Top 4 Intensely Overused Buzzwords In Growth Marketing
They’re misused, they’ve become misleading, and how to protect yourself from them
Growth marketing is often regarded as the future of business. Various dimensions of business, from customer base and revenue to communications channels and audience size, increasingly depend on it, via systemic, scientific, and scalable marketing operations. Its marks can be seen all over the Internet, be it in e-commerce, food delivery, sports, education or healthcare.
Sadly, the ubiquitous presence of growth marketing hasn’t led to its universal correct understanding. False interpretations of its most fundamental concepts have been introduced, preached, and advocated uncontrollably for years. Such overuse has turned into misuse and become a plague that spreads widely and wildly to keep up the confusion. What you can expect, eventually, is inevitable errors in decision-making both strategically and operationally.
If you’re a digital marketer, the best way to protect yourself from such errors is to clarify those concepts to yourself. There’s a fine line between them being hollow buzzwords and truly impactful tools, and keeping yourself clear from the first kind is the key. As a start, the four biggest buzzwords will be named below, along with key measures to understand and apply them better.
Growth hacking
The number one public enemy to everyone I care about — that is, digital marketers, consumers, and audience — is the term “growth hacking”. Every once in a while, you’d see an Internet “expert” show off a 1000%+ growth rate overnight. Their story would be utilizing growth hacks to “unlock” astronomical growth. Then, they’d attempt to give you the advice to repeat the process — usually as the first step towards selling more consultation services.
Here’s what most tend to hide: The growth, 95% of the time, goes from nearly nothing to some early gains, as in increasing from 1 to 15 Clicks a day for a Website, for instance. While it does, indeed, demonstrate massive growth, at a 1500% rate, it fails to say much meaningfully.
What’s even more dangerous is: The term is so popular that, when you do a simple search on Google for “growth marketing”, the vast majority of results will be for “growth hacking”. Examples of this are many, including:
- Keyword stuffing on Website or App/Play Store metadata
- Incentivization of fake Likes on social media or equivalent engagements
- Gathering fake customer reviews via bribery
The overarching theme is easy to recognize: Quick and dirty tricks that may reward rapid short-term growth opportunities. All you need to do is often pay a consultant or expert a fee, and they’ll either give you advice on how to execute them or perform them on your behalf.
However, they will never disclose this secret to you: Growth hacking refers to the lowest value of growth marketing tactics you can apply. At best, they’re just one-trick ponies. The whole idea, after all, is a quick and dirty trick to gain short-term advantages. At worst, they can get your business or product banned by Google, Apple, and other platforms. Get yourself introduced to “Black Hat” to learn more about shady tactics.
On its defense, growth hacking isn’t bad by default. Sometimes desperate measures are needed in desperate times. It’s the irresponsible overuse of the term that leads to unwanted consequences. When uninformed marketers seek advice from so-called “growth hackers”, this irresponsibility could confuse and mislead them — disasters will simply wait to happen.
How to combat the growth hacking confusion
A hack, trick, or tip is like a fish. You get one, you consume one, and it’s gone. Strategies, on the other hand, are like fishing rods. All you need is one to catch fish in the long run. For this reason, growth strategies are the topic you should get advice for.
In growth marketing, a strategy could vary from a branding concept or seasonal campaign management to advertising budget control and marketing channel scaling. The key is to build systematic processes to make growth paths efficient. In addition, it’s important to focus on experimentation to validate potential ideas. Once you’ve standardized the internal operations and identified what makes customers happy, hacking becomes child’s play.
Growth loops
Growth marketing is often summarized into self-repeating circular models. Loops, cycles, rounds, etc., are among the most popular terms to describe them. The reason behind such a “close-ended” pattern lies in the fact that growth factors tend to repeat themselves. Such repetition is shown to come from both sides — the brands/publishers and the customers/audience.
In reality, however, things hardly fall in line so neatly with such patterns. First, from the side of brands, every attempt to follow the loops is another step closer to a dead end:
- Most growth tactics wear off their effectiveness over time, after a certain degree of repetition. Think “social proof”, for instance. How many such proofs can one possibly find and use? Whatever the quantity, it’s finite, and an endpoint is inevitable.
- In order to compensate for this, each loop will need to come with new ideas. In fact, idea validation through experimenting is fuel for growth marketing. Yet, it’d require an infinite amount of ideas to sustain the same pace of growth over time. What’s the best way to make sure you’ll run out of ideas? Repeating what you do.
Second, customers are complex human beings, who are especially unpredictable online. Their motivations, interests, beliefs, and behaviors are full of outliers. It makes no sense to expect them to sort themselves out neatly into loops and mindlessly repeat their behaviors forever.
Take the viral loop, for example. Even though viral marketing generally depends on Internet users to repeatedly engage and share in a rapid manner, this repetition isn’t linear and doesn’t close the loop. Instead, each trigger opens a new level beyond the loop, just like viruses leave past hosts to infect the new. It’s often forgotten that viral infections tend to spread, not circulate — why would viral marketing be any different?
Either way, it’s now obvious that growth should come in waves rather than loops. For brands, the perception of growth waves encourages you to think outside the box. Since waves don’t close loops, you can keep growing to infinity and beyond.
For consumers, it’s also crucial to understand that customers come in waves, and each differs from the previous. This way, you’ll be able to estimate the size of each group of customers and measure its impact on business. After all, would it make more sense to measure “ten waves of customers” or “ten loops of customers”?
The practical implications of growth “waves”
Once you’ve shifted your perspective beyond the loop logic, it’s time to also act beyond the loop behaviors. You need to go outside of the box — as in, outside of the loop — in order to find more elements and new ideas to grow with. How? Customization may be the key.
In general, there are at least four major types of growth marketing paths or campaigns you can run next to each other to stir new waves:
1. Product marketing:
This involves the direct attempts to persuade an audience to buy your product or service for what it’s worth. In principle, there are three core components of a product: The value propositions, the technical functions or features, and the content to enrich the experience.
For example, a video streaming service promises on-demand entertainment to viewers as a value proposition, and a key feature to deliver it is through a well-organized list of genres for viewers to browse through, and the content may range from actual substance like what’s happening in Breaking Bad, to other elements like the cast, the synopsis, and the posters. At the end of the day, any attempt to promote the service by telling viewers how great each, some or all of these components are is another effort in product marketing.
2. Brand communication:
An advanced type of campaign that emphasizes selling the company instead of the product, the provider instead of the service, or the emotional values of the business instead of the physical. It promises a whole new path of growth that can totally operate independently. This promises a new opening for you in cases ideas are dry for product marketing.
In addition, brand communication campaigns are better suited for contexts where selling your product would seem awkward or inappropriate. For instance, in scenarios where “greater good” topics like ecological sustainability, human rights, racism, and other social issues are the main focuses, promoting a product would paint your business as “greenwashing”, hypocritical, or opportunistic. Instead, if you communicate what your business stands for as a brand and how relevant it is to those topics, you may be able to win the hearts of the audience.
In short, customers often support your business simply because they support your cause — doesn’t matter the product.
3. Seasonal promotion:
Sometimes, the best way to persuade customers to support your business isn’t showing them “why” they need it, but rather “when”. This is because, throughout the year, certain consumer actions are simply made because it’s the right time for it, even when there’s no specific need. For growth marketing, this means a third kind (or wave) of campaigns can be run in parallel with product marketing and brand promotion: Seasonal.
Seasonality works differently in different industries and for different customers. For shoppers, Black Friday has been the annual tradition. For travelers, winter and summer breaks are the typical peaks. For fans of films, Halloween is the best time for horror flicks whereas Valentine’s Day is the occasion to watch something romantic. Even for gamers, seasonality still exists, despite at a smaller scale, such as weekend deals.
The key to seasonal promotion is, as you may have guessed it, to capture the special occasions as an “excuse” to start a conversation with the customers. This is why picking the right times before, during and after them is critical.
4. Extracurricular activities:
As we’re witnessing “the new normal” in life, we’re also experiencing great turbulence in growth marketing. Nothing works as it should, and nothing is easily foreseeable. This is why many brands are going the extra mile so to stay competitive. Side projects or extracurricular activities, therefore, become more needed than ever before.
Examples of “something extra” includes viral marketing, PR, social media, event prospecting, and sponsorships, among others. Under normal circumstances, they seem like nice-to-have options to consider after primary objectives are achieved, such as performance marketing campaign optimization. However, when things are unstable and normal approaches yield limiting results, they become a much-needed extra card to play.
In summary, remember there are at least four questions your business may help customers answer, not just one: “Why” should they buy your product, “Who” are you that they should buy from, “When” should they buy it, and “What else” can you do to reach them.
Sustainable growth
Another buzzword that’s been “spammed” recently is sustainable growth. It’s dangerous because the abuser can easily use it to exploit you with hypocrisy. Using sustainability as an excuse, they could make you think their advice or decisions are just and admirable. However, in reality, the use of this term often signals hidden agenda you should watch out for.
A great way to check their legitimacy is to test what they mean by sustainable growth. Most of the time, they’d define the term inaccurately. You can start with a simple Google search for “sustainable growth marketing”. Out of the top ten search results I saw today, there were:
- One article (correctly, in my opinion) debunking “growth hacking”;
- One article from the open source Wikipedia that has no quality control;
- One academic research paper that scientifically and decently reviewed the concept;
- Seven articles that only acknowledge sustainable growth for its intrinsic values to the business, such as profits.
More specifically, these misleading sites represent a much wider community of growth marketers, and they describe the term as either a means to self-sustaining long-term development, as consistent or uninterrupted growth, or simply as non-stop growth of your business. While inaccuracy, in this case, doesn’t equal absolute falsehood, because self-sustaining growth is also important, it’s not what sustainable growth means.
In principle, the term has more to do with the extrinsic values of your business than intrinsic, and there are two vital areas that it must cover:
1. Grow also others, not just yourself:
Sustainability, by modern scientific definition, means fulfilling your business needs without compromising future generations’ resources, welfare, and ability to also fulfill their own needs. This works a bit like Karma, where your wrongdoing will come back and bite you eventually.
For instance, if you sustain your business growth by cutting costs of production via the use of toxic yet cheap parts, your products will get a lot of customers sick, e.g. with cancer. Their life expectancies, health, productivity, and so on, will deteriorate as your business grows. This will leave a burden for their children and grandchildren to carry. As future generations suffer, their ability to fulfill their needs will also decline. If this pattern sustains itself, things will eventually go to zero. That means zero customers, zero employees, zero suppliers, and, thus, zero growth for your business. “Sustain”, thus, becomes an oxymoron.
Growth marketing is subject to the same kind of Karma. That’s why false advertising and other shady tactics aren’t sustainable. But then, what are the chances that an “expert” would advise you to do good, and make societies prosper, so more people can afford to buy your products?
2. The Tripple Bottom Line:
Also known as the 3P model (Planet-People-Profit), the Tripple Bottom Line explains the priorities of every truly sustainable business. Accordingly, profit is only a low-priority goal, compared to serving the well-being of the people, who must then sustain the planet, without which nothing ever matters. This is because all businesses depend on a healthy human population to thrive, and humans can only be healthy if the Earth is healthy.
This view on sustainable growth often comes with a dilemma. If you prioritize external factors such as human civilization or the environment, your likely limited resources would deplete faster than optimal rates. Those resources can easily make your business more competitive and make more profits. On the other hand, if your priority is only or primarily profit, you’d likely risk doing business at the expense of those external factors.
Examples can be seen in mass deforestation, water, and air pollution, frauds that cost people their wealth, employment or relationships, and advertising lies that keep people misinformed and, thus, less empowered than desired. At the end of the day, both the societal and natural environments that the business is embedded in will crumble. Can it, then, still be sustained?
Here’s the catch: I have never ever heard a growth marketer mention the Triple Bottom Line before. Whether or not this is due to their unawareness or intention to hide the “greater good” sense of sustainable growth is hard to tell. What’s clear, though, is the fact that whatever you’re hearing or seeing from consultants, experts, or even veterans about the topic is likely wrong. Fact checks, as a result, may save your business one day.
What does it have to do with growth marketing?
For starters, once you understand the difference between sustained growth and sustainable growth, you’ll realize the key isn’t long-term profit generation capabilities. Rather, it’s the sense of responsibility of growth marketing. Ask yourself, is your growth driven by harmful marketing operations that place a heavy burden on the environment or accelerate social instability?
Sometimes, it’s unintentional and hard to tell, like in the case of smartphone addiction. You’ll need a clear framework to follow. That’s where Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) comes in. If fact, it’s helped many brands stay strong in sustainable growth — maybe it’ll do the same to yours.
Next, realizing who may be impacted by your marketing activities will help determine your relationships with them. This will be handy when you need to figure out what harms your marketing may cause based on those relationships — as in, do you have any harmful relationships? A prevalent tool to identify who your business in general and marketing, in particular, may affect is stakeholder management.
Depending on the industry, stakeholders may include customers, employees, suppliers, governments, the media, and non-profit organizations. By understanding your relationships with each of them, you’ll see more clearly if abuse exists and how sustainable your business and marketing really are. Do you bully competitors, manipulate the media to misinform the consumers, or exploit the workers and suppliers with reduced wages for maximum profits? Analyze your stakeholder relationships for the answer.
Data-driven growth
The last buzzword on the list has something to do with one of the most vital components of modern growth marketing: Data. In fact, the topic is so popular that no discussion of any campaign would be complete without at least one mention of the data required to plan and measure it — it’s simply ubiquitous.
However, the term has been so overused by Internet “experts” that its meaning has now become extremely confusing, not only to the audience like you and me but also to the very experts that give advice. Here’s why:
1. What’s often called data doesn’t actually mean data
First off, decision-making for growth depends on the marketing intelligence system that supports it. Such a system, then, depends on multiple levels of input to operate. Data is part of this input. However, it’s not the only component there. Multiple other forms of input are also required in the same system. They include information, knowledge, and wisdom, to name a few. Most importantly, they share certain similarities that drive confusion among many. When confused, everything seems like “data” to them — but it isn’t.
For example, knowledge built from years of experience isn’t data, because it’s gone through adjustments via personal development, whereas data is meant to be the lowest, rawest piece of input. For another example, information isn’t data, because it’s already inclusive of meaning and context, which chains together multiple data points. So, when an “expert” tells you to follow their advice based on what they’ve witnessed over the years, that’s not data, but knowledge. Similarly, when they tell you to make decisions based on recent popular trends in the market, that’s not data, but information.
The confusion here is extremely dangerous. For one, if you’re confused, you’ll mishandle the data. Imagine being shown two sets of data that have a tendency to change at nearly the same time in a rather linear manner. Hasty interpretation (e.g. looking at the information level and ignoring the raw data level) would easily lead to false identification of causality, whereas it’s most likely just a correlation.
For another, confusing thoughts will likely breed errors in data tracking and collection. The data sources, KPI definitions, calculations, and prioritization, among other factors, will be negatively affected. Remember: If you mistake one tiny metric in one part of the growth marketing funnel, everything else will make no sense.
In the end, being information-driven, knowledge-driven or Windom-driven isn’t wrong and even brings its own benefits. However, it’s nothing like being data-driven. Truly data-driven growth must start from the bottom up — from raw data. What’s more, there needs to be a cohesive system to manage data from end to end, across all interconnected levels. That way, biases may be better reduced because no details are ignored.
2. The vast majority of the data mentioned in growth marketing discussions is quantitative
The absolute kings and queens of data analyses in growth marketing have been concepts like KPIs, metrics, and statistics. They’re purely quantitative. This means, whenever somebody mentions “data”, it most likely means numbers. While nothing is wrong with this in and of itself, it only represents roughly 50% of the needed data for decent decision-making. The other 50% encaptures the more elaborate, complex, entangled and intangible side of data: Qualitative.
Qualitative data, in principle, revolves around the raw input that helps decision-making but has nothing to do with numbers. It’s not measurable and, thus, can’t answer questions like “How much” or “How many”. In return, what it offers is a variety of descriptive properties of a topic that helps you answer such questions as “Why”, “What” or “Who”. For example, for the same sample of data points provided in the image below, “two cats” would be quantitative whereas “black cats” would be qualitative.
As qualitative data addresses a totally different kind of input for decision-making, it requires different analysis methods. Instead of mathematics, statistical significance, or regression, which serve as quantitative data analysis, it depends on the content, discourse, and framework analysis, among others. (Growth) marketing intelligence, therefore, needs to be equipped with them to be complete. After all, quantitative and qualitative are like two sides of the same “data” coin — different yet incomplete without each other.
The seemingly unstoppable emergence of Internet “experts” is giving rise to an immense amount of growth marketing advice circulated around the virtual world. While some are, indeed, authentic and helpful, the rest are simply manipulative and deceitful. The most dreadful part is: You can’t tell fraudulent consultations from truthful ones.
To protect yourself, look for the buzzwords being used in such contexts. They can be many, but the top four among them are: “Growth hacking”, “growth loops”, “sustainable growth”, and “data-driven growth”. Above are some key points to help you see through them and protect yourself from deception. Stay safe and keep growing.
