Growth Marketing Strategy: How It’s Different Than Traditional Digital Marketing

The marketing industry can be a little guilty of running away with buzzwords. For example, what is the difference between a growth marketing strategy and digital marketing? Are they interchangeable? Not necessarily.

Tactics like email and social media marketing, PPC, SEO, content marketing, etc., are all considered digital marketing—in short, marketing tactics used on a digital platform. However, these are just a set of tools. What’s lacking is a methodology. That’s where growth marketing comes into play.

Growth marketing prioritizes data analysis, goal setting, testing, and experimentation to measure and improve conversion, ROI, and leads. For example, a growth marketing strategy will examine all parts of the customer lifecycle to maximize each step of the sales funnel.

Measuring the effectiveness of each touchpoint of the buyer’s journey will enable businesses to improve user experience across the entire marketing suite of websites, social media presences, email campaigns, and more. By understanding your buyer persona and their journey, businesses can personalize campaigns, tailoring messages and offers based on actual behaviour, which can increase sales by 10 per cent or more and deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend.

In 2022, consumers don’t want to feel like they’re talking with a robot. Over 70 per cent of shoppers say they’re frustrated when their experience is impersonal. On the other hand, nearly half of shoppers made impulse purchases after receiving a personalized recommendation and will then go on to become repeat buyers.

Growth Marketing or Digital Marketing?

So, which is better? Well, it’s not an either/or dichotomy. They’re not mutually exclusive. A growth marketing strategy doesn’t throw digital marketing out the window, it uses data-driven methods to optimize digital marketing tools.

To use an analogy, digital marketing tools are the ingredients and growth marketing is the recipe. You may have the freshest, highest-quality ingredients, but if you’re just throwing them together in a pot, chances are the soup won’t be a success. Too spicy, too salty, not savoury enough, these are all things a good cook needs to measure. The same goes for businesses. Digital marketing tools need to be deployed strategically.

Growth marketing empowers businesses to set measurable goals that can be scrutinized. For example, if you can see that the conversion rate of your email campaign is low, you can try optimizing the CTA. But you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Surprisingly, few marketers are actually measuring their tactics. For example, landing pages have the highest conversion rate for sing-up forms at 24 per cent, but less than a fifth of marketers are testing landing pages to improve conversion. By deploying a digital marketing strategy, your business stands the best chance to get ahead of the curve and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Looking for a growth marketing strategy to take your business to the next level? Contact us today.