Growing your business doesn’t just mean running one-off campaigns on a hunch and hoping for them to work. It also doesn’t mean focusing on just acquiring customers.
The most successful companies take a systematic approach and use data-driven insights to optimize campaigns and grow their brand. This is what growth marketing refers to.
In this guide, we will further explore what is growth marketing, and take a look at the trends and strategies that the world’s top brands are using to leverage their growth marketing and drive business.
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a data-driven approach that uses experimentation, automation, and analytics to optimize every stage of the customer journey, driving engagement, retention, and sustainable business growth.
Importance of growth marketing in SaaS
SaaS companies are at the forefront when it comes to growth marketing. Most SaaS companies actively deploy regular experiments to refine user acquisition, activation, and retention strategies.
This is important because SaaS companies have a recurring revenue model, which puts a lot of emphasis on customer retention. It also allows SaaS companies to optimize their processes and reduce customer acquisition cost and increase revenue.
Growth marketing vs traditional marketing
While traditional marketing majorly focuses on TOFU activities like brand awareness and customer acquisition, growth marketing focuses on the entire customer journey.
Additionally, traditional marketing strategies and campaigns are usually pre-planned with fewer adjustments. Even the success of the campaigns is measured at the end of the campaign. On the other hand, growth marketing leverages continuous experimentation and quick optimization to refine strategies, hence leading to more adjustments as compared to traditional marketing.
Elements of a successful growth marketing strategy
There are a few basic foundations or elements of a growth marketing strategy. Let’s go through them:
Experimentation
Growth marketing thrives on constant experimentation and iteration. A/B testing, for instance, allows marketers to experiment with different versions of elements like headlines, CTAs, email subject lines, and even pricing models to identify the most effective one.
Personalization
Modern consumers expect hyper-personalized experiences. Companies like Spotify and Netflix excel at this by curating recommendations based on user behavior. Growth marketers should tailor messaging based on customer lifecycle stages, customer behavior and user preferences.
Cross-team alignment
Growth marketing focuses on the alignment of marketing, sales and product teams. It defines shared goals that allow teams to work together to benefit the entire company.
Full-funnel approach
Growth marketing covers every stage of the customer journey—from awareness and acquisition to activation, retention, and referral. This holistic view ensures that no part of the funnel is neglected.
When should you adopt a growth marketing strategy?
Now that you have a much clearer idea about what growth marketing is, let’s talk about when it’s a good idea to adopt it. You can adopt growth marketing strategy when:
- You’re entering a new market and need to efficiently acquire customers.
- Your traditional marketing efforts are plateauing, and you need a more data-driven approach.
- You’re launching a new product or feature and want to optimize adoption.
- You want to improve retention and customer lifetime value to drive sustainable revenue growth.
Emerging trends in growth marketing
- Automation and AI: From predictive analytics to AI-powered personalization, automation is helping companies scale their marketing efforts efficiently.
- Community-led growth: Brands are investing in building engaged communities. Notion’s ambassador program and Figma’s design community are prime examples.
- Shift from third party cookies: With increasing privacy regulations, brands must adapt to cookieless marketing by leveraging first-party and zero-party data.
- Contextual advertising: Instead of hyper-targeted ads based on user tracking, brands are shifting towards context-based advertising, which is more privacy-friendly.
How to choose the right growth marketing strategy?
When selecting the right growth marketing strategy for your business, there are several factors to consider:
- Objective: Be clear about your objective. Is it acquisition, retention, or conversion.
- Scalability: Understand if your strategy will be sustainable to support future or long-term growth.
- Your current growth stage: Different growth strategies work best for different business stages like startup, enterprise, etc.
- Channels: Channels play an important role in reaching your audience. You would normally want to have a good mix of high-impact marketing channels that work for you.
- Budget & ROI – What is the expected return on investment you are expecting? How cost-effective is the strategy when compared to the value it proposes to deliver?
How to build a growth marketing strategy
A structured approach to growth marketing involves optimizing key stages of the customer journey. Unlike traditional marketing, which often focuses solely on top-of-the-funnel acquisition, growth marketing optimizes each stage of the customer journey.
Here is a 5 step framework to build your growth marketing strategy:
Awareness
At the awareness stage, your goal is to introduce your brand to potential customers and create a strong first impression. This involves leveraging various marketing channels like SEO, content marketing, paid advertisements, social media campaigns, and PR efforts to increase visibility.
A well-defined brand positioning and messaging strategy help attract the right audience. Using data-driven insights, you can identify where your audience spends time online and craft targeted campaigns that align with their interests.
Additionally, storytelling and educational content play a crucial role in capturing user interest, ensuring that your brand remains memorable and engaging.
Activation
Once potential customers become aware of your brand, the next step is to ensure a smooth and engaging onboarding experience and keep the user engaged or activated.
Activation is about turning visitors into engaged users by guiding them toward meaningful interactions with your product or service. This could involve signing up for a free trial, creating an account, or completing an initial setup.
A frictionless user experience, intuitive product design, and personalized communication (such as welcome emails and product walkthroughs) can significantly improve activation rates. Offering immediate value and addressing potential pain points early in the journey helps build confidence and encourages users to continue engaging with your brand.
Retention
Retaining customers is one of the most critical aspects of sustainable growth. Retention strategies focus on keeping users engaged and ensuring they continue to derive value from your product or service. T
his can be achieved through personalized communication, loyalty programs, in-app messaging, and proactive customer support. Regular engagement through email newsletters, push notifications, and community-building initiatives can keep users invested in your brand.
Additionally, analyzing user behavior and addressing potential churn triggers—such as complicated user interfaces, lack of customer support, or missing features—helps improve long-term retention. The goal is to create a habit-forming product that keeps users returning without needing continuous external incentives.
Revenue
At this stage, the focus shifts to monetization and maximizing customer lifetime value (LTV). Revenue growth can be driven through various strategies, such as upselling, cross-selling, and offering premium features or subscription plans.
Pricing models should be aligned with customer needs and purchasing power, ensuring a balance between affordability and business profitability. Implementing data-driven pricing strategies, optimizing conversion funnels, and reducing friction in the purchasing process are crucial for increasing revenue.
Additionally, a well-defined customer success strategy can help users extract more value from the product, making them more willing to invest in long-term plans or higher-tier offerings.
Referral
A successful growth marketing strategy leverages existing customers to drive new user acquisition through referrals. The referral stage involves encouraging satisfied customers to share your brand with their network, turning them into brand advocates.
This can be done through referral programs, incentives, and exclusive rewards. A strong product experience naturally leads to organic word-of-mouth marketing, but structured programs—such as discount-based referrals, loyalty bonuses, or ambassador programs—can amplify this effect.
By making the referral process seamless and rewarding, you can create a self-sustaining growth loop where loyal customers continuously bring in new users, reducing acquisition costs while increasing brand credibility.
Metrics to track in growth marketing
In growth marketing, you need to track the right metrics to ensure complete optimization of strategies. Metrics include:
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Customer acquisition cost (CAC) | The total cost of acquiring a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses. |
| Customer lifetime value (LTV) | The total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their relationship with your business. |
| Conversion rate | The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g., sign-up, purchase). |
| Churn Rate | The percentage of customers who stop using your product over a given period. |
| Retention rate | The percentage of customers who continue using your product after a specific time. |
| Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) | Predictable revenue generated from subscriptions each month. |
| Annual recurring revenue (ARR) | Predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions. |
| Activation rate | The percentage of users who reach a key milestone that indicates they see value in the product. |
| Net promoter score (NPS) | Measures customer satisfaction and loyalty based on their likelihood to recommend your product. |
| Lead-to-customer conversion rate | The percentage of leads that convert into paying customers. |
| Revenue growth rate | The rate at which your company's revenue is increasing over time. |
| Customer engagement score | A composite metric that tracks user interactions with your product (e.g., logins, feature usage). |
| Virality coefficient | Measures how many new users are acquired through referrals from existing users. |
| Average revenue per use (ARPU) | The average revenue generated per user over a specific period. |
| Time to value (TTV) | The time it takes for a new user to experience the core value of your product. |
| Cost per lead (CPL) | The cost incurred to generate a new lead through marketing efforts. |
| Return on ad spend (ROAS) | The revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. |
| Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) | Leads that have shown interest and engagement but are not yet sales-ready. |
| Sales qualified leads (SQLs) | Leads that are ready for direct sales engagement based on their behavior and interest. |
How leading companies leverage growth marketing in 2025
Growth marketing has gone beyond being an experiment to a necessity for businesses that are eager to scale. Here are some inspiring examples of growth marketing from some leading brands:
Airbnb
Airbnb built a scalable referral program and optimized SEO to drive growth. The company’s growth strategy was a masterclass in combining product-led and referral-driven marketing.
Initially, limited brand recognition made the company struggle with user acquisition. To solve this, Airbnb implemented a referral program that incentivized users to receive travel credits, thereby initiating organic word-of-mouth growth. This program quickly paved the way for global expansion as users all over the world started becoming brand advocates. Airbnb also leveraged the use of SEO, which allowed its properties to rank high on Google.
Notion
Notion fostered brand evangelism through community-driven growth.
Notion has been a pioneer in the world of community-led marketing. Since its early days, the company focused on organically promoting its product through ambassador programs. This gave users a chance to get familiar with the product, hosting workshops and sharing their workflows, turning them into brand evangelists. The company quickly achieved exponential growth with minimal reliance on paid marketing by tapping into this strategy.
HubSpot
HubSpot drove long-term retention through freemium models and content-led strategies. HubSpot established itself as a leader by publishing content consistently. It also provided a freemium model to its users. This allowed users to access essential CRM features, which offered premium upgrades for advanced capabilities.
This gave users the chance to try the product before committing to it, thereby reducing reliance on user acquisition through paid marketing and instead focusing on nurturing leads.
Takeaways
Growth marketing is an essential, holistic approach to driving sustainable business growth. Now you know the important components of growth marketing and you can even use the framework we’ve explored in this article to create a growth marketing strategy for yourself. Don’t forget to take inspiration from the real-world examples we’ve discussed in the article to make the most of your resources and efforts.
