Along with the radical changes that swept the world throughout the 90s, traditional marketing has evolved and become much more digital. In addition, with this new era, marketing has transformed into a business model that can be accessed not only by large corporations but also by small businesses.
The 2010’s witnessed the flowering of the customer-centric era, and new buzzwords such as digital marketing, Omni-channel marketing, growth hacking, growth hacker and growth marketing have appeared.
Although digital marketing, like a majestic mountain, overshadowed them all for a while, each term has an independent and significant value. Especially growth marketing among them has drawn attention, as it is a more holistic approach to the whole of marketing activities.
Growth hacking on the other hand is a very popular term that is still considered as the perfect solution. In today's world, where growth has become the most important goal, it is undoubtedly normal for an approach that aims to hack growth to become popular.
Although this term has gained traction recently, growth requires a much more holistic approach.
However, nowadays customers expect personalized communication, where you provide them with a product, service or solution whenever and wherever they need it. This is in an extremely competitive environment that has made the growth mindset mandatory.
It is precisely this reality that has given birth to a sustainable and long-term growth strategy, growth marketing.
What is growth marketing then?
Growth marketing is a mix of marketing sales, customer management, support, and marketing activities, including social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and any other operations within your organization. It’s a holistic approach that intends to grow your business by leveraging all marketing channels to achieve sustainable results.
Growth marketing is essentially an end-to-end approach. Developing a growth marketing strategy includes 4 phases:
1. Conducting a growth marketing check-up
2. Building a growth marketing strategy
3. Creating growth marketing plans and generating growth tactics
4. Optimising the strategy
You can find more detailed information about these phases from this interview.
A growth marketing mindset is a way of working and handling problems related to business, where you look for innovative solutions and use data and new techniques to accelerate growth.
In today’s business world, organizations constantly encounter new challenges. In order to overcome these new obstacles and challenges, companies need to come up with solutions rapidly.
And if the first solution does not work, you have to come up with new solutions. Most solutions will again require other tools or skills that your growth team must learn.
That is why a growth marketing mindset is so important.
The growth marketing mindset is a characteristic of growth marketers. As it’s a mix of different features, it is often hard to give an exact definition of the growth marketing mindset briefly. Yet, there are some key points that can spark an idea of what it entails.
Carol Dweck, a leading researcher on the topic identifies growth mindset as follows:
“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”
Of course growth mindset means something else for growth marketing, including possessing the ability to measure, learn from your experiments, iterate constantly, and understand the importance of collaboration.
In the good old days, things were simple, but today’s fast-paced landscape dictates a growth mindset that can drive you toward success.
Therefore, if you want to achieve your goals, you should reserve a room for a growth mindset and inspire it throughout your team.
In order to implement a growth marketing mindset within your organization, you should be looking at the whole sales funnel, identifying your key metrics, getting to know your strengths and weaknesses, and last but not least, believing in the power of iteration.
These are essential as growth marketing relies on a data-driven and agile approach.
Metrics may vary from industry to industry and from business to business, but ultimately you need to focus on measuring everything. As the management expert Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it”.
Since many departments now work together, collaboration can be seen as another component of a solid mindset. Without getting any feedback from your sales team, your product team, or your customers, it’s impossible to execute a healthy marketing strategy in today’s world.
Also, the foundation of a successful growth marketing and growth mindset is based on agility and experimentation. In order to gain comprehensive visibility in your efforts to achieve your long-term goals, implementing an agile methodology is key. At NBT we call it the “Test and Learn Structure” which allows us to quickly test and optimise marketing campaigns.
In this way, marketers can use a growth mindset to embrace change across industries and organizations. Don’t forget: experimentation is the driving force of growth marketing.
As the buyer’s journey might be too complex and involve too many decision-makers, learning from your experiment and letting iteration lead you will get you closer to a holistic strategy at every stage of your funnel.
If you are willing to outsource your marketing activities, we enable you to utilize growth marketing professionals and growth experts in all areas to build and execute a growth strategy to its fullest, without the hassle of managing a growth marketing team in-house.
Our Growth Marketing as a Service provides a wide range of packages and solutions according to your business scale or needs so that you can effectively transform your business.