
## Boost Your Business With INK's Brainstorm Growth Marketing Ideas Tool

<img alt="INK's Brainstorm Growth Marketing Ideas Tool" src="/brainstorm-growth-marketing-ideas-tool/growth-marketing.webp" width="100%" height="100%" />

_INK&#39;s Brainstorm Growth Marketing Ideas Tool_

**Growth marketing** is a great long-term success strategy. It's like traditional marketing — only better. **Growth marketing experts** hone **sales channels** from top to bottom — and now you can do the same with **INK**'s **Brainstorm** **Growth Marketing Ideas Tool**.

**INK**'s **Brainstorm Growth Marketing Ideas Tool** can help you **generate great growth marketing ideas** that'll take your business to the next level.

**Main Growth Marketing Takeaways:**

- An optimized form of marketing
- **Growth marketing** gurus leverage data to optimize sales funnels
- A growth marketing channel is an enhanced regular marketing channel
- **Growth marketing** is more popular than ever because it works
- Marketing expert **Sean Ellis** came up with the phrase "**growth marketing**" in 2010
- **Growth marketing strategies** include **A/B testing**, **consumer life cycle analysis**, and **cross-channel marketing**
- Loyalty programs, onboarding programs, and referral programs are all examples of **growth marketing** in action
- You can use **Brian Balfour**'s T-shaped framework to hone your growth marketing skills
- **INK**'s **Brainstorm** **Growth Marketing Ideas Tool** can help you come up with marketing ideas in minutes

Pain points, pivoting, tech stack, traction — jargon abounds in Startupville. Today we'll focus on just one buzz phrase: **growth marketing**. **Growth marketing** can help you take your business from blah to hurrah in months, not years.

But what is **growth marketing**, and how can you tap into the hottest GM trends? We'll answer those questions — and a few others — in this strategy-driven article. Ready? Let's get rolling.

## What Is Growth Marketing?

<img alt="What Is Growth Marketing?" src="/brainstorm-growth-marketing-ideas-tool/what-is-growth-marketing.webp" width="100%" height="100%" />

_What Is Growth Marketing?_

In a nutshell, **growth marketing** is **traditional marketing** — but upgraded. It's regular **digital marketing** Mk II. Regular marketing strategies are pick 'n' mix: You choose your favorite channels and hope for the best. **Growth marketing** is much more holistic.

Methods differ from company to company, but all growth marketing strategies have one thing in common: They're based on deep understanding. Growth marketers use A/B split testing, cross-channel marketing, and customer lifestyle analysis to formulate an attack plan.

Like other types of marketing, **growth marketing** needs periodic revision. Every six months or so — more frequently in fast-moving sectors — marketers reexamine consumer data and trends to make sure they're on the right track.

Growth marketers take entire sales funnels into account and develop personalized marketing campaigns for their employers or clients. Custom **growth marketing** aims to:

- Expand the company's customer or user base
- Promote audience engagement
- Enhance the lifetime value of each customer or user
- Create a solid retention strategy
- Boost profits

Forget about overnight success — that's not what **growth marketing** is about. Instead, **growth marketing** aims to improve UX to enhance brand value and build long-term loyalty. We'll explore specific growth marketing tactics a little later.

**Growth marketing** isn't the same as **growth hacking**. Growth hacking is the get-rich-quick equivalent of **growth marketing** — you get quick results, but they don't stick. In contrast, **growth marketing tactics** aim for evergreen results. Make **growth marketing** your go-to strategy, and your sales funnel will change for the better in the long term.

## Growth Marketing History

Lingo doesn't always have a clear origin — but we _can_ trace the growth marketing family tree. Coined by startup advisor Sean Ellis in 2010, the phrase first emerged as a recruitment tool. On the hunt for a growth-centric marketing expert for his team, Ellis came up with the idiom and included it in a job ad.

Initially intended to promote quick growth, **data-driven growth marketing tactics** quickly developed. Over the next few years, commerce professionals got better at growth-specific marketing techniques, and an ever greater number of companies adopted growth marketing strategies.

## Why Is Digital Marketing Growing?

**Digital marketing** in general — and **growth marketing** in particular — are more popular than ever because growth-centered **digital marketing strategies** pay off. They're designed to improve your **sales funnel** from start to finish, so you retain more of the consumers you convert.

## What Are Some Growth Marketing Strategies?

<img alt="What Are Some Growth Marketing Strategies?" src="/brainstorm-growth-marketing-ideas-tool/business-growth-strategies.webp" width="100%" height="100%" />

_What Are Some Growth Marketing Strategies?_

**Growth marketing**, in a nutshell, is personalization at scale — and that depends on a lot of data. To build an effective multichannel **growth marketing strategy**, you need to:

- **Identify key performance indicators:** Metrics like **conversion**, **consumer acquisition**, and **retention rates** help you figure out where to start.
- **Analyze your current status:** When combined with segmentation — grouping customers by demographic or interest, for example — the KPIs above illuminate your existing customer journeys.
- **Microsegmentation:** When you have a solid understanding of each segment's customer journey, you can begin to personalize UX for every consumer.

**Personalization** — especially 1:1 personalization — is a complex process. Here are three tactics you can use to perfect your growth marketing plan.

### Cross-Channel Marketing

Up until now, you've probably used regular marketing channels — **social media**, **email**, **billboards**, **television** — to target specific consumer groups. Some marketing channels perform better than others.

**Cross-channel marketing** is a blend of digital and non-digital marketing. Carefully selected channels combine to create one overarching plan.

To create an effective cross-channel marketing plan, you need to know your customers. You need to understand how they communicate, what they want, and where they are — and then you need to meet them there.

#### What Is a Growth Marketing Channel?

**Growth marketing channels** are regular marketing channels with a difference. Like other aspects of a growth marketing campaign, growth marketing channels are data-driven. You analyze your KPIs and use the results to select and hone marketing channels.

## Split Testing

**Split testing**, also known as **A/B testing**, is a central part of **growth marketing**. You can use split testing to perfect almost any marketing channel, like so:

- **Email marketing:** You test one marketing email on one consumer group and a slightly different marketing email on another consumer group.
- **PPC ads:** You run a banner ad with a red background for a week and then make the background blue the following week.
- **Social media ads:** You run with one type of marketing copy for a month, then swap out certain words and phrases the following month.
- **Landing pages:** You use one version of your copy on one landing page and a different version of your copy on another landing.

What do these experiments do, though? They provide data. You track the click-through rate and compare one email to another or one PPC ad to another. You track conversion rates via social media ads and landing pages.

When you’re done crunching the numbers, you should know which email, ad background color, social media ad, and landing page to use.

Blue ad background better than red, huh? Well, what shade of blue? What else can you change on your landing page to increase the conversion rate? What happens to your email open rate when you tweak the subject line? Hypothetical solutions abound, so split testing never really ends.

### Consumer Life Cycle Analysis

We briefly mentioned **consumer life cycle analysis** earlier: now, let’s dive in properly. The consumer life cycle is a journey, and every customer demographic travels a little differently. In general, though, the consumer life cycle has three main stages:

- **Activation:** This is the entry point — the beginning of the sales funnel. Consumers find out about your company and get interested. You welcome them and make a good impression with introductory offers, free trials, and so forth.
- **Nurture:** This is where you build your B2B or B2C bond. After customers make purchases, you send a nurturing email series to offer early sale access or send occasional money-off coupons.
- **Reactivation:** This is where you promote re-engagement. You send an abandonment or post-purchase email series or promote a loyalty program to keep customers coming back.

Consumers bounce out of the life cycle all the time. They unsubscribe from emails and don’t make repeat purchases when you expect them to, for instance. **Growth marketing tactics** plant seeds at every stage of the consumer life cycle to maximize re-engagement. They focus primarily on the nurturing and reactivation stages to kindle customer loyalty.

## Growth Marketing Campaign Examples

<img alt="Growth Marketing Campaign Examples" src="/brainstorm-growth-marketing-ideas-tool/digital-marketing-growth.webp" width="100%" height="100%" />

_Growth Marketing Campaign Examples_

We could talk about **growth marketing tactics** all day — but we won’t. Top-of-the-funnel engagement is one key example of growth marketing in action. A strategic **content marketing plan** can help you build **brand awareness** and guide consumers into your pipeline. Here are three other types of **growth marketing**.

### Onboarding Programs

When companies leave new subscribers to fend for themselves, they miss a valuable bonding opportunity. Onboarding programs make first-time customers feel at home and encourage them to engage with your brand.

Well-planned welcome sequences improve the user experience — but onboarding programs go further than that: they also create a chance to gather **consumer data**.

Let’s use a **welcome email** series as an example of **growth marketing**\-driven onboarding. You could begin with a relatively short “welcome to the club” message with a 10% off coupon code attached. You might invite recipients to the wish list section of your site — or ask them about communication preferences — in a follow-up email.

Every time you glean a little of data, you can use that data to improve UX and drive engagement.

### Loyalty Programs

If they feel welcome and like your product, many new customers morph into established customers.

Your customers probably have many vendor choices, so they could decide to shop elsewhere in the future. The solution? **Retention programs**. The right retention strategies turn established customers into **brand-loyal customers** — and eventually, brand ambassadors (we’ll talk about that next).

**Loyalty programs** offer your existing customers an incentive to shop with you rather than with another similar company. You could create a **points program** or grant your subscribers advance access to sales or sneak product previews.

Once again, you can use data to modify your loyalty program and make it more enticing over time.

### Referral Programs

Loyal, established customers eventually become **brand ambassadors** — but only if you nurture them properly. According to a recent [**research by SurveyMonkey**](http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/11/06/1646241/0/en/SurveyMonkey-Reveals-New-Research-to-Help-Businesses-Understand-Consumer-Perceptions-on-Trust.html), 65% of consumers in the US trust recommendations from family members or friends more than celebrity endorsements (7%) or online influencer posts (12%). Those statistics are similar in other countries, too. I**n a nutshell, social proof is powerful, and referral programs** are essential.

To maximize **referral conversions**, try offering incentives. In keeping with the **growth marketing** mantra, split your customer base by demographic and offer each section a different “carrot.”

Potential incentives include X-day free software trials, money-off coupons, cashback, or free shipping. **Two-sided referral programs** — where existing subscribers and new subscribers both get something — work particularly well.

## Growth Marketing Best Practices

**Growth marketing** is the long game, rather than a quick fix. To get the most out of your **growth marketing strategy**, follow these best practices:

- **Experiment:** Try different strategies and drill down into the ones that work best.
- **Be flexible:** Explore new tactics carefully and change tack if you need to.
- **Walk away:** When strategies don't work, let them go before they consume energy.

## Are You a Budding Growth Marketer?

So you want to be a growth marketer, huh? Well, many **growth marketing** professionals use commerce expert **Brian Balfour**'s three-tier T-shaped skillset framework for inspiration.

According to Balfour, the best growth marketers build on a bedrock of base knowledge: behavior psychology, analytics, storytelling, research, and branding, for example. They continue with a marketing foundation — skills like **copywriting**, split testing, **statistics**, and **coding**.

Balfour's framework culminates in channel expertise. Growth marketers need to know all about **conversion rate optimization (CRO)**, **search engine optimization (SEO)**, **email**, **multimedia**, **advertising**, **business development**, and more.

Whether you use Balfour's T-shaped guide or not, one thing is certain. The more you know, the higher you'll fly in the **growth marketing** world.

## How To Use **INK**'s **Brainstorm** **Growth Marketing Ideas Tool**

Need growth marketing ideas in a hurry? **INK**'s **Brainstorm** **Growth Marketing Ideas Tool** is super easy to use — and it's free, too.Simply add a few lines about your business and our super smart AI-powered tool will give you tons of fresh marketing ideas for growth.

## Growth Marketing Recap

A **growth marketing strategy** provides value. It's not a quick fix — instead, **growth marketing** brings consumers on board, builds trust, and keeps existing customers coming back for more. Effective **growth marketing plans** create long-term brand loyalty: short-term marketing emergencies diminish, and your business begins to thrive.

According to [McKinsey & Company](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/marketings-holy-grail-digital-personalization-at-scale), personalized **growth marketing** strategies boost revenues up to 15% and reduce acquisition costs by up to 50%. You can brainstorm great **growth marketing ideas** in a flash with **INK**'s **Brainstorm** **Growth Marketing Ideas Tool** for free today!


What is growth marketing? Generate innovative growth marketing ideas & start building digital marketing business growth strategies fast.


Brainstorm Growth Marketing Ideas Tool
