital PR).

For a growth marketing strategy to work, you must invest in a sustainable, long-term plan. This is called a growth marketing strategy framework, and it is the growth-oriented blueprint, philosophy, and methodology that you return to every time you go to create a new growth marketing campaign or strategy.

What Is the Most Important Aspect of Growth Marketing?

There are many elements that go into a healthy growth marketing strategy. However, there is one aspect that stands head and shoulders above everything else: 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.

A Pair of Examples of Growth Marketing

Rather than use hypotheticals, let’s consider a couple of real-world growth marketing examples.

Nurx Enhances Authority and Visibility

When Nurx came to the Relevance team, they asked our growth marketing agency to help them expand their influence in the telehealth industry. Using a holistic growth marketing approach, we created a search engine optimization strategy that helped Nurx rank for popular search terms related to their target market. 

At the same time, we used the effort to enhance their content strategy. The result turned Nurx into an industry-leading brand that was both more visible and exuded greater authority through its content creation.

Gabb Wireless Builds Brand Credibility and Authority

When Gabb Wireless asked Relevance to help with Digital PR, we immediately knew there was more we could do to help. The kids cellphone brand was as impressive as it was relatively unknown. 

Through a multi-faceted strategy, our growth marketing team got a wide variety of brand mentions across several different online publications. This was coupled with a concerted push to expand the brand’s content. In the end, Gabb’s online authority and credibility were both boosted, leading to a 279% increase in MRR (monthly recurring revenue).

Using Growth Marketing to Own Your Industry

When you see the growth marketing vs marketing debate, remember that you’re talking about two very different things. Marketing is an umbrella term that vaguely applies to companies selling a good, service, or skill to the public.

Unlike traditional marketers or growth hackers, growth marketers take a customer-centric, data-driven approach to promotion. It considers the entire marketing funnel and uses data to watch results, make adjustments, and make sure you reach (and often exceed) your marketing goals over time.

Growth marketing is a term you may have heard bandied around the Marketing Department or tossed off at SEO conferences. On its surface, it seems like a pretty basic idea: marketing … that helps you grow. Not rocket science, is it?

Yet growth marketing entails a bit more than traditional marketing. Think of the former as an updated version of the latter. There are certain aspects of which you need to be aware in order to be successful.

Here are seven of the most important elements of any growth marketing strategy. Learn them today and you’ll benefit from them tomorrow … and all the days after that.

First, Understand What Growth Marketing Is

Before anything else, let’s check in and make sure we have a solid understanding of what growth marketing is. This advice seems almost insultingly basic, but a lot of us aren’t great about reading the directions. (We’ve all been there, that IKEA bookshelf didn’t put itself together.)

The same is true here. Until you understand what growth marketing is, it’s hard to use it effectively in your brand strategy. So, what’s the deal?

Simply put, growth marketing puts its emphasis on data and evidence rather than going with your gut. This type of marketing asks you to continually gather and analyze metrics.

It requires that you tinker with copy, design, and user experience to see what works best. Then you adjust accordingly and tinker again. Rinse and repeat, just like that fancy shampoo tells you to.

Now, to get to the good stuff. Here are some important aspects. 

1. Distinguish Growth Vs. Traditional Marketing

Another important distinction between growth and traditional marketing is the focus. The latter strategy puts the product first, trying to get the product or service in front of eyeballs. And the humans to which they’re attached.

Growth marketing, on the other hand, cares more about those humans. Their problems, their stressors, their needs. With this strategy, you try to create content that reaches them where they are and meet those individual needs.

Essentially, growth marketing is a strategy that is never done. You can always fine tune it to stay on top of trends and see better results. However, with a solid foundation in place, a growth marketing mindset can grow with you forever.

2. Decide Where to Put Your Focus

You can’t accomplish everything you want with one tactic or strategy. We really wish that one mention would get you 100 new leads or that one blog would convert every customer for you, but that’s not the case. 

Think through where you want to focus first. Do you need to concentrate your efforts on the top of the funnel or bottom of the funnel? If you focus on the top, you’ll see more traffic to your website. Who doesn’t love more traffic? However, if you do that, you’ll likely see more empty traffic and not as many conversions because the traffic is less qualified. 

If you focus on the bottom of the funnel for your growth marketing efforts, you’ll see some different results. You won’t see as large of a boost in traffic, but the traffic you do get should be more qualified and more likely to convert. That’s because you’re focused on people who are looking for that solution to their problem, and not general education.

Both aspects have their benefits, but when defining your growth marketing strategy you’ll want to figure out where your focus will be. Once you have one part of it down pat, you can move on to another aspect.  

3. Divide and Conquer Your Market Development Strategy

A good market growth strategy contains more moving parts than one person could ever successfully oversee. This is not a forty-hour-a-week job. Rather, it is a mindset that requires the participation of sales, marketing, customer support, and analytics.

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 oversee creating content to boost brand credibility and someone else to focus on creating that rankable content for SEO. Together, you’ll get there. But alone, you likely won’t see

4. Regularly Do A/B Testing

Marketing strategies for business growth rely heavily on A/B testing. Sometimes referred to as split-run or bucket testing, this approach offers two options for any marketing endeavor. Examples of this might include the design of a landing page or a color scheme on a website redesign. Similarly, you might test the format of an email campaign or the copy on a sales page.

The basic idea is that, by sending prospects/customers to one of two different versions, you can see which performs better. You then have hard data pointing you in a specific direction. This will aid in your content marketing growth in the future … and mean less guesswork for you.

5. Be Helpful First and Foremost

Did you know that more than 77 percent of prospects won’t even speak to a salesperson until they’ve performed their own research? Therefore, it’s critical to ensure you enable that research.

Growth marketing helps you do just that. By putting out valuable content, you give them something to dig their teeth into. Hot bonus: you boost your brand’s authority at the same time.

Of course, that means you must ensure your content is always up to date. Make sure it is educational, helpful, and focused on helping people first. When your company’s blog is seen as helpful, it’ll work wonders for your brand authority. 

6. Value Gaining and Retaining Equally

One thing folks often miss about a good growth marketing strategy is that acquisition and retention are equally important. See, traditional marketing is all about that acquisition. Get the customers in, then pass them off to sales and dust off your hands.

Growth marketing recognizes that existing customers are part of your marketing machine in two respects. First, if you don’t keep them happy, they’ll leave. So in a way, you must keep marketing to them. Second, if you do keep them happy, they’ll do your marketing for you via word of mouth.

Where traditional marketing might focus only on ad performance metrics, a growth marketer is always engaging existing customers. That means a hefty portion of your content should be geared toward them.

That’s right. You need to put out content for the people who have already purchased from you. When they feel served, you’ll keep them around for longer … or for life.

7. Do Regular Check-ins

Once you’ve determined your strategy and are implementing it, be sure to do regular check-ins. That means looking at your analytics at least once a month to see what is working and what isn’t. 

Are you ranking for those target keywords you were wanting to? Is your organic traffic increasing? Have your goal conversions gone up? 

If the answer to those questions isn’t yes, you’ll want to test and optimize your efforts based on what you’re seeing. You may just need to adjust your focus to see the results you want. But if you’re not checking in regularly, you’ll never know if your efforts are working or not. 

Getting Started on Your Growth Marketing Strategy

Creating a new growth marketing strategy can be difficult at first. However, once you start the process you’ll see growth marketing is just another piece of your marketing puzzle to solve and the benefits of growth marketing are worth the time investment. 

Struggling to start with your own strategy? You may need to look into a growth marketing agency to help pick up some of the slack. And you know what? That’s okay.

Market share is one of the biggest indicators of business success. A larger market share can be used to measure the effectiveness of various revenue-generating efforts. These include marketing campaigns to product developments, expansion, innovation, branding initiatives, and so much more. All of these can be leveraged to increase market share.

In contrast to total retail sales, market share is simply the percentage of sales a company has in the overall market. For example, if a company's sales for the fourth quarter are $1 million and the industry's total sales for the same period are $200 million, their market share is .05%.

A high market share corresponds to profitability. In a study conducted by Harvard University called Profit Impact of Market Strategies (PIMS) project, business scholars identified 37 key profit influences, of which one of the most important is market share.

Market share can be the most reliable way of judging the effectiveness of your revenue generation plans. It can point out whether your marketing campaigns, branding initiatives, or CRM programs are progressing as planned or need any tweaking or a mid-course adjustment.

Market share is also a great way of measuring the success of your enterprise vis-à-vis your competition. Based on your share of the total business in a specific niche, you can measure the effectiveness of your strategies and their strategic execution over a given forecast period. These projections will later serve as valuable touchstones when considering any company's compound annual growth rate.

The Importance of Market Share

Yet, despite its apparent and critical importance, market share is not given the importance it deserves.

There are many companies that keep their focus fixated on factors such as brand awareness and loyalty, customer satisfaction, sale numbers, leads, and other internal metrics. This is, however, not a reliable way of judging your business performance or growth, especially if you are operating in a highly competitive field.

Internally focused metrics can often be deceiving because the findings might comfort you in terms of the internal performance of your enterprise. But when you stretch the comparison to include competitors' performance too, the same findings may reveal a current market share that is solidly below-par.

It goes without saying that a high market share puts a company at a competitive advantage. Because they are able to produce more and sell fast, they benefit from lower operational costs and speedy ROI.

If you're looking to scale your company and focus on profitability, you should really pay attention to increasing your market share. And here's how top companies do it.

1. Stay Relevant Through Innovation

Let's talk about Google, which currently holds a 90.8% market share in web, mobile, and in-app searches. (Yes, you read that right.) Talk about a large market share! You might be wondering, "How does Google manage to monopolize the market and can't have a real competitor?"

The strategy lies behind staying relevant through innovation. The company invested so much in making local searches so easy and fast for everybody. This in turn enabled them to operate at an insane level of 3.5 billion searches per day. They created additional platforms such as Google Trends and apps that make searching the easiest thing ever.

It doesn't matter what people are looking for, whether they're on the hunt for reputable retail stores that offer free shipping, companies that offer online cash advance, or clinics that could take online booking appointments. Everything they need is at the tip of their fingertips. Their strategy is that wherever users go, conducting a Google search is fast and easy.

Let Others Brag About Your Product or Service

It may sound bizarre, but really, the best people equipped to contribute to your product growth and make it popular are not the marketing agencies, consultants, or salespeople you've hired. Instead, they are the ones who actually purchased your product and thereby fueled demand. But being able to turn your customers into effective advocates for your brand requires great customer engagement strategies.

Take it from Zappos, a top-selling company when it comes to nifty shoes, clothing, accessories...and total sales. They own a 19.8% share of the global market, slightly ahead of Amazon (at 19%). More than its quality products, Zappos is known for its Customer Loyalty Team (CLT) which sincerely engages customers via phone, chat, and email. Obsessing over their customers, they offer unlimited call times (with no scripts), friendly, solution-oriented representatives, a 365-day return policy, free shipping, and returns...and absolutely no upselling.

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2. Embrace Flexibility

After the turbulence of 2020-2021, one thing is clear. We can be at our most creative selves when we have a more flexible working schedule.

And for that reason, many companies have deviated from enforcing a 9-5 shift and adopted a more generous, carefree work environment for their employees. In today's tight labor market, more than giving them competitive salaries, helping your people achieve a life-work balance is essential to employee retention and growth.

Take it from these companies that value "fair" and "flexible" work environments. No wonder they have some of the best talents in the world. Not incidentally, these practices have contributed to the company's market share.

3. Practice Promotional Innovation

Mint, a financial tracking startup, proved that it's possible to stand out from the competition and achieve growth by adopting well-executed online marketing strategies.

Entering the saturated financial management industry is never easy, let alone dominating it. But by publishing hundreds of quality content, from informative blog posts to helpful infographics and viral videos, they found new customers and grew their business.

4. Develop a Unique Brand Position and Be Consistent

Copyright © Coca-Cola. All rights reserved.

We can all agree that Coca-Cola is one of the most known brands in the world. That red and white color has been known across the world for over 130 years. And that level of consistency, from their products to their marketing strategies, has made them stand out.

Coke has created lasting inroads both in both fast food and quick service restaurants, consistently garnering the lion's share of the fast food market size. Owning 48% of the beverage market share, Coca-Cola managed to produce numerous products under different names and brands.

However, all the while, their iconic can of Coke still remains untouched.

That can shows up in all of their advertising campaigns, and with good reason. This is true not only in the United States, but also in all of North America, Latin America, South America, Asia Pacific, and beyond. Their brand awareness shows up just about everywhere in the global fast food market. Coke did not become the market leader by changing its approach every few months.

5. Acquire a Competing Company

Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace among big companies these days. Perhaps the easiest way to increase your market share is to snap up your competitors.

However, if your business doesn't have the means to purchase another company, consider acquiring their salespeople. Sometimes, customer loyalty resides with the company's salespeople, not the brand. Another way that is not really acquisition (but has a similar effect) is to purchase a competitor's customer list if they are closing soon. This gives you an even bigger customer base and can rapidly increase your market size.

6. Market to Smaller Groups or a Niche

It may seem counterintuitive to target a small market when you are looking to increase your market share. But one thing many businesses don't know is this: "The money is in the niche."

When small markets are combined together, the revenue really starts to add up. Focusing on one product, one idea, and one group at a time helps you find real customers and thereby secure market growth.

You might think of Apple as a tech giant. Most of us would hardly be able to tell that it's a company that specializes. But actually, Apple iOS only accounted for 12.9% of the market in 2013 because most people are buying Android phones.

Bad news for Apple? Not really. That is because they make 56% of the total profits in that industry. Apple concentrated on the ideal customer, i.e. people who want the best quality phones. That means if you want the best smartphone, you buy Apple. Their marketing efforts helped them achieve an impressive amount of brand loyalty.

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7. Planning an Increase in Market Share

Quite obviously, increasing the market share of a brand in particular or that of the organization, in general, will be one of the most important growth metrics any top management will be striving to achieve.

However, achieving a growth trajectory is not going to be an easy task. Ask any successful entrepreneur, and they will reveal that the process of reaching potential customers and increasing a companys market share is a long and never-ending one. It starts with a deep dive into market research and website analytics.

Fast growth is very nearly an oxymoron. Your growth rate is a function of consistently pleasing your existing customer base and leveraging those loyal customers to become de facto brand evangelists. Growing fast for market share alone is a shortsighted strategy. Instead, customer retention is one of the tried and tested ways of ensuring a larger share of the market for your business.

8. Engaging with Customers

When seeking to increase market share, you must make customer satisfaction and engagement a part of your core business practice.

It doesn't really matter what your product type might be. Increasing market share means communicating effectively with your target market. Engagement through your social media platform will not only help in maintaining the existing customers but can also attract new customers at a fair pace.

Use effective communication strategies and mediums to post customer service content through direct contact platforms such as social media and email. For example, during recent supply chain problems, the companies that moved quickly to communicate accurate information earned customer loyalty even as deliveries were delayed.

Encourage your current customers to respond by sharing or commenting as part of the online sales process. Use surveys smartly for feedback. User-generated content is one of the fastest ways to increase market size and let your loyal customer serve as a brand evangelist.

9. Use a Referral Program

Finding and acquiring new customers can be a time-consuming process. That's why referral programs are a key marketing strategy being used by many B2B businesses.

Even a small business can establish an effective referral program and roll it out as quickly as possible. Use that program to foster rapid growth, improve existing customer relationships, gain new leads and ensure greater conversion. Your market share will also increase in the process, slowly but steadily.

10. Spring Out with Something Special

A number of factors can impact the market share of an organization. Finding a need and filling that need or, in other words, leveraging product innovation to address a specific need of the market in a simple way can help create a distinctive position for your brand. How does your new product or service answer an unmet need? What makes you stand out against your direct competitors in a specific market?

A touch of exclusivity in everything you do (especially in your marketing campaign) can help attract audience attention and do wonders for your sales numbers. Make sure your sales team is able to articulate clearly to prospects what sets your company apart.

Your marketing team must work out of the box to create a distinct image for your brand and position it exceptionally. Then communicate your forte at every opportunity. This will make it easier to attract new customers and also keep the existing ones hooked.

The process of increasing your company's market share is a long and continuous one. By employing some of these tried and tested strategies of some of the most successful businesses in the world today, you can also scale your company, achieve a higher market share, boost total sales, and bring more profit to the table.