The Comprehensive Guide to Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is the strategies, tactics, and processes explicitly used to grow a business.

That might mean acquiring more customers, driving revenue, or rapidly scaling up product usage and reach. It zeroes in on acquisitions and expansions and is highly metrics and data-oriented—so businesses can track growth metrics and optimize based on what works.

Growth marketing's main focuses are:

• Quick experimentation
• Customer understanding
• Hyper-targeted strategies

It enables companies to grow their revenue cost-effectively and scale up fast.

Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing

Growth marketing builds on traditional marketing with some key differences.

Traditional marketing typically:

• Concentrates on broader brand awareness and consideration
• Asks, “How can we get our name out there?”
• Uses wider audiences and strategies
• Doesn’t place as much importance on metrics
• Often follows a longer and more linear path.

Growth marketing, on the other hand, is extremely metrics-driven. It

• Focuses on gaining customers and expanding the business
• Asks, “How can we get more customers and revenue?”
• Uses a targeted, custom-built approach with direct messaging
• Is data-driven and metrics-obsessed
• Involves rapid iteration through testing and optimization.

In short, traditional marketing is more concerned with brand building, while growth marketing aims to scale revenue with more targeted actions.

Both complement each other but have diverging priorities and require different mindsets. Businesses that combine the two find themselves in a stronger market position than those that don’t. s.

Growth marketing vs. demand generation

Demand generation is part of growth marketing, feeding the top of the larger strategy.

It focuses on identifying, attracting, and nurturing leads early in the purchase funnel to pique interest and heighten intents. Once hooked, these potential customers are passed on to sales teams so they can close them.

Businesses that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-qualified leads, which results in a 33% lower cost, highlighting the importance of demand generation in growth marketing.

Most growth marketing strategies use some demand-generation tactics, such as

• Content marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Paid search
• Webinars
• Paid social advertising

Demand generation’s scope typically stops when leads have made it through the first stage of the funnel. After teams are finished “initiating” and “cultivating,” growth marketers can work on converting prospects into paying customers and expanding the business—the ultimate goal.

Experimentation and evolution are the name of the game when it comes to growth.

Successful growth marketers often work flexibly rather than following rigid rules. They use testing and prioritization to guide their choices, doubling down on what moves the needle, pausing what doesn’t, and scaling the winners.

With that in mind, here are some core growth marketing strategies worth incorporating.

Conduct A/B testing

A/B (or split) testing enables you to run experiments showing one group of users version “A” of something and another group version “B” to see which performs better.

You should do this continuously across your messaging, offers, email subject lines, web pages, ad variants, and other elements influencing growth. Implementing the higher-converting versions helps you improve your copy and optimize user experiences over time.

However, only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates, so this strategy is still massively underused.

Create full-funnel content marketing

Content marketing fuels so many growth engines. Mapping out a content strategy to attract and convert at every funnel stage is incredibly powerful.

• Top-of-funnel (TOFU) blog posts and guides help drive organic traffic.
• Middle-of-funnel (MOFU) webinars and tools aim to capture leads.
• Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) case studies and demo videos focus on sealing the deal and converting paying customers.

Wherever in the process it’s placed, content should educate, excite, and expedite buying decisions.

Build your community

Nothing drives growth like a passionate community. Building forums, groups, and social spaces for customers to connect powers word-of-mouth marketing.

Loyal brand advocates and fans will organically amplify your brand’s reach and pull in like-minded prospects.

After all, growing a thriving community requires consistently delivering value, recognizing your members, and encouraging the sharing of ideas.

Invest in SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cornerstone of any solid growth strategy, with 69% of marketers investing in SEO activities.

Most people discover new brands through Google and other search engines. If you aren’t visible for top queries, you don’t exist in your prospects' minds.

Driving organic rankings for your target keywords through technical optimization, content creation, and link building is foundational.

Offer referral programs

Referrals from existing customers are among the most effective conversion channels.

Creating ambassador programs, customer rewards, and incentives to promote products can be hugely influential—especially when woven into the product experience and user journeys.

Audiences are far more likely to listen to a genuine, satisfied customer, no matter how engaging your other marketing is. In fact, over 81% of consumers trust the advice of their family and friends over businesses, with referral programs playing a big part.

Analyze customer feedback

Understanding how people use and perceive your product is invaluable for growth teams.

You might achieve this by:

• Seeking out ratings or reviews
• Interviewing users
• Surveying customers
• Analyzing support tickets
• Monitoring social media conversations.

Finding and fixing pain points to better match your users’ needs encourages retention and organic referrals.

Review your customer lifecycle

Mapping each customer touchpoint from initial discovery to onboarding to repeat purchases can be hugely revealing. Growth marketers often scrutinize each step to spot friction points and moments of delight.

How can journeys be smoothed to convert more prospects, speed up onboarding, create “aha moments,” and foster loyalty? Refining customer journeys over time to address these is vital.

Experiment with data

“Test and scale” is one of the core mantras of growth. It is crucial to use data and analytics to experiment with messaging, pricing, features, partnerships, channels, and creatives.

Growth marketers use various analytics tools to uncover trends and opportunities. They use intent data to engage high-propensity prospects and optimize their marketing spend.

After all, the better you measure, the faster you’ll grow.

Growth marketers live and breathe data. They’re obsessed with tracking key quantitative metrics to measure impact and optimize their efforts.

Here are some of the most important numbers to watch.

Revenue

This is the total revenue (or sometimes “sales revenue”) generated over a given time, most commonly monthly, quarterly, and annually. All growth strategies aim to drive sustainable, long-term revenue growth.

Revenue trends offer a top-level view of whether a company is growing.

It’s helpful to break revenue into meaningful categories, such as revenue by product line, customer cohort, geography, sales rep, and channel sources. This lets you explore which areas drive overall gains or declines to optimize your investment and strategy.

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

For subscription businesses, monthly recurring revenue indicates how much predictable revenue is generated each month through ongoing customer payments.

Tracking net MRR growth (accounting for churn) helps show your company's trajectory and the pacing of long-term expansion. Comparing MMR to your monthly targets indicates if growth is on track.

Companies also examine MRR changes to spot potential broader business issues. For example, a sudden dip in MRR could signal problems with acquiring customers that month.

Yearly recurring revenue (YRR)

Similar to MRR, yearly recurring revenue specifies how much annual income is locked in annually through subscriptions. It’s another vital benchmark for subscription businesses.

Increases in YRR can signpost business momentum and efficient scaling. It also helps you forecast further into the future.

Comparing your YRR between new customers and existing expansions lets you see where to focus your revenue strategies.

Revenue churn

The revenue lost each month due to cancellations or downgrading contracts is called revenue churn.

Keeping churn rates low promotes growth, as your expansion no longer needs to offset customers leaving.

Analyzing revenue churn cohorts (grouping similar customers with shared traits) helps you find the sources of your churn. From here, customer success teams can develop retention tactics to save at-risk accounts.

Lifetime value (LTV)

LTV estimates a customer's future value based on a predictive analysis of their projected engagement with your company. This includes the value of their purchases and how often they buy.

The higher the LTV, the more you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers. Cohort-level LTV analysis identifies the best customer profiles to target, while changes in LTV metrics help you see shifts in user tendencies or happiness.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

This is the average cost of acquiring a new customer. It covers sales, marketing programs, referrals, promotions, and other expenses associated with acquiring customers.

Analyzing CAC across different lead sources and campaigns helps reveal the most efficient growth drivers. Combined with LTV data, it also pinpoints the highest ROI channels worthy of significant investment. Lowering CAC can lead to success for startups or new businesses.

Conversion rates

A conversion rate is the percentage of prospects who take desired actions throughout the customer journey or sales funnel.

Typical conversion funnel stages are

• Website visitors to leads (i.e., email sign-ups)
• Leads to free trial starts
• Trials to first sales
• Customers to repeat purchasers.

Each stage’s conversion rate measures how well you influence buyers to progress to an ultimate revenue or loyalty metric—like a happy customer who regularly shares their referral code.

Micro-conversion rates might track minor actions like downloads to see how effective your content or messaging is.

With these numbers in mind, you can develop a conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan—74% of these programs lead to increased sales.

Activation rate

For SaaS and digital products, the activation rate is the percentage of customers who successfully onboard and start actively using the product after signing up. High activation prevents sign-up churn before users fully realize the value of your product.

Breaking down your activation rate by acquisition source and onboarding journey helps uncover drop-off points. Site onboarding tours and in-app messaging can then work to smooth the activation experience. Premium support packages are also good for nurturing VIP activations if you have ideal or high-value buyers.

Retention rate

The customer retention rate is the percentage of customers who still regularly use your product after a set period, like 60 days, six months, or a year after purchase.

Identifying users who might disengage (like cancel their subscriptions or downgrade plans) enables your customer success team to step in and work their magic—a retention intervention strategy. Features like in-app surveys can also reveal why your users churn.

Amplitude is one of the most powerful tools in the growth marketer’s analytics stack.

It delivers deep, granular insights into user behavior, empowering more intelligent prioritization, testing, and resource allocation that eventually scale growth.

• Behavioral graphs visualize usage trends, enabling you to understand the segments driving changes.

• Funnel and retention analysis shows where users struggle or churn, highlighting areas for optimization.

• Cohort tables benchmark metrics over time to expose valuable opportunities.

• Analyze high-value customers through a single dashboard. See their traits and behaviors to create targeted segments for more decisive campaigns.

• Integrate with data warehouses, connecting product engagement to business outcomes, like revenue.

• Keep your teams on top of issues that threaten growth, thanks to automated alerts. Receive notifications on unusual changes so you can respond quickly.

Ready to understand your users and accelerate your key metrics? Contact Amplitude today to see how we can help.