What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is marketing run as a series of small experiments. You test one change at a time, measure what visitors and customers do and keep what works. You do this at every stage, from the first visit to the customers who come back. Take a pottery studio that sells online at mossandkilnpottery.co.uk. For its shop, growth marketing could mean testing a new headline on the mug page against the current one. The studio then keeps the version that sells more mugs.

To start, you need a website you can change yourself and a way to see what visitors do there.

Growth marketing vs traditional marketing

Traditional marketing and growth marketing both aim to win customers, but they cover different ground and work in different ways. With growth marketing, each test result shapes your next decision.

Growth hacking is a close relative. It uses cost-effective, resource-light tactics to grow and keep an active base of users. Where growth hacking focuses on growing that user base, growth marketing applies the habit of testing to every stage of the customer journey.

Growth marketing vs digital marketing

Digital marketing covers all the marketing you do online, through channels such as search engines, social media, email and other websites. Growth marketing is the approach that decides which tactics you use, and how, based on what actually works. In practice, you use digital marketing alongside offline tactics such as direct mail, and you test both the same way.

Advantages and disadvantages of growth marketing

The main advantage is that you measure every change, so you learn what your customers actually respond to. A test on the mug page, for example, can show whether buyers react more to the price or to how the mugs are made. You drop what doesn't work, and your time and budget go to what does.

What you learn is useful beyond marketing, too. It shows you where to start with improving your website’s user experience. It also points to ways of optimising your checkout process and reducing shopping cart abandonment.

The main disadvantage is that growth marketing takes time and patience. A test can show that a change helped, made no difference or made things worse, so some of your experiments won't work. Don't treat a failed test as wasted: note what it ruled out. A small shop also waits longer for each result, because a test needs enough visitors before you can trust it. It's worth planning your tests in short, regular rounds and expecting a picture of your customers to build up slowly. Set aside time for each test, to plan it and to read the results. If you use a separate testing tool, check what it costs before you choose one.

The metrics growth marketing tracks

Growth marketing starts with a number you want to move, so choose your metric before you test anything. For the pottery shop, the number to move could be the share of mug page visitors who buy. Keep to one metric per test, so you know what each change did. The right metric depends on your business, and these are the common ones.

• Customer acquisition cost: what it costs you on average to win a new customer. It's your marketing and sales costs divided by the number of new customers.
• Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who complete a goal you set, such as buying a mug or signing up.
• Bounce rate: the share of visits in which people don't engage with your site. Google Analytics counts a visit as a bounce when it lasts 10 seconds or less, views one page and has no key event, an action marked as important to your business, such as a purchase.
• Time on page: how long your page is the active window on a visitor's screen (Google Analytics calls it engagement time), which shows whether they actually use it.
• Open rate: in email marketing, the percentage of recipients who open your email.
• Retention rate: the percentage of your customers you still have at the end of a given period.
• Customer lifetime value: the total revenue you can reasonably expect from a customer over the whole relationship.

If you run an online shop or a blog, you can see numbers such as your bounce rate by using Google Analytics. Most reports leave bounce rate out by default, so it shows there once someone with an Editor or Administrator role adds it to a detail report.

How to build a growth marketing strategy

Your strategy is a cycle you repeat, with each round aimed at the metric you picked and made up of the same four steps.

1. Collect ideas for improvements at every stage of the customer journey, from the first visit to the repeat order.
2. Turn each idea into a statement you can test, such as "a headline that says the mugs are dishwasher safe sells more mugs".
3. Score the ideas by impact (how much each could move your metric), confidence (how sure you are it will work) and ease (how simple it is to try), and test the most promising one first.
4. Run an A/B test and analyse the result before you pick a winner.

When the test is over, the winning version becomes your new starting point and the next idea gets its turn.

With Aida AI Website Builder, you edit your text, images and pages yourself whenever you want to try something new.

How an A/B test works

An A/B test compares two versions of a page to see which one performs better, with your visitors split at random between them. On mossandkilnpottery.co.uk, you might test the mug page's current headline against one that says the mugs are dishwasher safe. You then compare the share of each group that bought a mug. To run the test, you can use a testing tool or a feature of your website or shop. It shows each version to part of your visitors and counts who buys in each group. Look in your platform's help pages for "A/B test" or "split test" first. If it has none, a separate testing tool can do the split and the counting for you.

Give the test time before you call a winner. It's worth running it for at least a full week, so both versions see weekdays and the weekend. Then wait until each side has had enough visits and sales for the difference to be clear. With few visitors, that takes longer, so test changes big enough to make a clear difference. Change one thing at a time, too. If you change the headline and the photo together, you won't know which one made the difference.

You can test changes for SEO too, though not with a split. Change the title or text of one page instead, and compare the visitors it brings in from search over the following weeks with the weeks before.

Start with one test on your own website

Your first round can be small. Choose a page you already have, write down one idea for it and test it against the metric you picked. If your shop isn't online yet, build your website with us first, so you can change any page yourself whenever a test calls for it.