Have you ever heard the story of a rabbit and a tortoise? That’s performance marketing and growth marketing for you.
Growth marketing is a slow and steady process that leads to long-term, sustainable business growth. Performance marketing, on the other hand, captures a quick sale or conversion. It’s more of a short-term marketing strategy to get measurable results and drive more conversions.
Up until a few years ago, we knew digital marketing as ‘digital marketing’. But now, digital marketing is an umbrella having smaller subsets. These subsets are different marketing approaches, which we know as social media marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), performance marketing, etc.
In this article, we will understand the concept of growth marketing and how it is different from performance marketing.
What is Growth Marketing?
How growth marketing and performance marketing are different has to do with long-term and short-term business development. In simple words, growth marketing is a long-term, sustainable approach to development where businesses can attain compounding growth. On the other hand, performance marketing is a short-term, measurable growth strategy. It is more concerned with driving instant, quantifiable results.
The focus of growth marketing goes beyond just acquiring customers. It is highly centred on nurturing users at every stage of the marketing funnel using experimentation and data insights. The key features in the growth marketing include customer centricity, data-driven experimentation, full funnel focus and multichannel strategy.
Growth marketing uses a data-driven, flexible approach which targets the audience according to the marketing funnel. Growth marketing is a content-driven long-term marketing strategy where the goal is to improve customer retention and increase brand awareness to achieve sustainable growth.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is more concerned about achieving immediate, measurable results. You may also understand performance marketing with paid advertising, where brands pay for actions like conversions, sales and clicks.
The key features in performance marketing include ROI driven campaigns and conversion-focused strategies. Performance marketing campaigns are highly trackable as they use UTM parameters, pixels, and analytics. You can get measurable results in performance marketing campaigns. It offers short-term wins instead of a long-term sustainable strategy, which is a great option for quick revenue, but not as sustainable as growth marketing.
Benefits of Growth Marketing
Long-Term Growth
Growth marketing campaigns are ideal for your business to drive long-term growth. You can connect with your target customers on a deeper level to develop trust and build credibility. It results in improved customer retention.
Increase Brand Awareness
An effective growth marketing strategy requires making your brand familiar to your target customers. Hence, marketers launch campaigns according to the marketing funnel to raise awareness about the brand, foster consideration, and drive conversions. Your marketing campaigns should highlight your brand’s USP.
You can increase brand awareness using a growth marketing strategy, which is not possible using performance marketing, as it is more focused on delivering quick conversion-focused results
Drive Organic Traffic
An effective growth marketing strategy helps you improve search engine optimisation. You can improve the search ranking organically by optimising your website’s content. You can drive organic traffic to your website by using high-quality and up-to-date content.
Strong Customer Relationships
An effective growth marketing strategy will help you strengthen your brand’s relationship with customers. It will help you greatly while you scale your business. A long-term growth marketing strategy will help you understand the unique pain points of the customers. Through this, you can deliver tailored services and products to strengthen those relationships.
Benefits of Performance Marketing
Low Risk Campaigns
Performance marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy where companies use a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You can allocate some part of your ad spend towards a specific goal. You can also control the period up to which you want to run the ad. Hence, it gives low risk and high return in performance marketing. You can also review the performance of the ad campaign. If the campaign is not performing well, you can adjust your strategy and tweak the ad altogether to control the advertising cost over time.
Track Your Marketing Efforts
You can easily track your marketing campaigns in performance marketing, which is one of the key benefits of this strategy. You can track the key indicators in real time to see your return on investment and customer conversions. You can track every click and impression in your marketing campaigns, through which you can assess whether they meet expectations or not.
Tap into New Market
You can expand your reach to a wider audience by using performance marketing. Businesses can reach untapped markets and new audiences to drive more conversions. You can do this with the help of paid social media advertising from platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
To Sum Up
The question of whether to choose one over the other marketing strategy does not do justice to your business in the long run. This is because your business needs both. Performance marketing can give you quick wins, and growth marketing will help you achieve long-term growth. To truly make your business successful, you need a combination of both.
Growth marketing will provide you with organic traffic and reach. It will drive more awareness about your brand. Consequently, you will see more conversions and traffic on your website. You can seek SEO, SEM, SMO and performance marketing services from VerveOnlineMarketing, a leading performance marketing company in India.
