The Ultimate Growth Marketing Guide: Steps, Tips, Tools & Examples

Growth marketers work to optimize the six levers of growth: 

• Awareness: brand awareness, often measured by website traffic
• Acquisition: The number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated
• Activation: The number of MQLs that take a sales action, such as booking a demo or sales call
• Revenue: The amount of new business generated, typically measured by net new revenue
• Retention: The number or percentage of customers who renew, ascend to higher plans, and/or cross-sell into other solutions
• Reputation: The total quality of your brand’s holistic reputation, generally measured by referrals, testimonials, case studies, and 3rd party ratings and reviews.

They use data to identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in the buyer’s journey and then build targeted campaigns to improve a specific growth lever.  

Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing focuses exclusively on driving brand awareness and lead generation.

The problem with this approach is that it incentivizes generating as many leads as possible without consideration of how qualified or likely to buy they are.

This approach inevitably leads to low lead-to-customer conversion rates, frustrated salespeople who are sick of meeting with unqualified prospects, and flat revenue growth.

Growth marketing, on the other hand, offers an alternative approach. By constantly iterating and improving every stage of the buyer's journey, growth marketers are able to drive reliable, sustainable revenue growth. 

Growth marketing optimizes for profitable customer acquisition by focusing on qualified leads who are eager and able to buy. A growth marketer would much rather have a hundred qualified leads who match the ideal customer profile than a thousand random contacts that traded their email for an e-book that they never read.  

Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is an approach that involves rapid experimentation across different channels and tactics. Growth hackers often test unconventional, creative, and risky techniques in the hopes of quickly acquiring customers. 

Growth marketing, on the other hand, is a more holistic and long-term approach to driving sustainable business growth. Growth marketing involves setting and following a high-level strategic direction and then testing various tactics, within that strategy, to identify the most profitable tactics and channels. 

The main difference between the two is that growth hacking chases quick wins while growth marketing focuses on creating a cohesive, data-driven marketing strategy that can be scaled over time to achieve long-term business objectives.

Growth Marketing vs. Channel Marketing

Channel marketing is an approach to marketing that some businesses follow in which they focus exclusively on one channel, such as social media, SEO, or search ads. They’re like racehorses with blinders on, all in on their chosen channel. 

But just like the proverbial eggs and basket, failing to diversify your acquisition channels is a big risk. The digital marketing landscape is constantly shifting. The best acquisition channel today is the one that brings you quality customers. And the only way to know which that may be is to test different ones. 

Growth marketing is channel agnostic. It’s an approach, an infinite game of testing, measuring, optimizing, and iterating. Growth marketers are not afraid to test new tactics and channels to continuously seek out the most profitable combinations.

What is the Growth Marketing Funnel?

The growth marketing funnel visually represents how prospective customers move through the buyer’s journey with your business. It’s shaped like a funnel because there is typically some degree of drop-off between each stage. For example, not every lead will become a customer, so you’ll need to generate more leads than your sales targets to anticipate the drop-off. 

Writing out your funnel, with the metrics that measure each stage, is a great way to identify friction in your funnel. Evaluate your conversion rates from visitor to lead, lead to opportunity, opportunity to customer, and customer to evangelist. 

Where is the biggest drop-off? That’s the friction you need to address first. The great thing about building and optimizing a growth marketing funnel is that every improvement you make to conversion rates anywhere in the funnel results in increased revenue. 

What are the Essential Growth Marketing Metrics?

Growth marketing is a data-driven approach… so what data do growth marketers track?

The key is to focus on metrics that actually help you diagnose your acquisition system and identify opportunities for improvement. 

Many of the metrics that marketers track today are nothing more than vanity metrics. The number of “likes” on a LinkedIn post, total number of leads, and total website traffic are good for telling a fun story, but they’re not necessarily a reliable indicator of how well your growth system is performing. 

Instead, growth marketers focus on metrics that identify friction in the growth marketing funnel and therefore help them decide where to apply effort to make improvements. 

The most important growth metrics to track are those that assess the performance of each of the six levers of growth.  

Awareness

Measuring awareness can be tricky. How do you know who is aware of your brand? However, there are some concrete metrics you can track that will help you measure awareness: 

• Website unique visitors: how many individual users visit your website each month? Unique visitors is typically more useful than views because it shows you how many different people visited the site instead of how many times pages were viewed. 

• Brand recall: Brand recall is a measure of how well consumers remember your particular brand when prompted with a product category. To measure brand recall, researchers typically use a survey to ask participants to recall brands from a specific product category. Some common metrics to measure brand recall include unaided recall, aided recall, and top-of-mind recall.

• Social media metrics: Social metrics like followers, likes, comments, and shares can be useful for gauging awareness of your brand on particular social media platforms. 

Acquisition

Acquisition is a measure of how many leads are generated within a specific time period. To analyze the performance of your acquisition growth lever, you can see metrics like:

• Lead volume: Lead volume is simply the total number of leads generated over a specific time period. 

• Sitewide conversion rate: This simple metric is measured by dividing the number of leads generated in a month by the total site traffic from the same period. This tells you how many of your visitors completed a form on your site. A solid sitewide conversion rate in B2B is 1-3%. 

• Cost per lead: Cost per lead tells you how much you’re paying, on average, to acquire one lead. One simple way to measure this is to divide your marketing spend by the total number of leads generated over the same period. 

• Lead quality score: This important metric gives you an idea of the quality of your leads. How qualified are they? The lead score is typically assigned by your sales team and is based on criteria like level of engagement and how closely they match your ICP. 

Activation

Activation measures the rate at which leads ascend into the sales process. Depending on your business model, this may mean they scheduled a demo or sales call, or created an account. Some metrics that can help you track activation include

• Demo request rate: How many leads complete a demo request form or schedule a meeting for a demo?

• The conversion rate on the connection value offer page: a connection value offer is used to compel leads to schedule a meeting with sales by giving them a compelling reason to book. The conversion rate on this page will give you an idea of how effectively it sells the meeting. 

• Pipeline velocity How many days does it take new leads to move through the sales pipeline to become customers?
• Ascension rate : In a freemium model, the percentage of users who ascend from the free product to a paid product is the ascension rate. 

Revenue

The revenue growth lever is used to gauge how reliably leads become customers. Some important revenue metrics to track include:

• Lead-to-customer ratio: The number of leads that become customers compared to the total number of leads generated over a time period.

• ROAS: Return on ad spend is an important metric for anyone using paid advertising to drive leads. This measures the ROI of your ads by dividing the ad spend required to acquire 1 customer by the customer LTV. 

• Close rate: Of all the leads who scheduled meetings, how many moved on to become paying customers? A low close rate may indicate that your sales team needs more training or that the leads being generated are poor fits. 

• Net new revenue: how much new revenue has been generated over a time period. It’s important to separate net new from recurring revenue because it helps measure how well you are closing new deals. 

• Customer lifetime value (LTV): The estimated total value of a customer over the course of their relationship with a company.
• Average deal size: The average amount of revenue generated by a customer in a single transaction.

Retention

The retention growth lever is used to track how well you are keeping the customers you sell and maximizing value by cross-selling and upselling. 

• Recurring revenue: Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) indicates how well you retain customers and deliver results for them. Recurring revenue is a value receipt, it indicates that your client is still receiving value from your solution that exceeds the cost. 

• Customer retention rate: the percentage of customers who remain active or continue to use a product or service over a specific period of time.
• Churn rate: the percentage of customers who cancel or stop using a product or service over a specific period of time.
• Repeat purchase rate: the percentage of customers who make repeat purchases or renew with your company over a specific period of time.
• User engagement: a measure of how actively and frequently users engage with a product or service, typically measured through metrics like session length, sessions per user, and monthly active users.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: the score that customers use to rate their experience with a product.  

Reputation

The reputation growth lever is used to measure and track your holistic brand reputation. This includes how often customers refer your product and the quality and quantity of third-party reviews. Some metrics to track for reputation include:

• Net promoter score (NPS): This is a measure of customer loyalty, calculated by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending a product or service to others.
• Referral rate: what percentage of customers refer your product/service to others
• Online reviews and ratings: This tracks the overall satisfaction level of customers with the brand, product, or service. Brands often track the number of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star reviews they receive. 
• Media mentions: This tracks the coverage and sentiment of the brand, product, or service in traditional and online media. How often is your brand mentioned by news outlets, and how positive are those mentions?

Adopting a Growth Marketing Mindset

To be successful with growth marketing, it takes a business-wide change in mindset and methodology. You’ll need to get buy-in from company leadership and each department. Adopting a growth marketing mindset is about shifting your goals from generating traffic and leads, to improving the entire buyer’s journey to drive sustained revenue growth. Quit doing random acts of marketing, and instead leverage a data-driven, strategic approach to growth. 

You have to be bold and agile, and continually measure, implement, track, and retest. Embrace failure and learn from it.

Hallmarks of a Growth Marketing Strategy

While every growth marketing strategy will be unique to the needs of the business, generally speaking, all growth marketing campaigns have a few core elements. The following elements are commonly utilized across all growth marketing campaigns. 

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a process used to scientifically test how effective particular elements of a page or campaign perform. This process generally involves duplicating a page, changing one element, and then splitting traffic to the two versions to see which converts better. 

A/B testing helps growth marketers consistently improve their marketing assets to increase conversion rates and drive more revenue from the same traffic. Some elements to test include

• Page copy
• Images or videos
• Button copy
• Information architecture and layout
• Social proof elements
• Long page vs short version

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Growth marketers are data-driven. This means that all decisions should be grounded in measurable data. How do you know which channels to focus on? Which tactics should you double down on? Which persona should you focus your messaging on? 

These key decisions shouldn’t be left up to chance or “gut feeling”. Instead, use solid, reliable data as your compass. Use evidence to support your decisions. 

Agile & Iterative Approach

The best growth marketers follow the lean methodology. They launch the minimal viable experience, measure performance and experience, and iterate based on qualitative and quantitative data. 

Instead of spending three months developing a new lead magnet offer, start out by testing whether users will even click on a call-to-action for that offer. Smoke testing an offer is a great way to gauge whether the market will convert on a lead magnet before you even build it. 

Growth marketers aren’t afraid to test new approaches and strategies and pivot when something isn’t working. 

Customer Focused Strategy

Growth marketing strategy is centered on the needs and behaviors of the target audience. It’s important to empathize with the end user, to understand their drives, including their problems, fears, hopes, and goals. 

It’s essential to develop a robust understanding of your customer so that you can tailor all of your marketing to their unique needs. A customer-centric approach is the most effective path to sustainable growth. 

Cross-Functional Collaboration

It’s important to foster open collaboration between teams like marketing, product, engineering, customer success, and data science.

By working together, teams can identify the biggest opportunities for growth and develop effective campaigns to drive results.

Successful growth marketing campaigns often involve input from across the organization, and effort from contributors like designers, developers, copywriters, and conversion rate optimization experts. 

Results-Oriented Mindset

Growth marketing is focused on delivering results like increased traffic, higher conversion rates, and improved customer engagement. 

Growth marketers are constantly looking for ways to drive revenue growth and improve ROI so that the business can scale profitably. 

By staying focused on the North Star Metric of revenue growth, the team stays aligned and avoids becoming distracted by chasing vanity metrics. 

Why is Growth Marketing Effective?

Growth marketing is effective because it doesn’t leave growth up to chance. Rather than chasing shiny objects or “hoping” for growth, growth marketers follow proven processes to build long-term, sustainable growth. 

In this section, we will explore some of the key benefits of growth marketing and explore a few examples of companies that have used growth marketing to achieve remarkable results.

Benefits of Growth Marketing

There are many benefits to implementing growth marketing at your organization. Below are just a few of the most important benefits.

Efficient

Growth marketing uses the budget more efficiently. By focusing on the biggest opportunities and optimizing for customer acquisition, you’re able to ensure every dollar spent on marketing is well-invested. 

Leads in the database do not drive business results. Sustainable revenue is the result of generating engaged, qualified, and ready-to-buy leads and handing them off to a well-supported and talented sales team. 

Growth marketers prioritize the traffic, leads, and opportunities who are actually likely to buy, which ensures their efforts don’t go wasted.

Strategic and Effective

Many startup teams are pulled in so many directions that marketing is always something they get to when they have time. The problem with this approach is that random acts of marketing never drive reliable, sustainable growth. 

Growth marketers, on the other hand, have a long-term vision. If they build a robust customer acquisition strategy that defines the persona they’re marketing to, the channels they’ll target, the lead-generating offers that will convert the right type of lead, and the nurturing they will do to move leads through the sales pipeline. 

Supported by Proven Process

Many marketers engage in what we like to call “promote and pray” marketing. They rush to pump out promotional collateral that is all about them, with little consideration for the end user or their buyer’s journey. They then sit back and hope that the end user will be able to figure out what this product has to do with them, and then choose to make a purchase. 

Growth marketers, on the other hand, take the time to develop a deep understanding of the problems, needs, and goals of their target customers. They then develop targeted campaigns that include tactics for which they have proven processes to improve the chance that their marketing will actually resonate and drive results. 

Collaborative and Cross-functional

Organizations that embrace growth marketing tear down the silos that I have held back businesses for years. And instead, growth marketers collaborate with members of the sales team, the product team, and the success team to optimize the customer experience at every stage of their journey.

Growth marketers look for every opportunity to improve the flow of leads through the sales pipeline, whether that’s working with sales to create sales enablement content, working with the success team to generate positive ratings and reviews, or working with the product team to make sure they are explaining the core value proposition of each key feature. 

Growth Marketing Examples

Sometimes, the best way to understand a concept is to see it in action. The following examples are of companies who have successfully implemented growth marketing strategies to drive sustainable business growth. 

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage service that allows users to store and share their files and documents online. They grew from zero to one billion dollars in revenue over just ten years. 

One of the keys to their success was a robust referral marketing strategy. They offered users additional storage space for each new user they referred. This approach helped them acquire millions of users in a short amount of time.

They also employed aggressive experimentation to test various aspects of their funnel, from different pricing structures to product tweaks to exploring new channels. The Dropbox team also attributes their success to their focus on one key, shared metric: revenue growth.
When asked about achieving sustainable growth, Darius Contractor, former Growth Engineering Lead at Dropbox, said “when I’m working with a company that’s starting growth teams, I tell them the best thing to do is find a metric everyone cares about,” Darius says. “That’s usually either user growth or revenue growth.”

Uber

The world's largest ride-sharing company, Uber Technologies, was founded in 2009 and quickly grew to become the world's most valuable startup.

In the early days, Uber used a robust referral marketing strategy to incentivize both riders and drivers to refer friends to the platform. Pushing hard on the referral growth lever helped them quickly expand their user base. 

Uber used referral marketing to incentivize both riders and drivers to refer friends, family, and colleagues to the platform. This helped them acquire millions of users in a short amount of time.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a software company that offers the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, sales, and customer service tools. HubSpot has grown rapidly since its founding in 2006 and is now a publicly traded company with offices around the world.  

HubSpot is known for driving growth through the inbound marketing methodology. They provide free, valuable resources and courses for marketers and business owners to build trust with their audience and attract new customers. 

By sharing valuable content and useful tools, HubSpot attracted a large audience of potential customers. They quickly established themselves as a thought leader in the marketing industry, and leveraged that trust to become the leading marketing and sales software. 

Each of these companies leveraged the power of growth marketing to attract, convert, and retain customers and scale growth. To see many more examples of the power of growth marketing, check out our Results page.

How to Implement Growth Marketing at Your Company in 8 Steps

Step 1: Identify your Current Stage of Growth 

Before you can start building campaigns and testing tactics, you need to first understand your current phase of growth. High-growth companies build a reliable growth engine by moving through the following stages:

• Problem-Solution Proof: Your product or service has helped multiple customers achieve measurable, meaningful results. In order to ascend beyond this phase, you must have compelling, documented client results. These should include third-party ratings and reviews, as well as published testimonials and client case studies. 

• Message-Market Match: Do you know exactly what to say to stop your ideal customer in their tracks and compel them to take action? Message-market match is all about empathizing with the end user to generate messaging that speaks directly to their deepest pain points, fears, and goals. 

• Offer-Market Fit: You’ve built compelling lead magnet offers that fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads. When you have offer-market fit, you have compelling lead magnet offers that reliably convert your ideal customer into engaged leads. 

• Experience-Market Fit: When you reach experience-market fit, you’ve built a reliable growth system. You have profitable unit economics and are able to profitably acquire customers. 

• Scale: You know that you’re ready to scale when your marketing investments are reliably resulting in 4-5x ROI, meaning that every dollar invested in marketing generates 4 or more dollars in net new revenue. Now all you have to do is invest your profits back into marketing to scale growth.

Knowing where you are in the growth stages will help you know where to focus your efforts. If you’d like to go deeper on the stages of growth, check out our free training, the Growth Playbook. 

Step 2: Get Organization-Wide Buy-in to Growth Marketing

In order to successfully implement a growth marketing strategy, it is essential to have buy-in from all levels of your organization. This means not only getting support from top-level leadership, but also from all departments, including sales, marketing, product, and customer service. Without this cross-functional alignment, it will be impossible to fully leverage the power of growth marketing.

Here are some key points to consider when working on getting organization-wide buy-in to growth marketing:

1. Make a compelling argument: In order to persuade others to embrace a new way of thinking and working, you need to have a solid argument for why this approach is the best way forward. Be prepared to provide evidence that growth marketing has been successful for other companies in your industry.
2. Tie the decision to revenue goals: Show how a growth marketing approach will help the company achieve its revenue goals. This might involve creating projections of how much revenue growth could be achieved through a growth marketing strategy, or highlighting the potential cost savings that could be achieved by optimizing the customer acquisition process.
3. Bring examples: One of the most effective ways to get buy-in for a new approach is to show real-world examples of companies that have successfully implemented a growth marketing strategy. This could involve case studies, data-driven success stories, or even interviews with industry experts who have seen the results first-hand.
4. Foster a culture of experimentation: One of the core principles of growth marketing is continuous experimentation and improvement. To create a culture of experimentation, it's important to encourage your team to take risks, try new things, and be open to failure. This means celebrating successes and learning from failures and always looking for ways to optimize and improve your approach. 

Step 3: Build a Growth Team

A growth team is a cross-department, cross-functional group that collaborates to drive consistent revenue growth. Building a growth team is a critical step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy. Here are some tips to help you build your growth team successfully:

• Get the right people in the right seats: It's essential to have the right people on your growth team. Look for individuals with specific skill sets and experience that align with your goals. Make sure that the team members are aligned with the company's values and are committed to achieving the same objectives. 

A successful growth team consists of a diverse set of skills. Your growth team roles may include growth leader, CRO specialist, growth marketer, designer, and developer. 

• Cross-functional collaboration: Growth marketing requires collaboration across different departments, including product, sales, marketing, and customer success. Avoid silos and encourage cross-functional collaboration to ensure everyone is aligned on growth initiatives.
• Develop processes for consistent excellence: Establishing consistent processes can help your growth team work more efficiently and effectively. This includes developing a system for prioritizing growth experiments, tracking progress, and sharing insights across the team.
• Align your growth team: Ensure alignment by working toward improving a single, shared “north star” metric. We recommend revenue growth.

By building a growth team that is aligned with your goals and values, working cross-functionally, and focused on revenue growth, you can create a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement that drives success.

In-House Growth Team vs Outsourced Growth Team

How do you know whether to build an entirely in-house growth team or to partner with an outsourced partner? While everyone’s situation is unique, some key considerations include:

• Cost: it’s generally more expensive to hire, train, and manage an entire growth team, especially early on in the process. Hiring an outsourced growth team can help you keep costs low while you move through the initial growth phases.
• Process: Outsourced growth teams like Lean Labs use proven processes to drive reliable business growth. One benefit of partnering with an outsourced growth team is that you get access to their playbook. You can learn to run their plays effectively before trying to train a brand new team.
• Time: An outsourced growth team requires much less management than an in-house team. By hiring an outsourced growth team, you’re hiring a fully-formed, aligned, experienced team that is ready to go to work on day one collaborating to optimize customer acquisition. 

Step 4: Leverage a Growth Platform & Growth Marketing Tools

Growth marketing relies heavily on data to track and optimize performance. To effectively manage and measure growth, it's important to leverage a growth platform that can help you scale efficiently.

One such tool is HubSpot. With HubSpot, you can manage your entire customer journey in one place, and take advantage of features like landing pages, content marketing, lead tracking, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media management, and more. And HubSpot scales with you, so you won’t need to go out and buy a new tool in the middle of scaling when you are just trying to keep up with demand.

It's crucial to have reliable, centralized data that can help you make informed decisions. By consolidating all your data in one system, you avoid manually reconciling data from different sources, which is time-consuming and error-prone.

Additionally, having a tool that allows you to build, test, and iterate is essential to successful growth marketing. You need to be able to quickly build and modify campaigns, landing pages, and other assets to consistently improve conversion rates.

Using disparate tools can create unnecessary friction and hinder collaboration. By using a single platform with all the tools you need, you can streamline your workflow and focus on delivering results.

Finally, it's worth noting that a tool itself doesn't deliver results – it's the people and the process that you use to leverage it. You can get results with any tool, but you have to know how to use it. Therefore, it's important to not only select the right tools but also develop clear processes and skills that enable you to use them effectively.

Helpful Growth Marketing Tools

While there are thousands of tools that can help with growth marketing, some are more useful than others. Below are some of our favorite tools, broken down by category. 

• Analytics tools: Google Analytics, HubSpot
• SEO tools: Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush
• Conversion optimization tools: Lucky Orange, Hotjar, Wynter
• Customer feedback and survey tools: Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey
• Social Media Management tools: SproutSocial, Buffer, Hootsuite, HubSpot
• Email Marketing Tools: Mailchimp, HubSpot

Step 5: Set Growth Targets

If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s much more difficult to get there. Setting realistic growth targets will keep your growth team on track and give you something to measure your efforts against. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of your current growth rate and budget, as this will help you set targets. 

To assess your current growth performance and establish a baseline, use a tool like the Growth Grader, which will help you evaluate your growth system across the six levers of growth. 

Once you have a better sense of your current performance, you can set realistic growth goals for the next several quarters. It's important to make sure these goals are SMART, meaning they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This can help ensure that you're setting targets that are both challenging and achievable, and that you have a clear plan in place for how to achieve those goals.

When setting growth targets, it's also important to keep in mind that there are a number of factors that can impact your ability to hit those targets, including market conditions, competitive pressures, and changes in customer behavior. By staying flexible and responsive, and being willing to adjust your approach as needed, you can help ensure that you're able to stay on track and continue driving growth over the long term.

Overall, setting growth targets is an essential part of any effective growth marketing strategy. By taking the time to assess your current performance, set realistic goals, and stay focused on your north star metric of revenue growth, you can build a growth engine that drives sustained success and helps your business achieve remarkable results.

Step 6: Select Your Growth Marketing Strategies

Selecting the right growth marketing strategies for your business is crucial for achieving sustainable growth. The right strategies for you will depend on several factors, including your ideal customer, product, competitive landscape, and internal team strengths. 

Before selecting specific strategies, you'll need to ask yourself some critical questions. First, which acquisition channels will you focus on? Popular acquisition channels include search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, organic and paid social media, events, influencer marketing, and partnerships. Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and the best channel for your business will depend on your target audience and budget.

Once you have acquired leads, what lead nurturing strategies will you use to move them down the funnel and convert them into customers? This can include email marketing, content marketing, webinars, and other tactics that engage prospects and provide value over time. Additionally, you'll need to decide on your sales process, including how you'll handle inbound leads, the type of sales collateral you'll use, and how you'll move prospects through the sales funnel.

Finally, consider how you'll drive reputation and establish trust with potential customers. Reputation marketing involves building a strong brand presence, leveraging social proof, and generating positive customer reviews. It is essential to establish a good reputation because it can significantly impact your ability to attract and retain customers.

When selecting your growth marketing strategies, keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Take the time to understand your business's unique needs and choose the strategies that align with your overall growth objectives. Regularly evaluate your results and make adjustments as needed to ensure that your growth marketing efforts are continually driving results.

Step 7: Plan and Execute Growth Marketing Campaigns

Now that you’ve selected your channels and strategies, you’re ready to build your first growth marketing campaign!

Thoughtfully planning and executing growth marketing campaigns is the key to achieving growth. When planning your campaign, it's important to focus on the biggest opportunity and prioritize one lever of growth to focus on. Don't spread your efforts across multiple growth levers, as this will dilute your results.

We recommend planning your campaigns in one-month or one-quarter sprints, to keep things flexible and agile. This way, you can easily make adjustments based on results and market changes.

In executing campaigns, it's important to make sure that each person on the team knows exactly what they own, what the intended outcome is, and what KPIs they will be held accountable for. This will help to ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards shared goals.

Don't be afraid to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. This is how you can continuously improve and optimize your campaigns for better results.

Overall, planning and executing growth marketing campaigns is an ongoing process. It's important to remain flexible, data-driven, and focused on your goals to achieve the best results.

Step 8: Track Full-Funnel Growth Performance

We recommend assessing your growth performance every ninety days to track progress and identify areas for optimization. 

When tracking growth performance, measure metrics across the entire funnel to get a holistic view of performance. This may include measuring metrics like website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, referral rate, and revenue growth.

By tracking these metrics, you can identify the biggest gaps and opportunities to target and make data-driven decisions to optimize your growth marketing efforts. 

It’s also important to measure performance against your goals to ensure you’re staying on track toward hitting your growth targets. 

With these insights, you can adjust your growth strategies and tactics to improve performance and drive revenue growth.

Step 9: Scale Your Growth

Now that you’re running experiments, identifying the best channels and strategies, and optimizing your entire funnel based on reliable data, it’s time to think about scaling. 

As we discussed in the growth phases section, the time to scale is when you’ve developed a proven growth system that reliably generates at least a 4:1 return on your growth investments. 

When you have this system running smoothly, you’re ready to scale. 

To scale your growth marketing efforts, double down on the top-performing channels and strategies that have driven the most significant results. Reinvest your profits into your growth system to accelerate revenue growth.

It's also important to continuously experiment with new channels and tactics to find new growth opportunities. Expanding into new markets and geographies is another way to drive growth and cross-selling or upselling your existing customers is an effective way to boost revenue and maximize customer lifetime value.

Additionally, leveraging partnerships and influencer marketing can help you expand your reach and attract new customers. By collaborating with complementary businesses and thought leaders in your industry, you can tap into their audiences and gain new followers and customers. To become the market leader, you'll want to continually innovate and find new ways to differentiate your product or service from the competition. As you scale, be sure to keep an eye on your metrics, track your progress, and make data-driven decisions to ensure you're on the right path to achieving your growth goals.

Jumpstart Your Growth Marketing

Don’t wait! The sooner you implement growth marketing, the sooner you will start seeing reliable, sustainable business growth. 

Maintaining the status quo is tempting. It’s always easier to do what you’ve always done. But if you want to achieve results you’ve never had, you need to try an approach you’ve never tried.
Growth marketing is the proven methodology that has helped countless high-growth startups achieve profitable customer acquisition and scale growth.

Implementing growth marketing can help your business achieve sustainable and consistent revenue growth. By focusing on the six levers of growth, selecting the right strategies, and executing data-driven campaigns, you can create a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement that will enable you to scale your growth efforts. 

Remember to track full-funnel growth performance, assess your growth targets regularly, and leverage a growth platform to streamline your efforts.

If you want to accelerate your growth efforts, consider working with an outsourced growth team like Lean Labs. Our expertise can help you build the right thing, build the thing right, measure the results, and iterate toward greatness.

The Growth Playbook is our number one resource for businesses looking to take their growth to the next level. It provides a step-by-step framework for budgeting, planning, and accelerating your growth efforts. Unlock this free training today to see a clear path forward toward achieving your ambitious growth goals.