Marketing Growth Strategy: Definition, Process, Examples, and More
What is a marketing growth strategy?
A marketing growth strategy is a plan used by businesses to increase their market share, customer base, and overall business revenue over time.
The goal of a marketing growth strategy is to acquire new customers and engage and retain them long-term.
Growth marketing strategy vs. traditional marketing strategy
Growth marketing focuses on the entire customer lifecycle, not just the initial acquisition.
Such a holistic approach requires continuous engagement, retention, and revenue generation based on data from analytics and frequent experimentation.
Growth marketing is also highly agile. It integrates real-time feedback to adapt strategies. And it involves cross-functional collaboration for a consistent customer experience.
In contrast, traditional marketing tends to concentrate on short-term goals, like acquiring an X number of new customers.
To achieve these goals, it uses periodic campaigns rather than sustained effort. These campaigns are often run in isolation from other teams and lack the flexibility to adapt based on ongoing data analysis.
Why should SaaS companies invest in growth marketing?
Growth marketing helps companies to attract new users and keep them engaged. This increases the likelihood of subscription renewals and upgrades. This is essential for SaaS company success because they depend on customer retention and lifetime value.
Moreover, marketing growth enables them to stay competitive and relevant in the fast-evolving SaaS space. By continuously analyzing customer behavior and feedback, they can swiftly adapt and enhance their offerings to better meet the needs and preferences of their users.
Finally, growth marketing fosters cross-departmental collaboration. When marketing aligns with product development, customer service, and sales, the result is a more cohesive user experience that can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.
What are the four growth strategies?
The Ansoff matrix classifies business growth strategies using two variables: market and product. Companies can choose to grow in their current or new market using existing or new products.
Based on that, there are 4 main growth strategies.
1. Market development
Market development involves introducing existing products to new markets. This strategy can include targeting different geographic areas or new customer segments.
For example, Slack, initially popular in tech industries, expanded its reach to various sectors, including education and non-profits to increase its user base.
The strategy is suitable for companies operating in saturated markets trying to extend their product lifecycle. It helps them access a new customer base and diversify their revenue sources.
2. Market penetration
Market penetration is a business growth strategy that aims to increase market share within existing markets using existing products.
That’s what Zoom achieved during the C19 pandemic. The company significantly increased its market share in the video conferencing space by offering a product with excellent user experience and pricing strategies, like free premium access for educational institutions.
This strategy builds on existing market knowledge and resources, so the risk is lower. By converting competitors’ customers, it can quickly increase revenue and brand recognition.
3. Product development
Product development focuses on creating new products for existing markets.
Like Userpilot which continuously adds new features such as improved analytics and AI-powered capabilities to enhance value for existing users and expand our customer base.
The strategy suits established companies with a strong innovation drive and well-tuned to customers’ needs.
However, it requires investment in R&D and robust idea validation to avoid wasting resources on building features nobody needs, which leads to feature bloat, poor user experience, and dilutes value proposition.
4. Diversification
Diversification involves introducing new products to new markets. This can be a risky strategy but offers potential for significant growth.
HubSpot’s Customer Service Hub is a good example. By developing the product, HubSpot extended its offerings to include customer service tools and targeted new market segments.
This strategy combines all the pros and cons of the other strategies. It allows you to diversify your revenue sources and reach new, untapped markets. But, it requires investment in new tech and building new products for unknown markets comes with a huge risk.
How to develop a growth marketing strategy?
Now that we know what a growth marketing strategy is, let’s build one for your SaaS!
Define high-level goals to guide your marketing efforts
As with most processes in SaaS, developing a marketing growth strategy starts with goal-setting because it gives it focus and ensures alignment with the product vision and strategy.
For example, your general goal could be to increase your revenue or market share.
When setting your goals, make sure they are clear and specific.
To help with goal setting, teams use frameworks like OKR or BHAG.
My favorite tactic is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). With a slight twist: I add ‘C’ so it becomes CSMART, to make me remember that my goals need to be ‘Challenging’ too.
So a CSMART goal could be increasing MRR by 22% by 2025.
Map out the different stages of the customer journey
After setting goals, map out the stages of the entire customer journey.
Many SaaS products have similar customer journeys. They consist of stages like:
- Awareness – the customer discovers the product, for example, through an ad.
- Acquisition – they sign up for the free trial or freemium.
- Activation – the user realizes the product value.
- Adoption – the user starts using the product as a go-to solution to their problem.
- Retention – the user stays engaged with the product.
- Referral/Advocacy – when they promote their product in their circles.
- Revenue – when they subscribe to the paid plan or buy upgrades and add-ons.
Define metrics for each customer journey stage
As the growth marketing strategy focuses on user engagement at all customer journey stages, measuring performance requires tracking multiple metrics.
Here are some common ones:
- Awareness stage
– Click-through Rate - Acquisition stage
– Free trial sign-ups
– Demo bookings
– Customer acquisition cost - Activation stage
– Customer activation rate
– Time to value
– Primary onboarding completion rate - Adoption stage
– Feature adoption rate
– Time to Adopt (TTA)
– Breadth/Depth of Use (BoU/DoU) - Retention stage
– Custom churn rate
– Customer retention rate - Referral stage
– Net Promoter Score (NPS)
– Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
– Referrals - Revenue stage
– Customer lifetime value
– Average revenue per user
– Annual/Monthly Recurring Revenue (ARR/MRR)
Identify key areas for growth marketers to concentrate on
Based on the metrics you track, identify the areas for improvement.
For example, your activation and onboarding completion rate may be lagging, so your focus will be on improving onboarding. If the revenue metrics underperform, you may need to work on improving upsells and cross-sells. You get the drift.
Having identified the areas for improvement, dig deeper into the data to identify root causes. For example, use funnel and path analysis to investigate why users don’t complete their onboarding flows.
Execute the growth marketing strategies
Once you identify reasons why your metrics underperform, work out marketing strategies to improve them.
For example, to boost adoption, trigger contextual in-app patterns, like tooltips or hotspots, to drive repeated feature usage. And to promote customer advocacy, encourage power users to review your product and provide testimonials.
Start by targeting the areas where the gains are the biggest. After picking the low-hanging fruit, work your way through the remaining ones to boost the figures further.
Monitor performance and continuously iterate
As you implement changes, track their impact on product performance. Tools like Userpilot allow you to create custom dashboards, so you can track all the key metrics from one place.
Don’t stop there.
Regularly collect customer feedback and conduct experiments to identify new opportunities to improve various aspects of performance.
For example, A/B and multivariate tests can help you optimize your microcopy and in-app message design to increase conversions.
Examples of growth marketing strategies to implement
When discussing the steps above, I mention a couple of effective growth marketing strategies. Time for more.
Create product-led content to attract your target audience
Product-led content educates users about topics of their interest and shows them how to use your product to tackle their pain points.
For example, in Userpilot’s blog, you can find articles covering various topics related to product analytics, like funnel analysis, and explaining how you can conduct it in Userpilot.
Such blog posts or webinars serve two purposes: they help your existing users get more out of the product. And they attract new customers.
Let me explain:
Userpilot’s articles are well SEO-optimized so there’s a big chance that users who look for answers to TOFU and MOFU questions find them. When they read the article, they also learn about our product as a potential solution to their problems.
Optimize your landing page to increase sign-ups
Your landing page is often the first touchpoint in the customer journey with your brand. A well-designed page catches user attention and most importantly, drives conversions.
Here’s how to optimize your landing page:
- Create multiple landing pages, one for every use case and user persona, highlighting relevant features and benefits.
- Make sure it loads fast. Every second users have to wait for it to load reducing conversions by 7%.
- Create a compelling heading and an appealing design. You have 8 seconds max to catch user attention.
- Include testimonials to increase conversions.
- Add videos. HubSpot data shows it can increase conversions by 86%.
- Add a powerful CTA.
Provide a freemium plan or free trial
Freemium and free trials serve one purpose: they allow users to experience product value.
By limiting access to some features (freemium) or offering them for a limited period (free trial) you show your users what the product is capable of and how it can make their lives easier.
But without satisfying all their needs. Result? Conversions to paid plans.
The principle is simple but the execution is not so.
How long should your free trial be? What features to include? Product analytics can help you get a general idea of what users value or how long it takes them to activate.
Personalize the onboarding experience to shorten TTV
Your product likely has multiple user personas, with unique goals. And they all need different features to achieve them.
One-size-fits-all onboarding doesn’t cut it.
Instead, use product analytics (funnels, paths) to identify happy paths to activation for each of them. And design personalized onboarding flows that guide users along them.
Create a checklist to activate existing customers
Sked Social tripled its free-to-paid conversions by using checklists for customer onboarding.
What makes them such a powerful onboarding tool?
They show users what exactly they have to do and in what order.
They also hinge on strong psychological principles to drive the desired behavior. Users find it difficult to resist the urge to tick off the tasks. And the further they get, the more they want to finish.
This drive is even stronger if you add a progress bar and trigger celebratory messages when users complete key tasks.
Announce new features to increase customer retention
When you develop new features, don’t hide them from your customers.
Start announcing them before they’re ready to up the ante. Use a range of channels, like in-app messages, social media, newsletters, and paid ads to let your existing users know and bring new ones.
When the feature is out, use in-app messages to drive their discovery and adoption. Don’t rely on a single announcement modal. Create sequences, triggered contextually when the user needs the feature the most.
Provide self-service support to guide users
A study by Nuance Enterprise has found that 67% of users would rather use self-service than speak to an agent to solve their problems. 40% of users who get in touch with support teams first look for self-service solutions.
It makes sense.
Self-service resources, like knowledge bases, video tutorials, and community forums are available 24/7 and allow users to access help whenever they need it.
Companies benefit too! Self-service reduces costs and support tickets.
Collect customer feedback to measure satisfaction levels
Collecting customer feedback regularly has several benefits: it allows you to track customer sentiment and understand their needs. It’s also a good source of ideas on how to improve the product.
In-app surveys have higher response rates and enable you to reach active product users, making the feedback more valuable.
You can trigger them contextually. For example, to gather insights about specific features or collect CES data after a user interaction.
Email surveys, in contrast, are often the only way to reach churned users.
Send re-engagement email marketing campaigns to inactive users
Email isn’t just for delivering surveys. You can use it to re-engage inactive users.
Here’s an excellent example of such an email from Grammarly.
To orchestrate win-back campaigns, you need a CRM that integrates with email and analytics tools. Or an analytics tool that allows you to create 3rd party integrations via webhooks.
You can use Userpilot for both. It allows you to track user engagement and segment inactive users. You can then set up a webhook to send emails from your mail client. Or sync the data with HubSpot or Salesforce and launch the campaign from there.
Launch a referral growth strategy for getting new customers
Satisfied customers are happy to spread the word about your product to their mates. It comes naturally but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t help them.
For example, by setting up a referral program that rewards users for signing up their friends or colleagues. Or encouraging them to share reviews on sites like G2.
Trigger upsell messages to increase customer lifetime value
There are two ways to boost customer lifetime value: retain customers for longer or make them spend more.
You can achieve the latter with in-app messages prompting users to upgrade to higher plans.
Best to trigger them contextually. For example, when a user hovers over or clicks on a premium feature. Or when they’re running out of credits, data, or time available in their current plan.
Just don’t overdo it and be subtle. Intrusive prompts can be pretty frustrating and spoil the user experience.
Conclusion
Growth marketing, unlike traditional marketing or growth hacking, prioritizes long-term goals. It relies on consistent user engagement across all customer journey stages to improve customer satisfaction and boost revenue.
To implement growth marketing strategies, you need a robust engagement platform, like Userpilot. Book a demo to find out how we can help you scale your product growth.
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