Webinar review: Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking
4P square has recently organised a webinar about “Growth Marketing”, hosted by Nick Vinckier for the 4P square marketing community.
During this webinar, Nick explained what this method is all about and what it can mean for an organisation.
Contact 4P about Growth MarketingIs growth marketing the same as growth hacking?
An often-used synonym for growth marketing is growth hacking.
Indeed, those two terms are often used as synonyms but they do not exactly refer to the same concept.
Indeed, Growth hacking is all about finding and using underutilised strategies or shortcuts to achieve growth for your business. In addition, it’s far less sustainable than growth marketing.
That doesn’t mean that growth hacking can’t be an interesting source of inspiration for your growth marketing campaigns.
Some of my personal takeaways about growth marketing.
Characteristics of growth marketing
On the one side, this method of working is about:
- experimenting (a lot!);
- being able to adapt quickly;
- developing a lean way of working;
Moreover, the final goal of this process is to enlarge your audience and to create a more engaged user base. Eventually, that will help your organisation reduce churn and increase revenue.
Besides, growth marketing is a metric-driven method of working. It consists of continuously experimenting, building, learning and measuring results in order to learn and improve in a consistent way.
The goal is to find out what works for your organisation in the shortest amount of time with the least effort needed in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
Growth marketeers can often be perceived as a threat within organisations because of the assumption that growth marketing is becoming a substitute for traditional marketing and development. However, these two disciplines are very complementary.
The “Growth Hacker is a unicorn”
On the other side, the growth hacker is considered as a unicorn. It means that it is a discipline that is pulling inspiration from various divisions within your organisation.
Here are some of the profiles to look for if you’re thinking about putting up a growth division:
- Data & analyst: for testing and data analysing.
- Creative: for digital marketing, PR and “wild” ideas
- Tech & IT: for product development and automation
- Psychologist: for behaviour design, persuasion and UX
- Executive: for quick approvals and decision making
How do you start implementing growth marketing?
Growth marketing is an iterative process that can be broken down into the following 5 steps:
- Define your funnel using only metrics that matter.
- Measure your metrics to visualise trends over time and be able to compare.
- Prioritize the areas in your funnel that have the highest churn rate.
- Start experimenting.
- Repeat to optimize your funnel.
In a nutshell, if one of the experiments is not working as expected, that doesn’t mean that you have failed. In fact, you’ve just learned something new that you can take with you in the future. It is a learning process!
About the author
Alexander Karsai is a young digital marketeer driven by ambition and eagerness to learn. He is currently working as a Marketing Consultant at 4P square. 4P square is a leading sales & marketing consulting company helping companies to reach their marketing goals.
Want to know more about Alexander? Feel free to start a conversation with him on LinkedIn.