What does growth marketing actually mean? Plus, popular frameworks + strategies

Imagine we put five growth marketers in a room and ask them to describe their jobs. You’d think the responses would be pretty similar… right? 

Well, not exactly. 

Growth marketing today can mean a million and one things. It can also look vastly different from company to company. You might be a growth hacker, a paid specialist, a content expert, or a marketing generalist. 

Over the last few years, growth marketing has grown in popularity. We can see that growth directly from Google search behavior in the past 5 years (keeping in mind there’s a million and one variations of this job).

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While this role is growing, most marketers and even executives still have a fuzzy—at best—grasp of what it is. Because of its vagueness, growth marketing has become a fancy buzzword, which doesn’t help with demystifying it. 

But, today’s the day: whether you’re curious or just looking to explore growth marketing—let’s unpack it together!

What's the difference between growth marketing and brand marketing?

Before we dive straight into growth marketing, let’s back up a bit. One of the most frequently asked questions we hear is: “What’s the difference between growth and brand marketing?” Understanding the differences between both can help us figure out which marketing strategy you want to focus on and where there are learning opportunities! 

To break it down further:

What’s growth marketing?

Growth marketing feels a bit like a science experiment. You set a hypothesis and run sets of experiments to test and validate it. After you’ve gathered results and learnings from your experiments, you iterate on your hypothesis and start brainstorming your next experiment. 

The goal is usually to drive revenue by bringing in new customers or expanding existing ones into your business to experience its value. Unlike traditional marketing which typically focuses on top-of-funnel acquisition, growth marketers are involved with the entire sales funnel from acquisition to retention. 

“Growth marketing goes beyond traditional marketing: it is a data-driven approach that promotes formulating hypotheses, testing, and reiterating components of marketing strategy.”
— Bhavisha Morphet, Fractional Marketer 

What’s brand marketing?

I don’t know about you, but when I see a swoosh checkmark, my brain is programmed to think: Nike, just do it. It’s sort of freakish—but this is an example of brand marketing’s magic. 

Put simply, brand marketing is an effective way to make your company stand out. It’s the personality and unique identity that sets you apart. Through having strong recognition, you build trust and loyalty with your audience as they resonate with your message, core values, and greater purpose.

How do growth and brand differ?

Overall brand marketing is heavily focused on building long-term trust, recognition, and emotional connections between brands and target audiences. Whereas growth marketing is all about driving revenue through experimentation to acquire, activate, and retain new and existing customers. Despite having different focuses, success in both forms of marketing is heavily centered around a deep understanding of customers.

Popular growth marketing strategies and frameworks you should know about

If you’re a growth marketer, you’ve likely heard about some of these things… if not, now’s a great time to learn!

Product-led flywheel

From Slack to Notion, a ton of SaaS companies have scaled their businesses through a product-led growth (PLG) strategy. It’s a tried and true strategy to know, especially for growth marketers. 

PLG is exactly as it sounds—when the product is the primary vehicle for customer acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. A great framework to understand how to acquire and retain customers is the product-led growth flywheel:

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This framework consists of four different customer user segments:

• Strangers: Users who are just browsing, they’re compelled by your marketing but don’t have a relationship with you just yet
• Explorers: Potential users who are interested in your product, but not ready to commit.
• Beginner: Users who start to appreciate how your product might help them and start learning about it.
• Regular: Users who use your product regularly and view it as a key element of their success.
• Champion: The true fans of your product, dedicated users who even refer your product to others.

Each of these user segments represents four journey stages of the flywheel:

• Evaluate: Strangers become Explorers as they start evaluating your product 
• Activate: Evaluators become Beginners when they activate.
• Adopt: A Beginner becomes a Regular when they integrate your product into their workflow.
• Expand: A Regular becomes a Champion when they unlock true value from your product and develop a passion for it.
• Advocate: Champions arise once they start advocating for your brand and sharing it with new users.

For growth marketers, understanding this flywheel can inform effective strategies that move users along each stage of the flywheel, unlocking sustainable and repeatable growth.

Pirate metrics: AAARRR

Who would’ve known growth marketing and pirates were related? The Pirate Funnel (also known as AAARRR!) is a common framework to help growth marketers think through relevant strategies at each of the funnel stages. It gives growth teams actionable data from each stage of the customer journey and helps marketers find opportunities for experimentation.

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1. Awareness: How many people do you reach? The first stage of this funnel is important as new customers that interact with your company for the first time, will pass through each of the funnel stages, and recommend others to you—starting the cycle over. 
   
   ‍Key metrics: look out for changes to your website traffic, branded search, and social media mentions.

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2. Acquisition: Which channels are new users finding your product? Once customers know you, the next step is getting them to engage with you. The tricky piece here is making sure that the “right-fit” customers are moving through the funnel. 
   
   ‍Key metrics: successful acquisition is typically reflected in increased product signups and demo requests.

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3. Activation: How many people take the first important step? Growth marketers call this the “Aha moment”—the magical moment your customers realize the value you bring.
   
   Key metrics: keep track of your daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU), and monthly active users (MAU)

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4. Retention: How many people come back or buy again? Retention is one of the most important metrics for unlocking sustainable growth. Reducing the churn rate and improving your product stickiness is the focus here.
   
   ‍Key metrics: focus on reducing churn rate (lost customers divided by total customers) and increasing your customer retention rate (active users across the period divided by the total number of active users in the previous period)

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5. Revenue: How many people start paying (and how much)? This stage tells us how much money is earned from your customers, also known as “customer lifetime value” (CLTV). This is a critical metric as there’s nothing more helpful than knowing which customers are loyal and willing to pay you money. 
   
   ‍Key metrics: keep an eye out for the number of users going from free to paid, their lifetime value (LTV), the number of expansions, and average revenue per user (ARPU)

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6. Referral: How many people refer their circles to your business? The final stage is all about those champion customers who love your business enough that they tell others about it. Referral helps to increase awareness for new customers—repeating the cycle.
   
   Key metrics: see if there are signals in your signup or demo request’s  self-reported attribution, assess data from customer interviews or surveys

Growth Tribe’s G.R.O.W.S. Process

Now that you have a good sense of the experiments you want to run, the next step is figuring out how to go about it. Luckily, just like how there’s a method to every science experiment, there’s a method for running marketing experiments too. 

Meet the G.R.O.W.S. process, a 5-step loop for running marketing experiments. This process helps teams gather, create, and implement experiments and consists of:

1. Gather ideas: Brainstorm as many experiment ideas as possible with your team.
2. Rank Ideas: Rank and prioritize how many ideas have the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
3. Outline experiments: Choose your next steps.
4. Work, work, work: Execute your experiment in a 2-4 week window.
5. Study data: Collect and analyze the data from your experiment and decide on the next steps: learn and implement!

Community-led growth

The foundation of successfully improving user acquisition and retention is far more efficient when you build for the user as a human rather than the user as a number. This is why growth marketers are starting to adopt community-led growth as a core strategy. Building a community around your business is all about nurturing an enthusiastic cohort of customers and using them as your growth vectors. If done right, an active community takes your existing momentum and propels you further forward. 

This community flywheel effect is broken down into four categories:

1. Awareness: Brand build and boost awareness through community-generated content.
2. Consideration and sales: Unlock community-enabled prospecting and social proof.
3. Post-sales: Collect live product feedback and connect customers to co-support one another.
4. Advocacy: Grab testimonials and form referral networks from word of mouth.

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Community-led growth in SaaS

A strong example of this is GitHub, the developer platform that built community elements directly into its product offering. GitHub encourages coders to come together to work on projects in an open environment. Through building a robust developer community and coining “social coding” they formed the first successful open-source platform which lets developers build, shape, and improve their code far quicker than before.

Community-led growth in eCommerce

In the eCommerce world, Gymshark has nailed its community-led approach. Gymshark fosters community through its brand ambassador program, which features sports and fitness influencers who align with its brand values. Through sponsored events and affiliate discount links, they encourage their brand ambassadors to promote Gymshark clothing to their audiences, helping to grow brand trust and awareness exponentially.

Content Loops

Generating good content is a pretty common marketing strategy for most teams. But if you don’t share your content, no matter how great it is, it sits there and gathers dust. By forming content loops, growth marketers can make content go viral. It typically involves publishing and sharing media, which is then shared by the business, its users, and partners. The content attracts signups, activation, or user engagement, which leads to more sharing of the media—completing the cycle. 

A good example of a viral content loop is from Pinterest:

• Users create boards, pin them, and repin the best content
• Engineers aggregate the best content and create new boards
• Content from these boards are search-indexed and available via search on Google
• Users find these boards and sign up for Pinterest

As Casey Winters (former Growth Marketing Lead at Pinterest and Grubhub) describes, there’s a five-step process to get a content loop in motion:

1. Find ways to get content from your users: Content is unsurprisingly the key ingredient of any content loop. Identify the form of content that will drive your model that would be valuable for existing and net new users.
2. Give users an incentive (and a mechanism) to share that content: Early on, make the process of sharing content as frictionless as possible. This helps to fuel the content engine. 
3. Find where your community lives and double down: Figure out who your audience is and determine which communities will drive enough viewership of their content then find a way to maximize them.
4. Trace traffic back to the source to tweak your product: Marketers should break the traffic down by source to match user intent with the value of the product. If users aren’t converting from a specific source, they might just not be a fit for your product.
5. Convert, activate, and add some friction to feed the loop: Once you’ve attracted customers in the loop, converting them and making it sticky is a huge component. If you create value, you can feel comfortable introducing some friction to ensure that higher-quality users are going to withstand the friction and stick around.

Key conversion goals to keep in mind: 

Imagine trying to navigate without a map—frustrating, right? That's what it's like for a growth marketer to navigate without understanding key conversion goals. As you’re sharpening your toolkit, knowing the core growth metrics can give you raw insights into what’s working, and what’s not. Ultimately, it's not just about collecting numbers; it's about turning data into strategies that move the needle. Here are five conversion goals to keep in mind: 

1. Reducing customer churn rate: Think of this as the percentage of your customers who decide to break up with your business over a certain period. If this number starts climbing, it's like a red flag in a relationship. It tells you that you may not have product market fit, or that your growth channels are bringing in the wrong customers.
2. Turning blog readers into blog subscribers: If writing blog content is one of your primary channels of gaining traffic, start using call-to-action buttons to convert readers into subscribers. This allows you to grow a following and continually share your content with a dedicated audience.
3. Increasing free-to-paid or trial-to-paid conversions: Willingness to pay from your customers is often a good sign that they understand your value. Consider implementing tactics like paywalls or limiting product usage to advance free-trial users through the marketing funnel.
4. Driving towards the “aha moment” during user onboarding: When a user first signs up for your product, it’s like you’ve got seven seconds to make a good impression. Figure out opportunities for users to quickly understand your value. This could be templates, onboarding emails, or simply reducing friction to get started. 
5. Increasing renewal rates: If your business has subscriptions, this tells you how many customers have decided to renew. A low rate might mean your customers are not seeing the value in sticking around. Growth-oriented teams often provide excellent customer support and employ pricing models based on the amount of usage.
   

Growth marketing demystified

So there you have it, growth marketing demystified. Whether you're diving into product-led flywheels, pirate metrics, or content loops, there’s so much more to learn and explore. This is your calling to get started. 

Hear it from Brendan, a former first-grade teacher who took the jump and became a successful growth marketing consultant for companies like Navattic, SparkToro, Copy.ai, and AngelList.

“What I can do now as a growth marketer is forged in the fire of looking at 30 kids every day. Trust me, it transfers—and Growclass is the perfect way to figure it out.”

If you’re looking for mentorship, a real community, and tangible no BS content, consider Growclass’ Growth Marketing Course. Together we’ll navigate your career goals and give you the confidence to tackle new growth channels, make more money, and take on leadership roles.