Growth

What is Growth Marketing, anyway?

Rebecca
Jul 27, 2021
5 mins read

On Growthcurve's path to becoming London’s premier growth agency, we've certainly learnt a trick or two about innovating and setting all new industry standards in growth marketing along the way. But what does that all mean? Do you really know what we do?

Coined in 2010, the term 'Growth Marketing' has been buzzing around for just over a decade, yet it’s still relatively unclear what it actually is to those outside of the industry.

If you’re someone who has questioned it yourself, we’ve covered the basics of understanding growth marketing below.

A growth marketer will target every aspect of a customer journey and continuously trial different tactics to optimise marketing spend. Running a series of tests across multiple channels, they’ll use data to see what delivers the best results and then increase their spend on the successful experiments, rapidly increasing business growth.

As growth marketing has gained popularity, some of its tactics (such as A/B testing) have been adopted by traditional marketers. But there are still important differences between the two.


Take a look at this image; you’ll see that a traditional marketer focuses on the top of the sales funnel, increasing brand awareness and user acquisition through practices such as Facebook ads and email campaigns. On the other hand, a growth marketer focuses on the entire sales funnel. Taking in the overall customer journey, they’ll consider the methods they can use, not just to attract customers but to retain them and encourage them to refer their friends. That means they’ll often work with other parts of the business such as product and engineering to evaluate how users are experiencing the brand.

As a growth agency, we’ve seen the benefits that growth marketing can provide, particularly for early-stage startups (Facebook, Airbnb and Uber all adopted growth marketing methods when they were scaling).

  • It’s cost-efficient. Most growth marketers will run experiments with small budgets. Once they know what works best, they’ll increase the spend on a data-backed tactic that’s been proven to work, thereby lowering wasted ad budget.

  • Boosts customer loyalty. By focusing on the entire customer journey, growth marketers build a loyal fanbase of repeat customers and brand ambassadors. That means free word-of-mouth marketing for your business and lowered spend on acquiring new customers.

  • Generates more data. As growth marketing focuses on utilising data, it obtains more information about your target audience and the most effective ways to reach them. This enables marketers to develop a more personalised approach to the user (which has been proven to cut user acquisition costs by 50%!)

  • Delivers better results. Another benefit of using data-driven marketing is that it takes out all of the guesswork. Businesses are able to find out what works faster and start scaling quicker.

Considering growth marketing for scaling your business? For the best results, we highly recommend utilising a growth agency team that has experience working across multiple channels.

As the leading growth marketing agency in London, we love combining innovative ad-tech with a thorough marketing strategy for our clients. If you want to learn more about scaling your business through growth marketing, get in touch.