Growth Marketing Vs. Performance Marketing: Exploring the Main Differences

Growth marketing and performance marketing are results-driven marketing strategies that have indeed changed the way traditional marketing works.

Both these strategies have brought about extraordinary results for different organizations and businesses who have exercised these. As they are both more innovative and results-focused marketing strategies, often these terms are used interchangeably. 

However, an important thing to note here is that growth marketing is indeed different from performance marketing. Let’s get started with this growth marketing vs. performance marketing standoff.

What is Growth Marketing?

Simply put, growth marketing is a wholesome marketing strategy spread on long-term. Its focus is to achieve sustainability in customer acquisition, loyalty and retention. 

Typically, traditional marketing emphasizes more on accomplishing short-term goals. Growth marketing, on the other hand, channelizes data-driven insights, customer engagement and experimentation. These tactics generate massive growth for the business helping it expand on a greater level.

What are the Core Components of Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is composed of many key elements. These include:

• Customer lifecycle optimization: Growth marketing focuses on optimizing each and every phase of the entire journey a customer takes to learn about a brand and turn into its customer.
• A/B testing: Testing new and even existing strategies, channels and messaging is an integral element of growth marketing. This allows a business to figure out what approach suits a certain target audience the best.
• Personalized engagement: This involves creating more personalized experiences for customers to make them feel valued which improves their satisfaction with the brand, and also strengthens their level of loyalty.
• Data-driven decision making: It involves keeping a strict check on insights, trends, user behavior and analytics to constantly improve and iterate campaigns.
• SEO and content marketing: This involves leveraging the power of social media, search engine optimization, videos and blogs to generate brand awareness and organic traffic.

These key elements when combined together formulate different growth marketing strategies.

What are the Key Growth Marketing Strategies?

Growth marketing encompasses many key strategies which include the following:

• Viral marketing: This involves creating content that quickly spreads among people, one after another. Viral marketing typically involves organic growth.
• Referral programs: This involves encouraging the current users to invite more people to spread the word about the organization. Dropbox is popular for its referral marketing program.
• Lifecycle email marketing: This involves nurturing existing customers as well as leads by using email sequences.
• Product-led growth: This is when you use the product as a primary tool to acquire customers as well as retain them.
• Community building: This involves engaging users via webinars, social media groups and forums.

These marketing strategies are used by different brands and companies including Airbnb, Tesla, Duolingo, Slack, Netflix and HubSpot.

Now that you have better clarity on growth marketing, let’s throw light on performance marketing.

What is Performance Marketing?

Contrary to growth marketing, performance marketing is a ROI-centric approach that is powered by real-time data. This is wherein advertisers who want to advertise their brand pay according to specific actions. These actions include conversions, leads, or clicks.

Performance marketing helps achieve quick returns and measurable results. Usually, it relies on affiliate marketing and paid advertising.

What are the Core Components of Performance Marketing?

Growth marketing has several key components. The core elements include the following:

• Digital advertising: This involves the use of channels such as programmatic advertising, facebook ads and Google ads which brings in targeted traffic for the brand/ advertiser.
• Pay-for-performance model: This is when advertisers only pay when a certain action is fulfilled such as cost-per-acquisition and cost-per-click.
• Remarketing and retargeting: This involves targeting all the users who have previously engaged with the respective brand, but have not converted into clients yet.
• Affiliate and influencer marketing: This encompasses partnering with influencers or affiliates to advertise and promote services and products in exchange to get commissions.
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO): This involves improving sales funnels, ad creatives and landing pages to maximize customer conversions.

These key aspects also form the basis of different performance marketing services.

What are the Key Performance Marketing Strategies?

The core growth marketing strategies include the following:

• Social media ads: This involves the creation of extremely targeted ads on different social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• PPC (pay-per-click) advertising: This encompasses running different kinds of paid ads on social media channels and search engines.
• Affiliate marketing: This includes partnering with different affiliates to fuel traffic and drive sales.
• Email retargeting: This involves sending different follow-up emails to the users and potential customers who abandon their carts or show lack of interest.
• Landing page optimization: This includes improving the design, copy, interface and CTAs of landing pages for increased conversions.

Now let us take a look at when to use each of these two strategies.

Growth Marketing Vs Performance Marketing: Which Strategy to Use When

Both growth marketing and performance marketing are viable marketing strategies that work well for a range of businesses. That said, whether you should opt for performance marketing or growth marketing depends entirely on the type of your business, its resources, goals, target audience and needs.

When Should You Use Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is most suitable for you in the following scenarios:

• If you aim to achieve sustainable business growth instead of desiring instant sales.
• If you depend on organic growth, SEO and content marketing.
• If you wish to improve customer retention and brand loyalty.
• If you have a low ad budget for your business, but it has many strengths that can create more value and engagement for the users through meaningful content.

If any of these scenarios relate to your unique situation and business, growth marketing is the way to go forward. Even if your business situation is different from the aforementioned aspects, growth marketing suits businesses of all types and sizes.

When Should You Use Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is extremely suitable for your business if the following resonate with you:

• If you want instant conversions, leads or sales.
• If you are planning to launch a short-term campaign for promotional purposes.
• If you have a service-based business, have a SaaS business, or an e-commerce store and its sales are heavily dependent on paid ads. In case you do have an e-commerce store, make sure to select the right e-commerce platform for your small business.
• If you have set aside a fixed ad spend.
• If you are well aware of your CPA (cost-per-acquisition.)

If you run an apparel store, or an e-store that sells diverse products, performance marketing is a fitting option for you.

The good thing is that performance and growth marketing can both work quite well together. Successful businesses with a visionary approach usually exercise a hybrid approach that combines both performance and marketing strategies.

Conclusion: Grow Your Business with ITechSole’s Marketing Strategies

Growth and performance marketing, both play extremely critical roles in the competitive marketing world of today. Growth marketing promises sustainable growth over the long-term whereas performance marketing generates measurable and quick results.

The truth is you need both to grow your business by leaps and bounds. This is why businesses with a proactive approach often hire expert marketing agencies for growth and performance marketing services.

If you are in search of an innovative marketing agency with proven results in both growth marketing and performance marketing, ITechSole is here to assist you. Get in touch with our team today to drive unparalleled growth for your business.