What is “Growth Marketing”?

Last updated: January 24, 2019

What is “Growth Marketing”?

Good question! The short answer is it means a lot of different things to different people.

First, some background. A lot of folks would actually call what I do “growth hacking”. But I’m not a big fan of the term because a lot of people assume you come in to their organisation and immediately their numbers shoot up and to the right, hockey stick style!

For me, growth hacking is a iterative experimentation process involving the following:

growth hacking process

  1. Generating ideas: Constantly coming up with ideas and storing them in a central place. Ideas can be found from many sources - talking to colleagues & users, online resources (e.g. Product Hunt / growthhackers.com), analysing the industry & competitor tactics and of course, yourself!
  2. Scoring and prioritising: Score ideas based on expected effort to build out a test of it and the expected return. Priority = return - effort.
  3. Picking one and shipping it (MVP): Pick the one with the highest priority and build / launch an MVP version of it to test your hypothesis. Set your goals and a date for the launch.
  4. Analysing the results: Based on your goals in step 3, did you achieve them? Is it worth scaling this?

Now growth marketing / hacking can incorporate a wide span of disciplines (from design to SEO to PPC to digital marketing to coding.) In my role(s), my goal has been to merge code with marketing to optimize, automate and do things traditional marketing teams cannot.

For example, some projects I’ve worked on include:

  • Built the Landing Page Analyzer as a free tool to generate leads1.
  • Launched an experiment a week for 8 weeks including a referral program and an ROI calculator (listen to the podcast here).
  • Automated the outbound sales process for a number of startups.

What does a typical day look like for me? The best part is, there is no typical day! I could be doing anything from writing code (mainly Python & JavaScript), analysing data, launching a marketing campaign, researching new ideas or talking with users and customers to understand them.


1A note on free tools as a B2B marketing channel

I’ve spent much of the past few years developing free tools as marketing campaigns (from simple embedded JavaScript to full blown web apps) and, in my opinion, it is the next big wave in B2B marketing. To cut through the noise, you need to stand out. What better way of standing out than building a useful (this is a key point) tool for your target audience relevant to your primary offering. If you can help them, they will remember you, and if you can get people in the door of your free tool, you should be able to position your main offering and convert some of those free tool users.