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Quick Guide: Building a Growth Marketing Strategy

Effective growth marketing is all about experimentation and iteration. Determine the right approach for your unique challenges, know what to measure, what goals to set, and what steps to take with this guide.

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6

Chapters

Chapter 1

Growth Marketing 101

Chapter 2

Building Key Audiences​

Chapter 3

Understanding Your Pipeline

Chapter 4

Analyzing Performance

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

What is a Growth Marketing Strategy?

If growth marketing is all about experimentation, then a growth marketing strategy is:

  • Knowing what experiments to run
  • How to derive the most valuable insights from your findings
  • And how to take action based on those findings in order to affect the greatest possible positive change

When implemented effectively, a good growth marketing strategy leverages every opportunity to acquire new customers while converting and retaining as many as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Specifics vary by industry, but B2B growth marketing strategy aims to fill the sales/marketing pipeline with qualified accounts.

This requires marketers to identify indicators that can help forecast the value of leads secured from various channels and prioritize the tactics proven to be most effective at driving revenue growth.

A growth marketing strategy accounts for every stage of the buyer’s journey. One cannot solely rely on top-of-funnel techniques — they need to consider the entire pipeline holistically and optimize for proven, revenue-driven strategies.

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Chapter 2

Building Key Audiences

The first step of growth marketing is understanding your customers. You need to know precisely what kind of individual wants your product or service, along with their immediate needs. This step informs every other detail of your growth marketing strategy, from choosing the right channels to designing advertising creative.

Building a Growth Marketing Strategy

The most effective way to understand customers is to build data-driven segments based on personas, then testing to validate whether your assumptions about those prospects are correct or need adjustment. Here’s a simple but effective approach to getting started:

  • Use sales and marketing data to segment your audience and look for significant trends. Consider factors like age, demographics, education level, current career, income, job titles, and even hobbies.
  • Determine the specific needs your product or service addresses for these segments. Workplace tools can help them complete daily tasks more effectively, while entertainment products can help them unwind after a long day.
  • Write a profile for a buyer who reflects each of the steps mentioned above. Build your growth marketing strategy around them.
  • In a B2B context, it’s also important to map these “buyer personas” to your go-to-market strategies. For example, Product A or Industry A may require targeting different buyer personas from Product B or Industry B, and require adjustment.

Chapter 3

Conducting a Pipeline Assessment

For a B2B growth marketing strategy to be effective, you must understand how your marketing pipeline converts prospects into customers. Prioritize a pipeline assessment that analyzes lead activity:

  • Examine the top of your marketing funnel. This includes anyone who visits your website, engages with social media content, or otherwise becomes aware of your brand.
  • Look at mid-funnel leads — accounts and stakeholders who visit your website, follow your social media profiles, or frequently engage with your content.
  • Finally, examine the revenue generation stage of your pipeline. These are the accounts  that ultimately convert to closed-won.

In terms of growth marketing, your goal is to determine where potential customers fall away from the pipeline. While you should expect some churn, sudden or significant drops at any stage may signal that your strategy needs work.

Here are some questions to keep in mind:

  • Are leads even finding their way into your funnel? If overall views are low, you may need to consider another channel or build awareness through inbound marketing.
  • Is your content engaging enough to sustain an audience? If you can publish and share content relevant to your customer persona, you are more likely to sustain interest in your product.
  • Are there any problems with your conversion process? Technical issues are the most common obstacle to converting opportunities into customers, especially at crucial conversion points like Contact Us pages and demo requests.

These steps will vary depending on the nature of your marketing pipeline or funnel. Hubspot, for example, follows an “attract, engage, and delight” model. Others may adopt the AARRR framework: “acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.” In all cases, optimizing your pipeline for maximum revenue will drive growth over the short and long term.

Chapter 4

Analyzing Your Performance

Track Multiple KPIs

It’s also crucial to determine which key performance indicators will represent growth. Unlike a traditional campaign strategy, growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel — so you’ll need multiple KPIs for each stage. By doing so, you can track pipeline effectiveness while immediately highlighting any potential churn points.

KPIs will vary depending on your product or service, but here are some ideas to keep in mind:

  • A top-of-funnel KPI measures awareness. These usually take the form of ad impressions, video views, or website visits.
  • Mid-tier KPIs track engagement. Depending on your goals, these might include installing an app, opening an email, downloading a piece of gated content, or following a social media profile.
  • Bottom of funnel KPIs highlight conversion events. In most cases, this step will be completing a sale or some other revenue-driven activity. It may also apply to repeat customers, contributing to lifetime value.

At this stage, it’s worth noting KPIs become more valuable as customers move between stages. A top-of-funnel KPI will typically represent a low-cost event, while a bottom-funnel KPI is much more expensive — and valuable.

Making this distinction can help you determine the optimal metrics for driving long-term growth.

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