About a year ago, everyone in the digital industry started talking about Growth Marketing. It sounds exciting and focuses on growth. But what does it really mean and why should we care? Is it a short cut to increased revenue or just a healthier way of looking at marketing concepts?

Growth Marketing is all about working with the right message for the right person in the right channel and at the right time. It is a completely natural development of the possibilities with all digital channels where we connect customer behaviour with better adapted messages. We no longer do digital marketing based solely on demographics or lifestyles. We take into account the interests, past behaviours and needs of the target groups based on where they are in the marketing funnel.

Map the customers' needs before choosing a channel

Growth literally describes a process of increasing in size, but ironically, Growth Marketing is much more about finding a sustainable business where we focus on profitability rather than just the growth. More traffic does not necessarily needs to lead to more business. More business does not necessarily lead to better profitability. Here we first need to look at the deal; What are the focus goals that provide profitability? Where do we have sustainable growth? How do we get a higher value per customer over the customer's lifetime value (CLV)? By linking marketing with clear goals for profitability rather than the growth, we can achieve our long-term goals much better.

Develop measurable goals for the market investment that are based on profitability, not just growth

A returning customer is five times more profitable than a new customer. According to "What is growth marketing", it is actually not even about growth in the form of new customers but about retention and loyalty. However, we do not think that this only applies to large companies that can afford to work with loyalty programs. The value of the customer increases, of course, if they buy multiple times, and of course we have low customer acquisition costs. But on a smaller scale, it is not about offering a customer bonus club that Walmart or Target has, but perhaps selling more of what you have in stock, by start working with segmented e-mail, push notifications or produce content that is better adapted to the most profitable target group you have.

Prioritize activities for the customers that provide profitability

There are some things that we find even more interesting than all the others, and that is the connection to the agile way of thinking and agile way of working. Simply to work as a start-up. Of course, you do not build brands in the short term and this part is therefore not covered by Growth Marketing, which is actually about working with data, gathering data, learning from it and then quickly adapting. It is about failing quickly, in order to be on the right course towards the overall goal. It is much better to fail and learn from it, than to take the wrong heading and stay on that course. We at Advedro experience today that many of our consumers are good at optimizing each channel or each campaign, but that the goals rarely change based on the result. They focus too far down and discuss CPA or CPC rather than whether the channel or message was the right choice for their business goal. Remember that it is about changing behaviours and not about changing the data.

Dare to fail quickly -> market, measure, learn, adjust and repeat!

A concluding comment on Growth Hacking. Growth Hacking can be an excellent complement to Growth Marketing. But unlike Growth Marketing, Growth Hacking is about finding smart ways to get high-impact activities at low costs. A striking example is a video with the right content that goes viral in an owned channel or an automation of messages with the right message to the right person. To simply put it, less effort and more effect. Keep in mind that Growth Hacking is not the same as Growth Marketing, but can of course be part of the marketing strategy.

Build A Future-Proof Marketing Strategy in 2021

Few industries transform as quickly as digital marketing. What was popular only a few years ago now seems antiquated. That's why, as a marketer, you have to always be looking ahead.

Voice, intelligent chatbots and one-click shoppable ads are in for 2021. Additionally, 42% of ethnic minority shoppers say they'd switch to a retailer that's committed to diversity and inclusion. And when it comes to SEO, featured snippets, which are the special boxes where the format of a regular search result is reversed showing the descriptive snippet first, get by far the highest click-through rates (26% click-through rate on average).

This year you should be revamping your digital marketing strategy to reflect the emerging trends — and if you don't, just remember that your competitors just might.