Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing: What's the difference?
Marketing has come a long way since its Mad Men-esque heyday, when all you needed was a catchy strapline and a good spot on the side of a building.
Imagine you’re opening up a new vegetarian burger restaurant. You’re serving up some juicy plant-based patties, but you really need to let more people know about it.
So you take out an advertisement in a local newspaper. You buy some radio airtime on a regional station. Maybe you purchase a billboard in a high-traffic area near the restaurant.
Congratulations; you’re doing traditional marketing!
Traditional marketing can be very useful. But it can also be expensive. Traditional marketing has a broad reach; so essentially, you’re paying to put your ad for the Garden Grill in front of a lot of people, but how many of those people are actually your target customers
Using a growth marketing approach is often more effective because it focuses on attracting, engaging and retaining the right customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Let’s take a closer look at the differences between these two marketing strategies, and find out how growth marketing can generate impressive results for your business.
What is traditional marketing?
We’ve already touched on what traditional marketing is, but to sum it up, traditional marketing typically refers to the promotion of products or services using established, non-digital channels and methods.
Traditional marketing has been around for centuries (hence the name) and has evolved in step with technological advancements and changes to how we live, work, and consume. Over time, this approach morphed from its pre-20th-century beginnings like posters and flyers, adopting new formats like mass print, outdoor advertising, telemarketing, and audio-visual content designed to reach large, broad audiences.
Traditional marketing has played a foundational role in shaping how businesses communicate with consumers. Just think about how Times Square would look without it.
At its core, traditional marketing aims to leverage established media to create brand awareness and drive sales. Because of this focus on brand-building, traditional marketing campaigns tend to cast a wide net, aiming to appeal to a large and fairly non-specific potential customer base.
Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign is a notable example of this type of campaign. Launched in 2011, the campaign encouraged consumers to purchase ‘personalised’’ bottles of Coke with their names on them. The campaign used multiple advertising methods, including TV commercials, outdoor billboards, and point-of-sale displays, and was estimated to have boosted the company’s market share by 4%.
Another company that’s enjoyed huge success with a traditional campaign is Specsavers. Since its launch in 2002, the optician’s “Should’ve Gone to Specsavers” ads have become ingrained in British culture. Thanks to its effective and simple TV ads, clever billboards, and use of humour, no one in the UK is safe from being told where they should’ve gone every time they make a sight-based flub.
What is growth marketing?
In many ways, growth marketing is the evolution of traditional marketing. Where traditional marketing goes big, growth marketing hones in on the details, experiments, and iterates to land the best results.
Growth marketing is a data-driven strategy that considers the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage to drive sustainable growth. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing emphasises experimentation, real-time analytics, and new-fangled tactics to achieve measurable results.
It’s not just about getting your brand noticed; it’s about finding the right customers, learning what they want, and working to keep them coming back.
Growth marketing emerged in the 2010s, driven largely by the startup boom. It quickly gained popularity by offering a more structured way to hack growth—one that integrated traditional marketing principles with digital tactics and focused on long-term, scalable growth. Following the rise of advanced analytics, automation, and customer-centric strategies, growth marketing has advanced even further.
Growth marketing uses a huge range of tactics, but some of the most popular include:
Content marketing: Publishing blogs, videos, and infographics that are relevant to target customers to build engagement and trust
Email marketing: Using personalised campaigns to nurture leads and retain customers
SEO and SEM: Optimising search engine presence to drive traffic and get the brand found by its target audience
Social media marketing: Leveraging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to carry out targeted outreach
Referral and affiliate programmes: Encouraging existing customers to refer new users and advocate for the brand, often by offering incentives or commission structures
Given the approach’s spike in popularity, you’ll certainly have seen (or been targeted by) growth marketing campaigns, even if you didn't realise it.
Take Airbnb's recent "Made Possible by Hosts" campaign. This campaign made smart use of user-generated content by encouraging hosts and guests to share their unique stories, and using social media platforms, personalised email campaigns, and SEO-optimised blog posts to drive organic growth.
Another great way to do growth marketing is by offering free, useful resources to your target customers, just like HubSpot did in 2021. The company’s "Free CRM" campaign gave its audience access to free CRM tools, promoted through targeted social media ads, content marketing, and email campaigns. HubSpot then used data analytics to track user engagement and conversion rates, helping it create even better strategies in the future.
5 key differences between growth marketing and traditional marketing
Still think we’re splitting hairs? Let’s drill down into the five key differences between growth marketing and traditional marketing:
| Traditional marketing | Growth marketing | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus and scope | Focuses on brand awareness and customer acquisition, aiming to attract new customers through broad-reaching campaigns | Focuses on the entire customer journey (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral) and aims to optimise each stage to drive sustainable growth |
| Data usage | Uses data but often relies more on intuition and experience, with decisions based on historical data and long-term trends rather than real-time analytics | Relies heavily on data and analytics to inform decisions, using metrics and KPIs to track performance, understand customer behaviour, and iterate quickly based on feedback |
| Creativity and agility | Typically involves longer campaign cycles, often planned and executed over extended periods with limited scope for real-time changes | Emphasises rapid experimentation and testing to uncover more effective strategies, make quick adjustments, and constantly improve campaigns |
| Channels and tactics | Centred on more traditional channels that are established and less experimental, such as print media, TV, radio, and outdoor advertising | Uses a wide range of channels, including digital platforms, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and social media, and involves creative and unconventional tactics like viral campaigns, influencer partnerships, and community-building |
| Success measuring | Success is often measured by broader metrics such as brand awareness, reach, and impressions, with sales and revenue more difficult to directly attribute | Success is measured through specific, actionable metrics such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), churn rate, conversion rates, and other performance indicators that impact growth |
Why adopt a growth marketing approach?
So now that you know what growth marketing is, you might be wondering if now is the right time to invest in shaking up your marketing strategy.
While ‘everyone else is doing it’ is rarely a great justification for doing anything (think of all the bad haircuts you’ve gotten…), in this case, competitiveness does factor in.
Growth marketing has exploded in popularity because of its holistic and data-driven approach to business growth. Its combination of traditional, digital, and innovative data-driven marketing tactics makes it a powerful and effective approach—one far more suited to today’s fast-moving, individualistic, and data-heavy consumer market.
External factors like evolving consumer behaviour, increased competition, technological advancements, economic pressures, and the power of social media are continuing to push brands to elevate their marketing strategies. And as more businesses adopt this approach and make full use of the tools and methods available to them, brands that stick to relying on traditional methods will fall behind.
5 benefits of growth marketing
But keeping up with the Joneses isn’t the only reason to adopt a growth marketing approach. The strategy offers several truly impactful benefits that can go a long way towards helping companies attract and retain clients, tighten up their operations, and drive consistent, long-term growth.
More effective client acquisition
Growth marketing uses data-driven strategies to identify and target potential clients. No more guessing!
By taking advantage of advanced analytics, brands can pinpoint high-value prospects, personalise their marketing messages to resonate with specific client needs, and precisely target qualified leads through digital channels like LinkedIn, Google Ads, and email marketing.
According to research, 84% of businesses reported successfully raising brand awareness through content marketing, with 76% stating it had helped generate demand and leads.
Better retention and loyalty
Since growth marketing looks at the entire client lifecycle, you can improve client retention and loyalty by focusing on customer experience and delivering relevant messaging at every stage.
That could mean developing personalised content and communication strategies to keep clients engaged, implementing feedback loops and satisfaction surveys to better understand client needs, or creating loyalty programmes and exclusive offers to incentivise advocacy and repeat business.
More accurate and informed decision-making
Using data and analytics will help you get to know your customers, their pain points, and their behaviours, so you can make informed decisions on how to engage with them.
You can also use analytics to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and adjust strategies based on key metrics, so you’re not wasting any time and resources on campaigns that aren’t hitting the mark.
With this information at hand, you’re well-equipped to manage your resources more effectively and drive a higher ROI on your marketing investment.
Scalable and measurable growth
Growth marketing emphasises scalable strategies that can be measured and tuned up over time, helping you achieve consistent growth, while staying agile and able to adapt to market changes.
Again, data comes into play here. You can use A/B testing and multivariate testing to refine marketing tactics, scale successful campaigns quickly (and pull the plug on underperforming ones), and continuously monitor KPIs to ensure sustainable growth.
Pay attention to the data, and you can reap big rewards: studies show that businesses that conduct A/B testing are 60% more likely to improve their conversion rates significantly compared to those that don't.
Boosted visibility and authority
Growth marketing’s magic mixture of content marketing, SEO, and social media strategies can help enhance your brand's visibility and establish your authority in your industry.
By using growth marketing methods, you can achieve higher search engine rankings, making it easier for potential clients to find the company. You can build trust and credibility through thought leadership content such as blogs, whitepapers, and webinars. You can create greater engagement on social media platforms, fostering a sense of community and affinity with current and prospective clients.
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