Growth marketing: How startups grow

As a CEO, you must be involved in everything, but the most important one is the growth of your startup. To cut through the clutter, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a creative, iterative, and compelling marketing strategy. A strategy that not only aids in customer acquisition but also fosters virality, word-of-mouth, and organic growth.

This innovative and effective method of increasing user loyalty has a name: growth marketing.

In this article, we are going to discuss how to use growth marketing to grow your startup.

Key Takeaways:

• Focus on the product in the early stages, not the marketing.
• You do not need to hire a growth marketing agency at early stages.
• Define your marketing plan based on ROI.
• Build a data-driven growth plan using metrics.

Focus on your product

In the early stages, your growth is mainly determined by your product, not by your marketing efforts. If you are just getting started, your product will most likely be far from perfect. You must understand that what you learn as you try to position the product will have an impact on the product and the roadmap.

So do not hire a growth marketing agency (for now); At this point, you must figure out how to grow your company on your own. The person looking at website conversion rates should be in the same room as the person designing the landing pages and deciding which features to develop next.

Consider growth costs as an investment

The guiding principle in defining your marketing strategies will be your return on investment, or ROI. ROI represents the quantitative benefits (usually calculated as revenue) you receive above and beyond those needed to cover your original payment. For example, if you pay $1,000 a month for marketing services and you earn $1,500 in new revenue from those services, your ROI is $500.

Choosing a right growth marketing strategy is very important. For example, if you’re just starting out and you need a bit of extra momentum, the fast return of a PPC campaign could be well worth the money as a short-term measure for success, especially if you’re already investing in something like a content marketing strategy for the long term.

Keep in mind that marketing is a game of trial and error. Some of your experiments will fail, and the more tests you run, the faster you can figure out your growth strategy.

Always keep an eye on your metrics

Being data-driven is what wins in growth marketing. In other words, the most successful teams are defined by their growth marketing metrics. This is how they set a baseline, track progress, determine what works (and what doesn’t), fine-tune their strategies, and, of course, scale the business. Here are some fundamental concepts:

• CAC: CAC stands for customer acquisition cost. A company’s CAC is the total sales and marketing cost required to earn a new customer over a specific time period.
• CLV: The lifetime value of a customer is how much revenue a typical customer generates over time. This could be a matter of days, weeks, months, or years, depending on your typical retention rate and back-end product or service offerings.
• Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is what percentage of visitors turn into leads and leads into customers. This is a general marketing KPI but it can also apply to any of the other categories if you want to track each channel separately.