What Is Growth Marketing? A Beginner’s Guide

This integration of product and marketing was new at the time. Sean Ellis, then DropBox’s first marketer, coined it “growth hacking.”

Another marketer, Andrew Chen, followed on by calling growth hackers the “new VPs of marketing.” Coupled with the success of Facebook’s own growth team, many high-growth tech companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest started building and developing the discipline known as growth marketing.

In this post, you’ll learn the following:

Growth marketing is a holistic and data-driven approach to marketing. It focuses on the entire funnel (rather than just the top of the funnel) and applies the scientific method—formulating hypotheses, testing these hypotheses, then refining or eliminating them.

Originally known as growth hacking, Sean intended for the term to mean “​​creative, collaborative idea generation and problem-solving to thorny challenges.”

However, subsequent growth marketers focused too heavily on the “hacking” aspect, treating it as the “silver bullet” to solve marketing issues. The term “growth marketing” was promoted to refocus the discipline.

Traditional marketing has two main problems:

Let’s look at both in more detail.

Companies frequently structure teams by layers of the marketing funnel.

Generally speaking:

Then, each team is given a metric that measures success at each layer of the funnel. But the problem is that the teams then optimize for their metrics… at the expense of each other.

For example, a typical goal for marketing teams is the number of leads. But these leads can be low quality, which then impacts other teams (e.g., low-quality leads are harder to convert and retain).

That’s just one problem. Another problem is that these teams rarely communicate and collaborate with each other. In those scenarios, for example, product teams miss an opportunity to tap into the marketing team’s expertise on how to market new features. This silo-ing of departments is one reason why DropBox’s innovative referral program would not have happened at most companies.

Growth marketing solves this by putting the focus on the entire funnel.

Traditional marketing is hard to measure. Famous American merchant John Wanamaker once quipped, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

With hardly any idea of what worked, marketers came up with campaigns and tactics based on gut instinct and (hopefully) educated guesses. This created a desire for a rigid methodology—one that could generate experiment ideas, measure if they’re working, and redirect/eliminate resources from those that aren’t to those that are.

Growth marketing is that methodology.

According to Sean’s book, “Hacking Growth,” the core elements of growth marketing are:

Since the goal of a growth marketing team is to work on the entire funnel, the team needs more than just people with marketing skills. Sean suggests the team should comprise the following:

Data is key to the growth marketing process. It should be easy to access and analyze. Plus, it should be accurate.

Sean writes:

Growth marketing teams run through what is known as the growth hacking cycle.

Here’s how the process works:

The cycle then repeats.

There is no doubt that growth marketing works. After all, many companies have succeeded by using it. Facebook, Twitter, DropBox, and Airbnb are well-known examples.

However, observe closely, and you’ll realize most of the companies that have created successful growth marketing programs typically:

For most small businesses, growth marketing is likely out of reach. Lars Lofgren, who has built multiple growth teams himself, explains why in this post. Here’s a quick tl;dr:

If growth marketing is not right for your business, what should you do instead?

In Lars’ post, he wrote:

“A properly scaled marketing channel can 10X your business. Best case for a growth team that optimizes your funnel? 3X. I’d rather spend my time on a 10X strategy than a 3X one.”

That’s exactly what we did at Ahrefs.

Our main customer acquisition channel is content marketing. We produce content regularly on our blog and YouTube page. Over the past few years, we have built out this channel and continued investing in it.

While nothing we do here is truly unique, we did add a twist to our content marketing strategy. That is, like growth marketing, our content is full-funnel focused. Rather than having separate pieces of content tackle each stage of the marketing funnel, each piece of our content serves to:

Here’s an example. Link building is a highly searched topic. It gets around 31,000 monthly searches on Google:

It’s also impossible to do link building well without a backlink research tool—which is something we offer. So, in our link building guide, we naturally talk about our product:

This one piece of content hits all parts of the funnel. It:

How do we do this? Here’s a quick explainer of our strategy.

To rank on Google, you need to target topics that people are already searching for. You can find these topics using keyword research tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

Enter a relevant keyword, and it’ll generate thousands of ideas for you.

Then, narrow the list down using “business potential.”

This will allow you to focus on topics that drive growth, not vanity metrics like traffic.

To rank at the top of Google, you’ll need to create content that deserves to rank. Watch this video to learn how.

Simply publishing content doesn’t mean it’ll get discovered automatically. You have to give it a push and show it to people who care. Promote your content by following this checklist.

The growth marketing process can be difficult to implement. But even if you’re not doing it, elements of it are still helpful. Experimentation, tackling the full funnel—these are all ideas you can apply to your own business.

If you’re interested in learning how to execute growth marketing, I’d recommend these resources:

Did I miss out on anything about growth marketing? Let me know on Twitter.