The use of digital channels in marketing necessitated the evolution of traditional marketing strategies. As a result of this dizzying wind of transformation, some concepts are rapidly forming and gaining importance.
Digital marketing and growth marketing are concepts that come up in every corner of the marketing field. Mastering these concepts is critical when creating an effective marketing strategy aligned with your marketing goals.
If you want to make the right choices to contribute to your business growth by evaluating these concepts, we will provide you with helpful information. First, let's clarify what these concepts mean.
Digital marketing is the marketing strategy that companies implement through digital channels such as social media, email, and search engines. Devices such as desktop computers and mobile phones are some of the targets to be reached through these channels.
Unlike internet marketing, which provides marketing using only the internet, digital marketing uses all devices that have a digital identity and enable interaction, and allows you to create marketing strategies that will spread across all digital channels.
These strategies help companies to achieve their goals, such as creating brand awareness, offering a specific product to the right user, and retaining the current user.
While digital marketers are creating digital marketing strategies, they work by dividing into sub-branches such as social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing in order to get maximum efficiency from each of these channels.
According to the We Are Social 2022 Digital Report, 62.5% of the human population are internet users, and 58.4% are active social media users. And the number of users tends to increase every year. All these users establish their communications as interaction-oriented, and the static nature of traditional marketing campaigns cannot provide them with this interaction. That’s why creating a digital marketing strategy radically puts your product forward.
Growth marketing is a methodology in which you shape your marketing strategies by holistically evaluating the entire marketing funnel. It focuses not only on acquiring and retaining users but also on achieving various goals to ensure sustainable growth.
A growth marketer’s difference comes from a growth marketing mindset, which aims to create the right strategies for every step of marketing with data-driven and experimental solutions.
Because growth marketing requires developing a unique set of strategies specific to the firm, growth marketers create long-term and short-term plans in line with their marketing goals. To realize these long-term plans, growth marketers constantly analyse the company and its industry.
If implemented correctly in line with a growth-oriented mindset, growth marketing strategies radically change business growth rates.
Growth marketing is often confused with growth hacking. Although they have common attributes, they are quite different in terms of their inclusiveness.
Growth hacking is an aggressive growth strategy carried out by small-scale companies and start-ups to quickly gain a place in the sector. Growth marketing requires a much more holistic perspective, as it targets the entire marketing funnel, generating growth at every stage. Growth hacking strategies can be thought of as a much smaller and less sustainable subset.
These two marketing methods approach certain stages of the marketing process at different depths. This situation causes sharp distinctions in certain concepts.
Digital marketing focuses on the upper part of the marketing funnel and implements various strategies for customer acquisition and brand awareness. Growth marketers aim to go one step beyond this. It arises from a mindset designed to target the entire funnel.
It aims to use marketing efforts more efficiently and creates holistic growth paths using this broad perspective. Because sometimes actions at the bottom of the marketing funnel become the starting point of a much more productive cycle at the top, and forming a much more solid foundation for the growth strategy.
Performing continuous analysis and data-driven monitoring, as well as creating a company- and industry-focused growth plan, is the key to mastering the entire marketing funnel.
Because they aim to make these strategies unique to each company, growth marketers constantly experiment and look for growth opportunities accordingly. This way, it differs from the digital marketing mentality of providing returns by applying standard methods.
While applying digital marketing strategies, details that will make a difference in the next step may be overlooked. Since growth marketing is a maximum data-driven discipline, it focuses on not missing any metrics that may benefit growth goals.
Each customer's journey to purchasing a product varies. Identifying these customers with the right segmentation methods and planning each step of the journey makes a significant difference. Growth marketers combine these phases by creating marketing funnels designed in detail for each potential customer, which improves the entire strategy by working on the details.
Digital marketing is far from the traditional marketing approach, but growth marketers can powerfully blend digital marketing methods with traditional marketing dynamics.
Growth marketing also uses digital marketing strategies in line with company-specific growth targets. For this reason, it would not be correct to consider these two concepts as opposites of each other.
Growth marketing and digital marketing are not entirely separate concepts. There is no such thing as choosing one of the two and continuing on your way. However, you can compare the two to determine on what basis you will continue your company’s growth process.
Implementing digital marketing strategies will contribute to the growth of your company. Although, growth marketing is not a concept where you ignore digital channels. On the contrary, it requires using digital marketing channels effectively. However, the background process when using these channels is much more detailed and carefully planned.
There is no distinction between small and large companies in comparing these two concepts. Marketing strategies, created in line with the growth mindset by a strong growth marketing team, will make a big difference for all companies.
Being in the growth marketing mindset while applying digital marketing strategies makes it easier to take the right action by comparing results you get with the holistic goals of the company. The process of creating new goals doesn't always start from the beginning when you plan every step in advance. Growth marketing saves you time and labour and helps you channel your investment into other projects.
If you want to achieve more holistic growth and achieve this quickly and sustainably, working with growth marketers will allow you to achieve much more solid results.
Growth marketers aim to reach big goals by considering small goals at every stage. This means that, for growth marketing, the separate goals of your digital marketing strategies serve a common company goal.
In addition, growth marketers circulate between your departments like a capillary and maximise their communication and organisational capabilities. As a result of increased synergy and awareness, your employees always focus on the right targets.
As this happens collectively, both your growth rate and income will increase. Growth marketers can also rule out the possibility of uncontrolled rapid growth because unplanned rapid growth can lead to a rapid collapse.
The right application of growth marketing strategies can radically change your company’s position in the industry. You can start by building a solid growth marketing team.
But having a growth mindset and blending it with experience is critical to success for a strong team.
That’s why you can also choose to work with a team with experience and solid background. In that case, you can benefit from NBT’s proven growth marketing methodology to go one step beyond classical digital marketing strategies.
