Growth marketing: what is it? Why and how to do it?

Definition and Origins of Growth Marketing

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing, literally translated as "growth marketing," is a strategic and operational approach to marketing that aims to develop a brand's revenue by optimizing every stage of a customer's buying journey.

This practice, popularized by startups, relies on leveraging innovative and sometimes "unconventional" techniques to generate rapid growth, all with a limited budget. This is what we call Growth Hacking.

Growth marketing revolves around the idea of rapid experimentation, testing multiple strategies until finding those that work best for the business. But it's also the ability to use very different levers like content creation (white papers, blog articles), paid advertising, or email marketing to generate qualified leads, all while limiting acquisition costs.

The Role of a Growth Marketer

The Growth Marketer, a true conductor of growth, is responsible for developing and implementing strategies aimed at boosting a company's growth. They use both traditional marketing techniques and more innovative approaches, often associated with Growth Hacking.

Their main mission is to generate value throughout the customer journey, by attracting visitors, converting these visitors into users, then retaining these users. To do this, they must master a large number of skills, particularly in SEO, SEA, social media, marketing automation, and inbound marketing.

What most characterizes a growth marketer compared to a traditional marketing manager/coordinator is their versatility. We also talk about T-shaped marketers—marketers capable of working at a good level across all aspects of marketing with at least one very advanced expertise in one aspect.

The other particularity of the Growth Marketer is that they must constantly analyze AND UNDERSTAND data to optimize the actions implemented and achieve the set growth objectives. Anyone can read a figure reported by this or that tool; the real growth marketer knows how to interpret it.

And trust our experience—this is by far the least common skill among marketers.

Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking

Let me get straight to the point: I have a problem with the notion of "Growth Hacking."

It's a buzzword that's been used abundantly on social networks and generally misused.

To put it simply, growth marketing means targeting significant and resilient growth through serious mastery of all marketing and digital levers.

Growth hacking, as applied by most self-proclaimed experts, means finding the latest trendy loophole to get incredible results very quickly, regardless of the risks incurred for clients or the brand in the long term.

There are plenty of good growth hacking tricks, and not everything should be thrown away. But today, we also need to distance ourselves from these notions that are poorly exploited by sometimes unscrupulous professionals.

The Pillars of Growth Marketing

The AARRR Method: What is this Growth Marketing Framework?

The AARRR method is a Growth Marketing framework that optimizes a company's performance through a client's complete lifecycle and marketing statistics. It breaks down into five key stages:

• Acquisition: attract new users to your site or application

• Activation: encourage these users to take action (purchase, registration, download, etc.)

• Revenue: Transform users into paying clients

• Retention: Keep clients by offering them a satisfying experience

• Referral: encourage these clients to recommend your brand to their network

This model allows analyzing and optimizing each stage of the customer journey to maximize conversion rates and increase revenue. It's a structured and meticulous method that requires in-depth analysis of customer data to identify the most effective growth levers at each stage.

The Main Growth Marketer Levers

SEA or Paid Search

SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is a digital marketing technique that involves buying advertising space on search engines. It's a quick and effective way to increase online visibility, attract potential customers, and stimulate sales.

• It allows a visibility boost, with much faster results than natural referencing (SEO)

• SEA relies on a keyword bidding system (cost per click (CPC)) with the search engine, so that your site's ads appear in dedicated advertising spaces each time a search is performed on these keywords

This lever is very (too?) used by growth marketers because it allows very quickly getting a measurable result. However, be careful about what it measures and its real effectiveness compared to other levers that are harder to evaluate.

Social Ads

Social ads, or social media advertising, represent an essential lever for a Growth Marketer. These platforms offer the ability to precisely target audiences based on interests, behaviors, and demographic data.

• Facebook Ads: ideal for reaching a broad audience, with detailed targeting options

• Instagram Ads: effective for visual products, ideal for reaching a younger audience

• LinkedIn Ads: perfect for B2B, allows targeting by sector, company size, position...

• Pinterest Ads: very useful for reaching clients in certain sectors like decoration, architecture, food. Purchase intent is much higher there than elsewhere

• Twitter Ads: Just kidding.

The effectiveness of social ads largely depends on content quality, choosing appropriate formats (images, videos, carousels...), and implementing testing strategies to optimize performance.

Cold Outreach

Very trendy in recent years, "cold" prospecting by email or multichannel is an important lever to master.

Its rise is due to the emergence of tools capable of automating these email campaigns while allowing good levels of personalization and deliverability. But be careful—as often in marketing, the more people doing something, the harder it becomes to get good results.

The key to success lies in the quality of the contact list targeted by the campaign, the right message, and the right level of personalization.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is one of the most complete and effective growth marketing levers. It relies on using content marketing and a set of techniques aimed at attracting, educating, and converting website visitors into clients.

It's often sidelined by growth marketers because it takes much longer to pay off than other levers and is harder to measure.

Yet this lever is incredibly powerful because it's very scalable, resilient, and has increasing returns: it always brings more while mobilizing fewer and fewer resources. It's also a very good tool for investing in your brand.

Marketing Automation

Often combined with inbound marketing, marketing automation is a very good optimization lever for growth marketers. It allows automating lead capture and contact campaigns based on "gated" content or "lead magnets."

It allows increasing your website's conversion rate relative to the traffic it generates, regardless of the source.

Marketing automation may seem complex, but it's not. Simply keep in mind that it's not the chosen tool that makes marketing automation. It's the growth marketer who must be able to understand how to use it, determine the right strategy, and implement it in a tool compatible with that strategy.

SEO or Natural Referencing

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or natural referencing, is an essential lever for any Growth Marketer. It's a set of techniques aimed at improving a website's position in search engine results like Google.

The objective is to increase visibility, attract qualified traffic, and obtain a better conversion rate. SEO is based on several elements:

• Technical site optimization: loading speed, mobile compatibility, site architecture...

• Content quality: relevance, originality, use of strategic keywords...

• Link building: acquiring quality incoming links to strengthen site reputation

SEO audit is a key step, allowing identification of points to improve and establishing an effective strategy. Unlike SEA, SEO offers long-term results and requires regular work to maintain and improve site positioning.

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

SMM (Social Media Marketing) is an essential lever that uses social networks to promote products or services. It consists of two main subcategories:

• SMO (Social Media Optimization): concerning organic or natural content distribution, without using advertising features. This optimizes company presence on social networks by creating and sharing engaging content that encourages user interaction

• SMA (Social Media Advertising): concerning purchasing advertising space on social networks to reach a targeted audience. Ads can be optimized based on demographic data, interests, and user behaviors

It should be emphasized that each social network has its own characteristics and target audiences, so an effective SMM strategy must be adapted to each platform. For example, TikTok is ideal for visual products and reaching a younger audience, while LinkedIn is perfect for B2B.

No-Code

"No-code" is one of the levers that has most contributed to growth marketing's rise. It's an approach that allows creating applications or websites without needing to code.

What's the connection, you might ask?

Simply put, before no-code, a marketer had to call on many other people to develop and test their ideas. Particularly developers.

Today, many operations that were once too expensive or slow to implement can be deployed by a competent growth marketer. Think for example of creating landing pages, modifying a website, or creating an advanced lead magnet. All this is possible by mastering no-code or low-code tools like Webflow, Make, Zapier, Airtable, or Unbounce.

This makes a huge long-term difference. The difference between a good marketing strategy and a bad marketing strategy is often that in one case we actually implemented what was decided, and not in the other.

Essential Tools for a Growth Marketer

Cold Outreach Tools: Lemlist and Waalaxy

To succeed in your cold outreach campaigns, two tools stand out: Lemlist and Waalaxy.

Lemlist, highly appreciated for its intuitive interface, specializes in sending multichannel prospecting sequences. It offers great flexibility in campaign personalization through "liquid language" integration, allowing addition of personalized variables (job, gender, company...).

On its side, Waalaxy was originally recognized for its advanced capabilities in LinkedIn prospecting. In addition to emailing, it offers the possibility to scrape your LinkedIn prospects' email addresses—a significant advantage for effective prospecting.

Both companies are also models of the genre in growth marketing. They've massively invested in content, SEO, and all growth tools.

Marketing Automation Tools: Brevo or Klaviyo

Marketing automation is an important growth marketing tool—there are dozens available. We don't have all day, so we'll present two: Brevo and Klaviyo.

Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, offers a complete marketing automation solution as well as a CRM at a reasonable cost. Brevo covers numerous use cases and will perfectly suit most businesses.

On the other side, Klaviyo is a platform designed specifically for marketing automation in e-commerce. It allows creating targeted email marketing campaigns, automations, and offers data-based insights.

CMS: Webflow and Shopify

Again, there are dozens of CMS (content management systems). Those that should most interest growth marketers are: Webflow and Shopify.

Webflow is currently the best CMS for showcase sites or e-commerce (for selling digital products). It allows very rapid iteration and producing a very effective site while deploying complex content strategies very quickly.

Shopify is THE CMS par excellence for creating an e-commerce site. Much less flexible than Webflow (without resorting to developers), it has the immense advantage of having integrated everything an e-merchant needs to operate their business. Moreover, using templates allows putting a first version of an e-commerce site online in a few hours.

Automation Tools: Zapier and Make

These tools are the growth marketer's magic wands. There are many, so we'll only cite the most used: Zapier and Make.

Zapier is an extremely powerful tool that allows creating automations between over 3,000 applications. It's used to automate repetitive tasks, saving precious time and optimizing workflows. For example, you can create automation to save email attachments in Dropbox, or to add tasks in Trello from an email.

On its side, Make is a no-code application creation tool that allows developing automated and personalized workflows. It's more suited to businesses needing advanced functionalities and ready to invest time in configuring complex automations.

These two tools are complementary and can be used together to automate and optimize your growth marketing processes. It's essential for a growth marketer to master these tools to be able to implement effective automation strategies.

Examples of Growth Marketing Techniques

Dropbox

Dropbox is often cited as a success example in Growth hacking. The main growth method used was creating a referral program. For each user who recommended Dropbox to a friend, the company offered 500 MB of additional storage space. Simple but remarkably effective, Dropbox flooded the market by encouraging massive word-of-mouth.

This strategy was developed by Sean Ellis, a recognized marketing specialist, when he worked for Dropbox.

Clubhouse

The Clubhouse case is a model of the genre—an exceptional growth hacking campaign. It's also a textbook case showing that user growth isn't everything and that growth marketing can't be reduced to seeking short-term gains.

The principle was simple: Clubhouse was a new audio-based social network. You accessed rooms where various people conversed on very different subjects. Clubhouse's strategy was to create an image of exclusivity: you could only join the platform if sponsored by a user.

It had therefore become a sort of social proof to have a Clubhouse account—user growth was spectacular.

Result: In 9 months, the startup reached a valuation of over $1 billion.

Since then, we've all forgotten it because we don't have time to listen to people listen to themselves talk for hours. But that's another story.

OpenAI and ChatGPT

You all know this one, and it's very recent.

End of 2022, OpenAI needs money. They created a generative AI model (LLM) in its third version. This model is impressive in efficiency and competent in many domains. Problem at that time: it's only usable via an API intended for developers and a "Playground" that allows testing but whose UX leaves much to be desired.

Sam Altman knows their AI is advanced enough to be very widely used. To raise funds allowing the company to continue its work and accelerate it under the best conditions, OpenAI must create hype.

They then create the first general public generative AI product we all know today: ChatGPT. It's nothing more than an easy-to-use interface that allows the same thing as the playground. Suddenly everyone can use it, and social networks will seize the phenomenon with great fanfare of AI conversation screenshots.

Result: A few weeks after ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft injects $10 billion into OpenAI.

Tesla

We often hear that Tesla didn't do marketing until 2021.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Tesla has been, since Elon Musk's takeover, an absolutely fabulous growth marketing machine.

Sure, Tesla didn't advertise on TV or in the subway, but Tesla was:

• A referral system that allowed any Tesla owner to earn money, then free charging kilometers for each person they sponsored

• One of the first and vastest influence marketing strategies in the automotive world—simply put, Elon Musk arranged for all his Hollywood and Silicon Valley superstar friends to be seen driving a Tesla

Result: Tesla is the world's leading automotive market capitalization. Facing century-old groups that include dozens of brands.

If that's not marketing...