We’re at a point where we expect the unexpected. Even the most successful businesses can’t rely on constant growth; they need to actively seek out new opportunities.
In this environment, a well-crafted growth marketing plan is more crucial than ever for achieving business goals. Whether you’re refining an existing plan or starting from scratch, this updated guide will help you understand the steps needed for real, measurable growth.
What is a Growth Marketing Plan?
Growth marketing doesn’t just focus on one part of your sales process; it looks at the entire customer journey. It’s a long-term strategy that aims to build customer relationships and loyalty while also attracting new customers.
At every stage of the customer journey, a growth marketing plan uses data to create insights for strategic actions. Leaders need to foster a culture that values creative problem-solving, experimentation, and agility to quickly learn from and improve these actions.
Traditional Marketing Vs. Growth Marketing
Typically, top-of-the-funnel initiatives that promote awareness and acquisition are the main emphasis of traditional marketing. Annual plans are typical, and regardless of performance, plans usually don’t alter.
A typical marketing team’s main objective is to generate more leads, purchases, or sign-ups.
Growth marketing promotes to customers at every level of the funnel, placing them at the center of the experience.
Instead of just aiming to increase revenue from new business, growth marketing focuses on growing the entire business, including retaining customers and advocacy.
Growth marketing teams quickly evaluate data and make optimization decisions to boost performance when a strategic endeavor isn’t working as planned. Alternatively, they can scrap the campaign and move on to something different.
Senior Contributor John Hall summed up a recent Forbes piece by saying “Growth marketing-adopting businesses aren’t always focused on increasing revenue through individual sales of products and services. Rather, growth marketers concentrate on their clientele.
Their goals are to expand that base, retain those customers that are part of it, and establish a reputable brand. When a growth marketing strategy is used sales increase reach to personal prospects, existing clients, and recommendations.
A firm may find it difficult to accept a decline in leads or consumers in the near term, but in the long run, it may pay off as cost per lead declines and overall revenue rises.
It might be five times more expensive to acquire new clients than to keep the ones you already have, as Hall notes. Additionally, brand-loyal customers will spend up to 57% more.
Ansoff’s Matrix: Four Growth Strategies For Big Business Growth
The Ansoff matrix is a tool in growth marketing that facilitates the identification of opportunities for macro business growth.
H. Igor Ansoff, an applied mathematician and business manager, created a straightforward framework to assist executives in defining, creating, and communicating their strategy for increasing revenue.
Market Share Acquisition
Fourth strategies are identified as the lowest risk, market penetration involves the distribution of current goods inside their current markets.
This might be accomplished by lowering costs, stepping up marketing and promotion, or purchasing a rival company in the same industry.
As an alternative, you may consider collaborating with a business that offers a distinct product or service but is aiming for the same market as yours.
As an illustration, a B2B SaaS firm and a B2B agency may collaborate by suggesting each other’s clients.
Compared to other tactics, market penetration could be a safer decision, and it’s frequently a terrific location to start expanding.
However, it is also rather constrained, particularly if you cater to a specific market, have a set price structure, or have a product that doesn’t need to be purchased again.
Product Development
This is the process of creating new goods to satisfy your current market. Using your current client base to pinpoint the issue that a new product may address, sell the solution directly to them, and predict with accuracy when the new product will be adopted are benefits of this strategy.
In the best situations, a new product opportunity will materialize on its own. For instance, you may observe that some of your current clients are combining your product with another, and this presents a chance for you to create something comparable (but superior). Alternatively, your clients may be actively asking you to introduce a product.
Regardless of how the concept develops, starting from scratch is not the only choice. Instead, a lot of companies will decide to buy intellectual property, rebrand generic goods, or cooperate with a business associate.
Market Development
A company will enter a new market via market development. To reach a larger audience, you may, for instance, offer your current product in a new nation or change your marketing approach.
It might be difficult to break into a new market, particularly if your marketing campaigns and goods were created with a particular target in mind. It’s crucial to avoid straying too far from your current market since doing so can cause your messaging and tactics to alter so drastically that you lose some of your current audience.
To create a plan for the new market, spend money on target advertising, and make any necessary adjustments to creative and content, market development usually involves some initial expenditure.
Diversification
By using a diversification plan, your company may expand into new markets and create new products. Although it is the riskiest growth method, there is the greatest chance of success.
It is crucial to investigate comparable items and markets in order to achieve success with diversification. Stated differently, to apply your existing knowledge to a new situation. It’s also advisable to think about how you can use your current team, procedures, and organizational structure to your diversification initiatives.
Stated differently, it would be imprudent for a B2B SaaS provider to diversify into a tangible product aimed at consumers.
One significant opportunity found in the Ansoff matrix and many minor ones for expanding inside the current marketing funnel may be included in a growth marketing strategy.
Benefits Of Growth Marketing
Growth occurs at every level of the funnel, which is generally the largest advantage of growth marketing.
You are focused on obtaining and keeping consumers who become brand ambassadors, as opposed to obtaining a sizable number of new leads or customers that ultimately churn. Additional advantages include:
Build A Data-Driven, Results-Oriented Culture
Every choice made in a growth marketing plan is informed by data, which is one of its distinguishing features. When data drives the prioritization of projects, the strategic and tactical approach, and optimizations, you develop data-literate marketers who understand the business effect of their job.
Not only can this result in more effective marketing, but it also makes marketers happier and more well-rounded and can assist in identifying possibilities that were overlooked.
Bring More Ideal Customers Into The Funnel — And Retain Them
When marketing is assigned the responsibility of generating more leads, they will fully commit to tactics that prioritize number above quality.
For instance, marketing will step up if a lead-generating advertisement generates a lot of low-cost leads. They can find out six months later that these leads begin to sour due to deceptive marketing or overly general targeting.
The whole funnel is taken into account in growth marketing, and marketers will encouraged to follow campaigns and strategies that produce leads that match their ideal customer profile. The leads that are acquired now will kept and prepared to develop in the future, resulting in an overall increase in business growth.
Increase ROI And Every Other Important Business Metric
A growth marketing plan considers every stage of the customer journey, so the long-term worth of the customer will be factored into your ROI calculations and attribution model.
Your ROI will skyrocket as soon as marketing initiatives begin to draw in higher-quality clients, freeing up more funds for further growth strategy experimentation or expansion.
It will likely increase along with all other business metrics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn rate, and activation rate, enabling your company to provide a good growth narrative.
What Is The AARRR Framework?
When we discuss a growth marketing strategy that addresses every stage of the customer journey, we are talking about the AARRR framework, a methodology created by venture investor Dave McClure to optimize each stage of the process.
The AARRR funnel, sometimes known as the “pirate funnel,” is composed of the following five stages:
- Acquisition: How do customers discover your business?
- Activation: How can buyers recognize the worth of your offering?
- Retention: Do users return to use the product again and again?
- Referral: Do buyers recommend your goods to friends and coworkers?
- Revenue: How do you monetize your customers?
The typical flow of growth marketing at each funnel step looks like this:
Acquisition
- Objective: Convert web surfers into leads and clients
- Tracking metrics: Include cost per lead (CPL) and new sign-ups.
- Strategies and tactics: It includes lead nurturing journeys, collaborations, social media content, sponsored advertisements, SEO, and demand-generating material.
Activation
- Goal: The objective is to assist new clients in realizing value (their “aha” moment).
- Metrics to monitor: It includes user engagement, time to first important action, and activation rate.
- Strategies and tactics: a welcome email journey, product tours, tooltips, and the gamification of significant events.
Retention
- Objective: Clients that consistently use your product
- Metrics to monitor: Include CLV, daily/monthly active users (DAU/MAU), churn rate, and retention rate.
- Strategies and tactics: It includes how-to videos and material, customer success, and services, and retention mailings or journeys.
Referral
- Objective: Convert consumers into brand evangelists.
- Metrics to monitor: Include referred customers, customer value from referrals, and NPS or CSAT ratings.
- Strategies and tactics: Include community-led growth, gamification of referrals, review campaigns, and referral campaigns.
Revenue
- Objective: Growth in the number of customers and revenue
- Metrics to monitor: CAC, MRR, and CLV
- Strategies and tactics: Community-led growth, retargeting advertising, customer success and support, how-to videos and content, expansion travels.
How to Create a Growth Marketing Plan
Even the most seasoned marketers might find the blank page moment frightening. The AARRR framework’s ability to segment the customer experience into digestible parts is one of its greatest features.
For each piece, do the following steps to develop your plan:
1. Create A Vision For Growth
Take a broad look at the company now, what you want it to look like in the future, and what ideal development may look like before diving into the figures.
If your company offers several product categories, determining the pace of growth of each section of the business may be important. In any event, you should consider whether to go slowly and steadily or whether to accelerate expansion.
You may create a more comprehensive picture of your development by breaking this down into manageable pieces, such as one, five, and ten years. This will be useful in the following stage.
2. Identify Business Goals and KPIs
Let’s go right into the details.
Start by evaluating the current performance of your company at each level of the AARRR structure. For example, you would look at customer lifetime value, net promoter score, daily active users, customer churn, existing customer growth rate, and retention rate in the retention stage.
You’ll be able to assess your strengths and areas for growth using this knowledge in no time.
3. Identify Areas To Prioritize
While it may be tempting to want to seize every opportunity at once, doing so usually results in less concentrated efforts and less successful outcomes.
Asking yourself these two questions can help you focus on one issue at a time:
- What are the three areas with the most growth potential?
- Which of these prospects is more in line with the overarching expansion strategy of your company?
This should offer you a list of your top three priorities as well as a starting point.
4. Go Deep into the Data to Generate Insights.
Now that, you’ve identified a focal area, thoroughly examine the data to determine precisely where adjustments or enhancements are required.
If we take the retention stage as an example, you would want to look at the times when customers are most likely to depart and the actions that your most devoted customers execute. Get your customer-facing personnel engaged to find out about the discussions they’re having.
You should also think about conducting interviews with both lapsed and loyal customers to discover more about their experiences since qualitative data is equally as valuable as quantitative data.
An insight such as “Customers are more likely to churn if they do not create a team project within 30 days of signing up for our product” should derived from the data given.
Further investigation of the data may be necessary in this case as well. For instance, if clients who do finish a team project within that time frame are asked to do so at some point throughout their trip.
5. Create An Action Plan
You now possess the knowledge required to create an action plan based on data. Start by putting your most innovative ideas on the table during a brainstorming session. Then, decide which ones you want to pursue further, the resources needed to make it happen. The activities involved, and any dependencies on those tasks.
Asana or Monday are two project management tools that may assist keep things on track and provide leadership teams with excellent insight into the growth initiatives that are underway.
6. Track Your Results (Before They Happen)
Establish dashboards and reports to monitor your campaign’s success and pinpoint impact channels before it ever launches. This will enable you to begin optimizing immediately and identify any tracking or attribution problems before they become serious ones.
Examples Of Growth Marketing Plans In Action
Acquisition: Notion’s Community-Led Growth Strategy
Creating a hub where other users of your product can work together and exchange their insights or advice is a fantastic method to demonstrate social proof and provide value to your intended audience.
Here, the development of Notion’s network of ambassadors serves as the ideal case study. The origin story was recounted by Olivia Nottebohm, CRO of Notion, in an interview with the SaaStr Podcast.
Lead marketing for Notion Camille Ricketts saw that a few individuals were loud on Twitter about how amazing Notion was. When she saw this, she understood that this was our community. What steps must we take to welcome and integrate these individuals?
Next, Notion discovered Ben Lang, the owner of his Notion fan site, who extended an offer to work full-time as Notion’s Head of Community.
From that point on, they expanded their network of ambassadors worldwide, offering them access to Notion founders and staff as well as funding to help them book venues for events and soliciting input from them about the product in person and online.
Due to the snowball effect, numerous Notion aficionados and users joined forums, and groups, or even founded their own, resulting in the creation of a vast resource for all users.
Activation: Grammarly’s Product Tour
A few brief questions regarding their intended usage of the site are posed to new users upon their login to Grammarly. After that, users quickly walk through a four-step tour to see how the platform functions, and then a pre-loaded document loads.
To assist the user in editing the document in real-time and reduce the learning curve and time before value realization, tooltips load.
Retention: Canvas Weekly Tips And Design Challenge
Products that users log into regularly tend to remain around the longest. You must explain to your consumers why they need to log in often to make this happen. For Canva, this includes enlightening users about the vast array of tools and capabilities available on the platform.
They employ a weekly tips drip campaign that provides customers with shortcuts, how-tos, and suggestions for utilizing the platform’s numerous capabilities, instead of inundating them with alternatives.
With the #CanvaDesignChallenge, users may create anything based on a topic or brief for a chance to win a Canva prize pack and have their design highlighted in the Canva community, further encouraging their use.
Referral: Dropbox’s Referral Program
For good reason, Dropbox’s referral marketing case study is among the most often cited in the field of growth marketing. More space was something Dropbox could readily provide for its users, and they took use of this to build a potent growth loop.
For every friend that was referred and went on to become a customer, 500MB of space would given to the original customer. The individual who was referred received the same payment, motivating them to continue referring others in their network.
Revenue: Monday For Sales
Monday has a per-seat pricing strategy, therefore to grow income, they would need to persuade their current clientele to occupy more seats.
This probably proved to be especially challenging during and after the COVID-10 epidemic. When the marketing, HR, and operations teams they were aiming for were retreating rather than growing.
Monday launched Monday CRM in 2022 in what is likely an attempt to combat this. This made it possible for current clients to increase the number of seats in their plan for their customer service and sales staff.
Here is an illustration of market development in action. Instead of developing a new product or growing their current market. They expanded out with their current product (added certain features).
Final Words
Growth-promoting top-of-the-funnel activities are the foundation of traditional marketing. Growth marketing strategies consider the full funnel, figuring out how to increase revenue, activation, retention, referrals, and acquisition for a company.
This strategy for growth is more sustainable, has more chances for organic development, and gives clients a more fulfilling experience.