Modern marketers are expected to integrate growth marketing and brand marketing techniques to obtain the maximum ROI. Besides content and inbound marketing, growth and brand marketing hold a unique significance in the marketing world.
If truth be told, growth marketing to some extent depends on brand marketing. Contrary to growth hacking, which is entirely driven by tactical performance marketing, growth marketing creates brand awareness and develops a bond with customers. In turn, outcomes of growth marketing need to be sustainable.
And that’s how we reach something that both growth and brand marketing strategies have in common- the success of both these strategies is measured in the long run. Ultimately, they both need and reward commitment.
Looking at the growing importance of these marketing strategies, it’s worth exploring their merits, differences, and respective advantages. Let’s find out what are these marketing strategies in this blog:
Brand marketing
Brand marketing is aimed at establishing and enhancing a company’s brand. The process begins the moment when you strive to gain clarity on the following questions:
- Who is my target audience? And what are they looking for?
- How is my company different from the prevailing competition?
- What are my brand’s personality and brand statement?
Brand marketing focuses on boosting brand awareness while developing close associations between your brand and your customers. For example, we identify Apple as a brand that fosters innovation and clean design, whereas Nike is associated with hard work and determination.
Thus, it can be said that brand marketing is not just about promoting a specific product but is more about conveying your story that resonates with your audience.
Following are a few common brand principles:
- Consistency: In order to create impact through your brand story, your marketing practices should be consistent in terms of voice, visual aesthetics, and messaging across all channels.
- Emotion: More often, we tend to express loyalty to specific brands due to emotional bonding with those brands or products. And that’s how we perceive that brand with a sense of familiarity.
- Delivery: Trust is among the core elements of a powerful brand. Thus, make sure that your marketing practices sync with what you are offering to your customers.
Friendly media coverage, endorsements from influencers, or enhanced social media engagement are some of the measurable objectives of brand marketing.
Growth marketing
“Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers,” as defined by Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com.
This is how growth marketing is linked to the entire funnel. The goal here is to attain revenue growth but not just by reaching new customers. It majorly focuses on actuation, retention, referral, and monetization of your existing customers. Growth marketers are usually involved in the work that includes product development.
It is a data-driven process in which the performance is tracked, modified, and optimized consistently.
Since growth marketing is not merely about customer acquisition, it concerns customer lifetime value and customer retention. It is a user-focused, experimental and iterative process in that sense.
The crucial aspects of a growth marketing process include analytics, A/B testing, user-testing, engagement measurement, etc.
Conclusion
While growth marketing focuses on carrying out experiments to enhance the outcome of the target section, brand marketing fosters the promotion to strengthen the brand identity further. Most marketers don’t invest enough time to realize that both of these strategies, if executed together, deliver optimal growth. Every marketer needs to explore both brand and growth marketing to attain improved growth.
