What is Growth hacking? And Growth marketing? Inbound marketing? Performance marketing?

What is Growth hacking? And Growth marketing??Inbound marketing? Performance marketing?

Is it all the same, only in makeover? And what does it do for your business growth and revenue growth??

This article will help you find out what kind of digital marketing works for your company.

Many digital marketers refer to themselves as "growth marketers" - but what does the term 'growth marketing' even mean? Well, It's a strategy for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers that is based on continual experimentation and an intense focus on your clients' individual changing motives and interests.

By customizing and delivering highly personalized, customized messages that are tailored to your clients' requirements, you'll be able to expand your company rapidly through a variety of channels, especially the ones that matter most to your clients.?

Let’s take a closer look at what it means to be a growth marketer. Growth marketers help make things better for users. They optimize the user experience and, by consequence, turn them into happy customers. Growth marketing is an umbrella term for the different kinds of digital growth strategies used by companies all over the world.?

Successful growth marketers aren't only concerned with increasing the number of users; they're also focused on building a highly engaged audience that can help minimize churn and increase each user's lifetime value. (Don't want people to turn away? Keep them happy!) Building a highly personalized marketing strategy has proven to cut acquisition costs in half, lift revenues by up to 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 30%.?

This is where Growth Hacking comes in.

“It’s time to stop looking for shortcuts. You can't just hit the toggle switch to digital marketing and hope that your business will take off. Your company's growth requires a focused, data-driven approach with an emphasis on personalization - and it takes work to get there.” Pieter Moens GH

A growth hacker creates new ways of acquiring users through unique channels like social media, or improves existing products by making them simple and intuitive. It might sound easy, but companies must constantly test their ideas before they get to what works best for each audience segment. Growth Hacking is a methodic blend of creativity, analytical thinking and social metrics to grow your business. This type of growth has been made popular by companies such as Uber, who has grown from 16 employees in 2010 – to 2000+ today, with no paid advertising budget!?

The concept of growth hacking has taken off recently as startups and scale ups have realized that they don't need advertising budget to grow their businesses as they can find ways to scale through low-cost channels like SEO, SEM and Social Media Marketing.?

Growth hacking marketing techniques are more focused on optimizing your existing user base rather than finding new customers. It’s all about identifying which users are likely to be most engaged with your company and tailoring messages specifically for them, so you can maximize retention rates instead of wasting resources on chasing down leads who aren't interested in what you're selling.?

It's not just another buzzword. Growth hacking is a movement that's changing the face of marketing and entrepreneurs worldwide, by challenging the traditional concepts like advertising and PR to get more users for less money. It all started when Sean Ellis coined "Growth Hacking" in 2010 as an effective way to grow early-stage startups.?

Successful growth hackers focus on measurable results instead of vanity metrics (page views, click-throughs), continually iterating their way towards scalable solutions while maintaining high retention rates—and often doing it with only one or two developers.?

What types of digital marketing are used??

Inbound Marketing

Growth hackers and growth marketers will also use inbound marketing. Inbound Marketing is based on the idea of "pulling" customers to you by educating them, entertaining them and convincing them to buy. It's all about creating content that brings in business.?

There are several methods for increasing traffic. You can produce more blog articles and e-books, optimize your keywords, and develop a social media publishing plan. You can also use influencer marketing and create giveaways.?

You've tried everything you can think of, and yet your website isn't performing as well as you'd want? Forms may work for a day, but after that, they become useless. It might be tough at first, but eventually, effective inbound marketing is essential for your company's growth. It's one of the most cost-effective approaches to bring new visitors to your site without spending a lot on advertising. So, how do you stay up with it in such a fast-paced, always-changing, and expanding environment?

Attract

This stage focuses on driving relevant traffic to your site. Traffic that is most likely to become a lead or a potential customer. You can achieve this with great SEO, blogging, social publishing, and more.?

About blogging?

Your blog is the foundation of your inbound marketing strategy. This is your storytelling and lead generation mechanism. As you publish content, your audience will learn about your brand, products and services. If you aren't blogging regularly, you could be missing out on significant gains in return.?

“HubSpot” has calculated that if your blog posts are being read by at least 100 people, you have a good chance of having one person to become your client. As traffic to your blog increases, so does your brand's visibility. The more visible you are, the more potential leads come to visit your website.?

The blogging industry is exploding. Thousands of blogs are published every day for a reason: to drive traffic. That's why I still believe in blogging.

Blogging is effective. However, when you have no or few visitors, it takes time. When you contribute to a guest post on an industry expert site, you increase the number of people who visit your website.

Remember that long, In-Depth Content is Better.

Blogging on your site is also outstanding for driving inbound traffic. But not just any blog post will do. You can't expect your company to become the next Facebook by throwing together a 500 or 1000-word article in a rush. It just won’t happen. You'll need high-quality, high-value, consistent blogging to turn your company around. Add Walkthroughs or Step-by-Step Content. This is the most effective approach to make your blog more lengthy. Instead of producing weak content fillers, focus on providing useful information.

Convert

In the 'Convert' stage of inbound marketing we focus more on sales and conversions than simply attracting new visitors. E.g. your blog posts should directly lead readers towards a conversion or action that benefits your business goals.?

One of the key elements in this stage is lead generation forms. You are collecting information from your visitors, usually their contact details. This means that you can connect with them further on another occasion when they might be ready to buy or sign up for a service, even if it's not today.?

It's about staying in touch with them and nurturing the relationship. It is a key factor to build your email list, an important asset for most businesses today. With a strategically built email marketing campaign, you will be able to stand out from competitors by strengthening the connection between you and existing customers or users.?

Close

The third stage of an effective inbound marketing strategy is the Close stage.

Your goal here is to convert leads into sales and close customers through a formal process of selling. Your content in this part of the funnel should be specifically designed for high-quality lead generation. In fact, it's often referred to as pre-selling or even presales content because you are building trust and leadership with the target audience before actually showing them your product or service.?

Delight

After you've successfully closed a lead by converting it into an actual customer, now what? Now is when you can go above and beyond to delight that person. Your goal is to make him/her feel special and show your appreciation.

This is where the relationship building aspect of inbound marketing comes into play. It's about staying top-of-mind with current customers, remaining valuable for future reference, creating experiences that differentiate your company from competitors, strengthening relationships, earning trust by making people happy,? and ultimately becoming the preferred option for all of your customers' needs.

Inbound marketing is a type of digital growth marketing that focuses on attracting, converting and delighting customer prospects by helping them solve their problems with content-driven solutions.?

Moreover, growth marketing will use Performance Marketing.?

Performance Marketing is all about using pay-per-click campaigns, affiliate marketing, display advertising and email marketing to grow your business. By using this strategy, growth happens quickly because you are paying for each customer.?

Performance marketing is a way of advertising on the internet.

You pay for what you get, like clicks or conversions. Performance marketing, unlike traditional and organic marketing, is used to drive behaviours, track and measure those activities, as well as attribute the ROI of each activity to the performance of your marketing efforts. Since you're paying for each action, this approach is much more targeted and measurable than organic or traditional inbound marketing approaches.

While major corporations can spend millions of dollars on branding, most businesses need to focus on the bottom line to stay profitable. Performance marketing puts power back in the hands of the advertiser. You determine the action, then pay when that action has been completed – whether it’s a sale, lead, or click.?

With performance marketing, the customer is in control.

When you pay only for results, it becomes clear exactly how effective your ads are and which keywords and marketing channels are generating the best return on investment. This allows you to constantly improve and optimize your campaigns as you learn more about what works for your business and how well it performs.

Performance Marketing is a great way to gain new customers, increase sales revenue and raise brand awareness. Also, if something goes wrong with a Performance marketing campaign, there is a clear line of sight to the problem and a registration process in place for when things go wrong.

Performance marketing is not just about clicks or conversions, it’s also about identifying which source makes you more money than others by tracking your ad spend against revenue generated. Then use this data to fuel future campaigns with better targeting so that every dollar goes further.

Performance marketing is just like advertising on Google Ads or Facebook, but there are some differences. The most important differences are:

- You only pay for actual conversions (not clicks)

- Conversions can happen anywhere on your site - not just in a specific ad unit

- No setup costs if you use a performance marketing platform

- Conversions can be tracked across multiple devices to see your customers' entire path to purchase?

- You are only charged when a conversion occurs

4 basic steps for your performance marketing campaign

- Step one, choose your objective. It's important that you decide what type of action you want the customer to take, whether it is a sale, lead or click.

- Step two, select your digital channels. You can choose from two main types of channels: search or display. You can also use both at once if you want to broaden your reach even more.

- Step three, create and launch the campaign. The goals of this step are to decide on your target audience, keywords, ad copy/creative, and bid.

- Step four, measure and optimize it. You have to decide how you will evaluate your campaign’s success by choosing specific metrics that are important for the action you want the customer to take.?

Four primary KPIs used in Performance Marketing

- Click-through rate (CTR) - The average number of clicks per ad impression?- Conversion rate - The percentage of total users that convert (become a lead or make a purchase)?

- Cost per click (CPC) - How much it costs to get one click on your ad. This can be high, when you're bidding for keywords with high competition and low search volume; or low, when you're bidding for keywords with less competition and higher search volume?

- Cost per acquisition (CPA) - The average amount of money spent to acquire a customer. This is the total ad spend divided by conversions

Unlike traditional or organic inbound, which are content led and require time before they start generating revenue for you, with Performance Marketing the advertiser is only paying when there's a conversion. This means that results happen quickly.?

Be sure to think about affiliate marketing for your company.?

Affiliate Marketing is a performance marketing subcategory that is entirely focused on data and goals. Affiliate Marketing is a subset of pay-per-performance marketing.?

A great way to think about affiliate marketing is as follows: in traditional, you're the advertiser and your audience are consumers who buy products from brands that market them; in Affiliate Marketing, you're not buying traffic or an audience, but rather paying for conversions - whenever someone buys your product as a result of an affiliate link or ad you've bought.?

Affiliate Marketing is the practice of partnering with other, more established brands to cross-promote products and services. For example, if Company A has a new app for iPhone users that they want to promote through advertising, then they might choose Affiliate Network B.??

If Company A is an affiliate of Network B, they may be entitled to some percentage commission for each user who downloads the app after clicking on their ad. This approach means that there are no wasted marketing dollars - every click or view results in a sale or lead which directly contributes to your bottom line.?

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most efficient and effective performance marketing techniques.?

Programmatic marketing

Programmatic marketing is another automated approach to digital advertising that has a big impact on Performance Marketing, as it enables advertisers to buy better placements at scale and maximize their ROI.??

Programmatic Marketing is when you set up a campaign and then pay for it when the specific action has been completed. In addition to automated buying of ad space using an algorithm to target the most relevant audience at the best possible price, programmatic marketing also provides a great deal of data for digital marketers to analyse.?

Programmatic marketing is becoming an essential ingredient of performance marketing as it enables advertisers to buy better placements at scale and maximize their ROI by targeting the most relevant audience at the best possible price with automated buying using algorithms that can identify users' profile, interests & behaviour patterns across multiple devices in real time.?

In conclusion: in order to understand, measure and optimize your growth, you need to focus on your customer. By means of digital marketing, which includes gaining traffic, leads and engagement online. In short: Digital Growth Marketing.

Growth marketing and Growth hacking use means like Inbound marketing and Performance marketing, as affiliate marketing and much more. This entails listening to and reacting to your customers.

For me, Growth Hacking is the combination of that, with a pince of sales experience, a creative mind and having love for data.?

First, you must comprehend, evaluate, and optimize your digital footprint. Then, make sure you are outreaching to your clients; raise awareness and help them solve their problems using the full force of the big digital world.?

And remember, the client's first way is the only way! Pieter Moens GH

Post written by: Pieter Moens GH, a creative dyslexia entrepreneur.