What do You Know About Growth Marketing?
Let’s start with the basics: Do you know the difference between Marketing and Growth? Sudip Chhatui, in his article Growth vs. Marketing: The real difference nobody is talking about declares:
Growth is a data-driven approach that is based on iterating and reiterating strategies to arrive at the end goal, whereas conventional marketing is almost on rules that hope to give you the desired result.
This way to generate Growth is usually in charge of the “growth hacker.” The term was born in the startup world to refer to the role in the company responsible for acquiring customers while spending as little as possible, through marketing experiments and iterations to improve the results of the successful ones. Today, this role is also present in big corporate companies, that despite having more resources, see the acquisition of customers at a lower cost as a competitive advantage.
Another difference is that Growth has an end to end approach, while Marketing is concentrated only on the early two stages of the Marketing funnel. For more information, read the article by Drew Housman: What Is Growth Marketing? (And Why You Need It) The role in charge of this end to end approach is the “growth marketer.”
I think about Growth as a holistic mindset to generate sustainable revenue growth at a company. At the same time, Marketing is the initial step to acquire customers forgetting that that is just the beginning of a relationship. For that relationship to be useful for both customers and the company, there’s a mindset in which critical roles in a company need to think about how to continually add value to the customer to maintain that relationship as long as possible.
Marketing will manage to find a date and achieve that first kiss. Growth will think about how that crucial first step can be turned into a happy marriage in the future. None of the approaches is better than the other, and both of them need each other for their goals.
Please don’t fall into discussions about which approach is better than the other, and understand their differences to set up the right goals and make the most of each approach.
