MIA #05: Everything You Need to Know About Growth Marketing
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I've found that trends like "Growth" and "Growth Marketing" can be quite confusing. So, I decided to give a history lesson to clear up the confusion.
Growth marketing originated in the United States. It emerged in the early 21st century as a response to the challenges faced by startups in achieving rapid growth with limited resources.
Here’s a timeline highlighting key companies and individuals associated with the development and popularization of growth marketing:
The early 2000s
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The 2010s
The 2020s to date
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Getting Started with Growth Marketing
It is easier to grasp Growth Marketing by moving beyond theory and putting it into action (that’s Marketing In Action).
I put together a Notion resource to help you get started with this right away. You can streamline your growth team's productivity and collaboration with strategy, projects, tasks, docs, sprints, and experiments all in one.
See how it works in this video:
I’ve published the link to the Notion templates within this Resource Library.
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And a Few Concepts:
Growth marketing combines the principles of traditional marketing with a focus on rapid experimentation across various channels and product features. It's data-driven, aiming to find the most efficient ways to drive revenue growth.
A professional who focuses on driving growth for a business by using creativity, data analysis, and experimentation to rapidly acquire and retain customers.
A comprehensive plan that outlines the channels, levers, and tactics used to achieve specific growth objectives (not limited to customer acquisition), such as brand awareness, customer acquisition, retention, revenue growth, referrals, market expansion, and product engagement.
Growth Motions
Growth motions are a blend of channels and tactics used to drive continuous and sustainable growth across the entire customer journey—not just for initial acquisition. Growth motions guide the deployment of specific growth tactics across various stages, including activation, retention, and expansion. Examples include:
Product-Led Growth Motion: Utilizing product features to drive user engagement, conversion, and retention, allowing the product to be a central growth driver with tactics like freemium/free trial, self-serve onboarding, in-app messaging, user gamification, referral programs, and usage-based upselling.
Sales-Led Growth Motion: This centers growth efforts on a dedicated sales team that builds personalized relationships with potential customers, guiding them through the sales journey and facilitating high-touch conversions. Key tactics include one-on-one sales calls, prospecting and qualification, live demos and consultations, solution-based proposals, negotiation and custom contracts, high-value onboarding support.
Marketing-Led Growth Motion: Leveraging marketing channels and tactics to continuously engage and nurture customers across the lifecycle, creating a steady flow of value-driven engagement and brand loyalty. MLG tactics include content marketing, lifecycle marketing, SEO, paid ads, email marketing, social media marketing, community marketing and events marketing.
Inbound Growth Motion: As a subset of MLG, Inbound Motion focuses on attracting and engaging customers organically through non-intrusive, value-focused channels like SEO, search PPC, content, organic social media, community engagement, webinars & podcasts.
Community-Led Growth Motion: As a subset of MLG, Community Motion focuses on cultivating a community of users and advocates who actively engage with the brand and each other, driving organic growth through shared knowledge, support, and brand advocacy. Key tactics include online forums or community platforms, ambassador and influencer programs, user groups and meetups, community-driven events and workshops, community-generated content, customer success stories.
Outbound Growth Motion: Proactively reaching potential customers through direct outreach and targeted campaigns, with personalized and high-touch methods to drive awareness and conversions. Key tactics include Account-Based Marketing (ABM), targeted cold email outreach, sales calls, and paid ads focused on prospecting and retargeting high-value segments.
Ecosystem-Led Growth Motion: Leveraging partnerships, integrations, and alliances with other products or services to expand reach and acquire new customers. This involves key tactics like co-marketing, marketplace listings, and affiliate programs.
Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
A GTM strategy is a plan for introducing a product to market, defining the target audience, positioning, messaging, and channels to drive customer acquisition and early growth. It aligns sales, marketing, and customer engagement for successful market entry and adoption.
GTM strategy is a subset of a growth strategy since GTM strategy focuses on initial market entry and early-stage customer acquisition, which are part of broader growth objectives.
Your GTM motion is the blend of channels and tactics you can adopt to drive a GTM strategy, e.g. Product-Led GTM, Sales-Led GTM, and Hybrid GTM.
Growth channels encompass all avenues for reaching, engaging, and converting users across the entire customer lifecycle, not limited to initial awareness or acquisition. Examples include product features (in-app messaging), lifecycle emails, communities, SEO, customer referrals, upselling opportunities within the product, and partnerships.
Inbound Growth Channels: Focused on attracting customers organically through methods such as content marketing, SEO, Search PPC, and building community and customer advocacy.
Outbound Growth Channels: Focused on actively reaching out to potential users through direct outreach, such as sales outreach, cold email campaigns, or strategic partnerships to drive engagement and conversions.
Marketing Channels
Marketing channels are specific to creating awareness, generating demand, and attracting potential customers to the brand or product. They are primarily used in the acquisition phase to reach a broader audience, establish brand presence, and drive interest that leads to customer onboarding or purchases.
Inbound Marketing Channels: Channels that attract users naturally through content marketing, SEO, Search PPC, PR, social media, webinars, and podcasts.
Outbound Marketing Channels: Channels that push messages directly to target audiences, such as paid ads, email outreach, events, and targeted campaigns.
Growth Levers
Levers are the key areas that can be leveraged to drive growth. e.g. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue.
Growth Project
An initiative aimed at achieving a specific growth objective, involving multiple tasks and tactics, such as launching a new marketing campaign or developing a referral program.
Growth Task
An individual action or step taken to execute a growth tactic or project, such as writing a blog post, setting up an email sequence, or analyzing campaign performance.
Growth Sprint
Weekly or bi-weekly 30-60 minute reviews to review active projects/experiments, learnings, new growth ideas, and assignments.
TL: DR
Get a PDF summary of this article here.
Many trend jumpers and even practitioners don't fully understand what “Growth Marketing” is.
Early 2000s: PayPal, Facebook, and LinkedIn used innovative tactics like referral programs & network effects to grow fast.
2007: Sean Ellis coined "growth hacking" – rapid experimentation to find the best growth methods.
2010s: GrowthHackers.com, books & tools popularize growth marketing strategies.
2020s: Notion, Clubhouse, and Substack show how community & content fuel growth.
Was this helpful? Hit that ❤️ and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Want to see more of this content? Restack this post (if you're on Substack) and share it with your friends!
You might find these interesting:
How to build a Growth Process & Machine – A practical guide to building a successful growth machine that is scalable, predictable, and repeatable.
How to build a Growth Team – A practical guide to structuring your growth team, and executing Product Led, Sales Led or Hybrid GTM motions.
How to hire a Growth Marketer – A practical guide to finding and hiring growth generalists, channel specialists, and ensuring acquisition channels are delivering performance.
Product & Partner Recommendations:
James Praise – I partner with founders and marketing teams of Product-Led startups to drive long-term growth using Performance Marketing, SEO, Product Marketing, and Lifecycle Marketing, from acquisition to retention to revenue.
Clay – Clay combines 50+ data providers, real-time scraping, AI, and outbound workflows, so you can send automated, 1-1 personalized campaigns (and book more meetings than your sales team).
Testimonial – Testimonial makes it easy to collect text and video testimonials from your customers in minutes, with no need for a developer or website hosting.
Synthesia – Synthesia is the #1 AI Video Creation Platform that enables you to create professional videos without mics, cameras, actors, or studios.
Riverside – Riverside makes it easy to record remote podcasts and video interviews that look and sound like they were recorded in a million-dollar studio.
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