5 Growth Marketing Terms Every Startup Founder Needs to Know
As a startup founder, or the owner of a small business, you have a lot on your plate. Not only are you responsible for Board reporting and hitting your sales numbers, you’re probably also running point on customer relations and marketing.
If that sounds like you, you might be looking for a little guidance to help make marketing, brand-building, and advertising easier.
You’re in luck. In this post, you’ll learn 5 key terms about growth marketing that every startup founder should know.
Without further ado, here are the 5 essential key terms to know:
1. Growth Marketing
Growth marketing is all about achieving speedy, scalable growth by optimizing your whole funnel - from lead to evangelist.
Growth marketing is defined by a commitment to data-driven strategy, clear metrics, sales and marketing alignment, and agile strategy. This is typically measured in terms of sales, but it could be measured with other metrics, depending on your company’s growth goals.
2. Lifecycle Stages, or Contact Stages
A lifecycle stage, sometimes also referred to as a contact stage, is the phase of the buyer journey that an individual or account goes through on their journey to becoming a customer.
There are a few standard stages: lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, customer, evangelist.
Growth-focused companies will also focus on “Lost” leads, opportunities, and customers, and may even consider those to be lifecycle stages in their own right.
3. Buyer Journey
This is the behavioral experience that a contact or company goes through on their way to becoming a customer. The buyer journey is typically defined in the following steps: awareness, consideration, decision, loyalty, promotion. Not all companies will track the last two phases, but growth-focused businesses should.
4. Funnel
Your funnel is basically a visualization of the process that leads to a customer. It's called a funnel because that's what it looks like! Your funnel is simply the way your business measures an individual or company’s process of becoming a customer.
Every business has a funnel, even if you don’t know it yet!
The marketing and sales funnel is typically composed of the lifecycle stages (Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist), but it can also be defined by the behavioral stage of a lead or customer (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, etc.). More complex funnels may include stages between these primary stages, such as Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
Some companies will split up the funnel into the marketing portion, and the sales portion. If your sales process includes a method to “hand off” a lead from the marketing team to the sales team, you may want to consider creating a slight distinction between your marketing and sales funnel.
Funnels are super valuable, because they simplify this journey and make it easier for businesses to track how their leads are becoming customers, and identify any issues in their marketing and sales process.
I talk a lot more about the marketing and sales funnel in the Beginners Guide to Startup Marketing. It’s a completely free resource and you can get it here.
5. Conversion Rate
In a general sense, the conversion rate is the percentage of individuals or companies that take an action. The percentage of people who click on your blog email notification is your email conversion rate. The percentage of leads who sign up for demos is a conversion rate, too. Conversion rates are really important for growth marketing, because it helps you see what is working - and what isn’t.
Those are just a few of the essential key terms you need to know if you’re working on growing your business - but that’s just scratching the surface. Growth marketing is a data-driven, optimization-focused marketing and strategy.
It’s not right for everyone, but growth marketing is a great strategy for startups and small businesses that are looking to scale.
I believe that growth marketing is wonderful because it really keeps your eye on the ball; it forces marketers to focus on lead and customer happiness, and makes sure that the data is central to the strategy. That said, some companies that are more focused on brand-building than on customer acquisition and retention might not want to focus on growth marketing strategies.