Table of contents
- What is included in our growth marketing guide?
- What is growth marketing?
- Why you need growth marketing?
- Growth marketing vs traditional marketing vs performance marketing
- How to implement a growth marketing culture
- People
- Process
- Technology
- Growth marketing software platforms
- The best growth marketing resources
- About Growth Method
- Frequently asked questions
Having worked with businesses from 5 to 5000+ employees over the last 3 years, and with almost 1500 marketing ideas and experiments in the Growth Method platform, we’ve put together this guide based on everything we’ve learned so far on our journey.
What is included in our growth marketing guide?
The guide consolidates the systems, frameworks and thinking from many of our growth marketing articles into a more easily digestible format. We cover the core topic areas below with links to over 20 additional articles written by our team:
What is growth marketing?
Most of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries from antibiotics and water purification to breakthroughs in agriculture and sanitation, owe themselves to the scientific method - the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation. This basic process involves making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and analysing the results.
Perversely, the method of progress and discovery employed by many marketing teams today is to place big bets on big ideas, largely based on faith, and with no hypothesis or prediction of the likely outcome.
However, the world’s fastest growing companies, digitally native companies like HubSpot, LinkedIn, Atlassian and Slack are taking a very different approach. They all use the exact same process to run their marketing and growth teams. A process known as Growth Marketing.
Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a more rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results. It is a system, or framework, for running marketing teams optimised for growth.
Put simply, growth marketing is where the scientific method and marketing collide.
For more information see our article on What is Growth Marketing?, our guide to what growth marketing managers do and how to hire one, our comprehensive list of growth marketing conferences for B2B marketers, and our guide to growth marketing strategy.
Why you need growth marketing?
Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results.
There are 5 problems with traditional marketing teams that the growth marketing process is designed to solve:
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Intelligent decisions are not based on assumptions or gut feel - Traditional marketing teams decide what to do based on assumptions, gut-feel, or the highest-paid person’s opinion (aka the HiPPO, for short). Every time you or your team makes a guess, you are introducing bias and risk into what you do.
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What works for others is not going to work for you - Copying what your competitors are doing, or what you see other companies doing online is not a strategy. There is no “one-size-fits-all” advice when it comes to scaling marketing.
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Growth is the sum of a lot of small parts - There is no one thing that will alter the trajectory of your marketing efforts or dramatically increase results. Implementing the latest marketing tactic or “growth hack” is unlikely to have any material impact on your business long term.
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The effectiveness of all marketing tactics decreases over time - The first ever banner ad debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78%. Clearly, nobody is getting that kind of clickthrough rate today.
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Every marketing team has finite resources and needs to optimise for efficiency - We live in a world with finite resources and unlimited expectations of results. A good marketing strategy helps to ensure marketing resources are allocated to the areas where you can gain competitive advantage.
The growth marketing process
The growth marketing process is a scientific approach largely based on agile best practises. The 7-step process is outlined below:
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Set goals - Having the best team, optimised processes and a world-leading technology stack doesn’t matter if the marketing team aren’t working towards a common goal.
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Research ideas - Ideas are the leading input to the entire growth marketing process, they are the rocket fuel for growth.
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Prioritise ideas - Every marketing team is resource constrained. For marketing teams to be effective, they must be able to accurately identify and focus on high impact work.
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Run experiments - Modern marketing teams operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty and constant change.
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Analyse results - Every experiment is an opportunity to learn more about your customers and successful growth teams understand the more they learn about their customers, the more they will succeed.
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Build assets & flywheels - Many marketing teams today are still structured around the idea of marketing campaigns. The best growth marketing teams achieve success by continually improving systems, assets and activities that deliver value over time.
Growth marketing vs traditional marketing vs performance marketing
Growth marketing is often confused with its neighbours. Here’s how the three approaches compare:
| Approach | Primary focus | Time horizon | Decision-making | Primary channels | Success metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Growth marketing | Full customer lifecycle, acquisition through to retention and referral | Short, iterative sprints | Data and experimentation-led | Cross-channel, whichever the data supports | North Star Metric (e.g. active users, revenue) |
| Traditional / brand marketing | Awareness and brand perception | Long-term, campaign-based | Intuition, creative judgement, brand guidelines | TV, print, brand campaigns, sponsorships | Brand awareness, reach, sentiment |
| Performance marketing | Paid acquisition and conversion | Short-term, campaign-based | Optimised to ROAS/CPA in near real time | Paid search, paid social, display | ROAS, CAC, conversion rate |
How to implement a growth marketing culture
The People, Process, Technology framework (aka the “golden triangle”) is widely used to describe the key elements of a successful company or team.
People
Good growth marketers typically have a wide base level of knowledge, covering everything from user and behavioural psychology to data and analytics, as well as a deeper knowledge in one or two areas well-suited to growth marketing.
This is often described as the T-shaped marketer: broad enough to understand every stage of the customer lifecycle, but with a deep specialism, whether that’s SEO, lifecycle email, paid acquisition or product analytics, that they can go deep on when it matters. As AI takes on more of the execution work, teams are increasingly built around a small number of these generalist marketers rather than a large roster of narrow specialists.
Process
Though it’s not sexy, some of the world’s most successful marketing and growth leaders talk more about process than about anything else.
Growth has nothing to do with tactics, and everything to do with process.
In practice, process means running a consistent cadence: a steady flow of ideas going in, a repeatable way of deciding what to work on next using a prioritisation framework like ICE or RICE, and a fixed rhythm of shipping, measuring, and reviewing results, rather than working project by project. Teams that skip this step tend to fall back into ad hoc, opinion-led decision making the moment things get busy.
Technology
A growth marketing stack typically covers three jobs: measuring what’s happening (a product or web analytics tool such as PostHog or GA4), testing changes (an A/B testing or feature-flagging tool), and planning and prioritising the work itself. Teams need a good working understanding of the metrics that matter, conversion rates, organic and paid traffic, MQLs and pipeline, and the tooling to track them without manually stitching spreadsheets together.
Increasingly, AI agents are taking on more of the day-to-day execution inside this stack: drafting campaign plans, prioritising the backlog against a stated goal, and analysing results, freeing up the team to focus on strategy and judgement calls rather than manual reporting.
Growth marketing software platforms
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Our platform helps businesses build a performance marketing culture and grow in-house capability resulting in reduced costs and improved efficiency and results.
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The best growth marketing resources
About Growth Method
Everything in this guide points to the same conclusion: growth marketing works because it replaces opinion with evidence. That’s exactly the gap Growth Method is built to close. Growth Method is the agentic marketing platform for B2B teams: pre-built AI agents plan, launch, and analyse campaigns from your live marketing data, so the plan-run-learn loop this guide describes happens continuously, not just when someone remembers to run a retro. Connect your martech stack in minutes and get started.
Frequently asked questions
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a systematic, experiment-led approach to marketing that treats the full customer lifecycle, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, as one connected system. Instead of betting on big campaigns based on gut feel, growth marketers form a hypothesis, run a small test, measure the result, and only scale what the data proves works.
How is growth marketing different from traditional or brand marketing?
Traditional and brand marketing optimise for long-term awareness and perception through large, intuition-led campaigns. Growth marketing optimises for measurable outcomes across the whole customer lifecycle through short, iterative experiments, with decisions driven by data rather than creative judgement alone.
What tools do growth marketing teams use?
Growth marketing teams typically combine a product or web analytics tool (such as PostHog or GA4) to measure behaviour, an experimentation or A/B testing tool to run tests, and a system of record for planning and prioritising ideas. Growth Method brings these together in one place, purpose-built for running and learning from campaigns.
How do you build a growth marketing culture?
A growth marketing culture is built by setting a clear goal, running a steady cadence of small experiments rather than a few big bets, reviewing results honestly (including the failures), and giving the team the autonomy to act on what they learn. It relies on process and consistency more than any single tactic.