3 reasons why the most important tool for a growth marketer is the right attitude 

If we consider growth marketing to be a silver bullet that instantly turns a company’s sales into growth, halves CPA and doubles ROAS, we have already failed and wasted resources. Dagmar’s Digital Planner Mikko Salonurmi believes that even though growth marketing is done in spurts, the attitude towards doing things should be kept in a bird’s eye view. Learn why. 

Growth marketing refers to a marketing technique that focuses on achieving and accelerating a company’s growth through new customer acquisition, adding value and increasing loyalty. This can be done through various marketing strategies such as social media advertising, email marketing, targeted content, website development, and direct sales events. The goal is to create lasting customer relationships and achieve long-term growth in the company’s business. 
This definition was created using ChatGPT. 

When reading blogs, talking to customers and arguing at work, it is easy to notice how differently we approach growth marketing. Some think of it as testing different audiences and creatives on Meta, others start their growth marketing project with a week-long Brand Purpose workshop. 

When reading blogs, talking to customers and arguing at work, it is easy to notice how differently we approach growth marketing. Some think of it as testing different audiences and creatives on Meta, others start their growth marketing project with a week-long Brand Purpose workshop. 

Both can be the right strategies for doing growth marketing, depending on the company’s situation and readiness. Brand Purpose helps companies define a unique way to talk about themselves that stands out from the competition, while Meta’s A/B tests help ensure that new marketing messages work. 

(By the way, Simon Sinek‘s TedTalk on the importance of brand purpose is a classic worth checking out if you’re not already familiar with it.) 

If I had to define growth marketing in one sentence, I would summarize it like this:

Here are the top reasons why growth marketing should be seen as a long-term strategic change: 

1. The beauty of failure and continuous learning 

Growth marketing lore includes: A story about Hotmail using every email sent with Hotmail as its free marketing and customer acquisition channel—just adding a signature to the end of every email sent

When reading cases like this, it’s easy to think that I only need one brilliant idea. However, the core of growth marketing is not a single gimmick, but continuous learning and accumulating failures. The goal is to throw a huge amount of small baits (tests) into the sea (customer journey) and see which ones work. Gather information and increase understanding of failed tests, scale and delve into positive outcomes. 

Let’s say 95% of tests fail, but the remaining 5% of tests build the desired growth. The mantra of Growth Hackers has become the phrase:

When you internalize this, isn’t it wonderful when you encourage failure at work? 

2. Long-term benefits with short spurts 

Growth marketing isn’t just successful when it hits a golden idea like the Hotmail case. It is also a process of its own to increase one’s own understanding and develop marketing measures through continuous improvements. A bit like James Clear has introduced The Power of Tiny Gains graph to illustrate a person’s personal growth. 

Take, for example, digital advertising tests, which are usually easy, short and quick to implement. They can be used to collect information on, for example, the impact of two creative solutions on the other A of the AAARRR funnel. Simply build your own, separate A/B test on Meta’s platform and track the impact on your key metrics. 

Here’s how short-term tests can improve long-term marketing performance: 

1. Tests are built into their own aquarium so that they do not affect continuous advertising or constant advertising does not distort the results 

2. the results are analysed and reported and transferred to the Learnings Archive 

3. Successful tests are scaled and/or integrated into continuous marketing 

4. Continue testing 

3. Good groundwork will be praised many times later

The concepts of continuous learning and testing are simple and easy to understand. However, they require, especially in the early stages, their own efforts: creating their own processes and answering the diverse questions of the organization. 

1. Do we have enough information about who we are, who our customers are, and what our USP is for our customers? Return to Sinek’s Brand Purpose video 

2. Since growth marketing involves the entire AAARRR customer journey, do we already have good ways to exchange information between marketing, customer service and product development, for example? In growth marketing, it is recommended to transform a marketing unit into a hub that processes data from all other units, looking for and finding opportunities to create added value for the customer. 

3. How do we define goals and monitor results? Testing is meaningless if goals are not set, metrics are not defined, results are not analyzed, and data is not collected. It takes your own work, for example, to build your own research and reporting tables. 

4. How is information about tests shared within the organization and how are successful tests implemented? 

All this ties up resources at first, but if, for example, the framework for doing things is not defined at the beginning, a puzzle may soon fall into your lap, the pieces of which will be difficult to find a place for as the amount of data increases. 

WRITTEN BY

Mikko Salonurmi

Senior Digital Planner

mikko.salonurmi@dagmar.fi

+358505321714

Mikko on sisältömarkkinoinnin puolelta Digital Planneriksi loikannut markkinoija, jonka sydän sykkii uuden oppimiselle, hypoteeseille ja testaamiselle.