Should you invest in growth marketing alongside digital marketing?

TL;DR summary

Most teams I work with already “do digital marketing” but fewer of them invest in growth marketing. This is for a number of reasons – some believe it is an approach meant mainly startups, SAAS companies and product teams. Others may have heard of it but neither fully understand what it is or how it would help them.

In most cases what I find is commonly missing, is a more strategic and holistic approach to their marketing, one that considers how their efforts can compound over time. At its core, growth is just full-funnel, data-driven marketing, and most organisations will benefit from it. I therefore believe marketing teams are missing an opportunity and they should at least experiment with a growth marketing approach.

Growth vs digital marketing

This is an important distinction to understand before we delve into the the topic of this article deeper. What exactly are the both of them and how do they differ?

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a broad, comprehensive and holistic approach approach that utilises rapid experiments and focuses on the entire customer journey from awareness, acquisition to retention, and advocacy. Growth marketing utilizes digital marketing channels but goes beyond initial awareness and acquisition, to improve metrics like customer lifetime value.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the planning, execution and measurement of marketing activity in digital channels such as search, social, content, email, paid media and digital PR. The aim is to brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. Broadly speaking it does not go beyond beyond initial acquisition, considering areas such as activation and retention.

Apologies if I am teaching some of you to ‘suck eggs’ with these definitions, but I felt it important to define it exactly in order to draw a distinction between it and growth marketing.

Why this distinction matters

While not the case with every team I work with, I have found that digital marketing activity can often run in silos, with a focus on channel specific KPIs. After campaigns end, momentum can fade until further activity continues. What I find is missing, is clear strategic direction and a consideration of the compounding impact of marketing activity.

Growth marketing helps fix this by:

• Setting fewer, clearer commercial goals.
• Directly linking channel specific marketing activity to those goals.
• Considering the entire customer journey and joining the dots between marketing activity and your goals.
• Improving results through disciplined experiments and readable reporting.
• Paying more attention to the mid and end of the funnel activity and the compounding effect of them.

The growth lifecycle and the metrics that drive it

Embracing growth marketing means you plan across the full journey:

Awareness → Acquisition → Activation → Retention → Referral → Revenue

I tend to utilise a handful of KPIs, such as:

• Cost to acquire a customer
• Conversion rates at each step, from lead to customer
• Time to first value or activation
• Retention and churn
• Lifetime value and the ratio of LTV to acquisition cost

These will vary slightly depending on the industry and sector I am working in. I recommend choosing a handful that prove whether growth is profitable and durable.

Where digital marketing fits inside a growth system

Digital marketing channels are commonly the tactics of how a strategy gets executed. In a growth model:

• Search, social, content, email and Digital PR are selected because they support a stated hypothesis and audience job to be done.
• Budgets are focussed towards achieving impact rather than just habit or what was done in the past.
• Creative takes its lead from positioning and messaging.
• Results are compared on from a single source of truth, so decisions are consistent.

A simple growth operating model

Step 1: Goals and KPIs
Pick one or two commercial goals for the next two quarters, such as “Increase qualified lead pipeline by 30% at an agreed cost to acquire.” Decide the 5–7 KPIs that will prove progress.

Step 2: Customer and search insight
Interview customers. Review win and loss notes. Use search data to find questions and intent. Turn those inputs into value propositions and messaging pillars.

Step 3: Experiment design
Write clear hypotheses and success criteria. Set sensible sample sizes. Prioritise with a straightforward ICE or RICE score so the highest impact work goes first.

Step 4: Weekly cadence
Plan, run and review. Keep ideas, live tests and results in one place that everyone can see. Scale winners. Stop and learn from what is not working.

Step 5: Measurement and reporting
Build one scorecard that links activity to pipeline, revenue and margin. A typical stack is GA4 and a tag manager for event tracking, with HubSpot or Salesforce as the source of truth for revenue. Keep the format readable by executives and useful for practitioners.

A pragmatic channel mix and when to use each

Organic search (SEO). Compounding demand over time. Suits considered purchases. Needs a clear information architecture and content that answers real questions.

Paid search (PPC). Captures intent quickly. Useful for testing propositions and accelerating proven terms. Monitor cost to acquire and ad fatigue.

Social search and paid social. People now use TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Reddit to research choices. Use data-led targeting and test creative on a regular cadence. Measure outcomes such as qualified leads, pipeline or sales, not surface clicks.

Content marketing and experience. Guides, comparisons, demos and calculators designed for the journey, not just the click.

Email and lifecycle CRM. Onboarding, activation nudges, cross-sell and win-back flows that push lifetime value up and steady acquisition cost.

Digital PR. Credibility and brand signals that also support organic visibility.

Choose the mix that suits your stage:

• Startups: move quickly with paid tests and lifecycle email, while laying technical and information foundations for search.
• Scale-ups and enterprise: double down on search and lifecycle, then add brand building content and thought leadership.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Reporting fixates on vanity metrics. Anchor to pipeline, revenue and lifetime value.
• Too many tests, not enough learning. Run fewer, better experiments with sensible samples.
• Channel silos. Work from one plan and one scorecard.
• Little focus on activation or retention. These are often the largest and cheapest drivers of growth.
• Tool sprawl. Use fewer platforms that are properly implemented, consented and trusted.

A basic starter plan

Weeks 1–2
Clarify commercial goals and KPIs. Align on positioning and audiences. Audit analytics and CRM tracking.

Weeks 3–6
Design six to ten hypotheses across acquisition and retention. Stand up the scorecard and weekly growth meeting. Ship the first tests, for example a search-led content cluster, two paid search value-prop tests and an onboarding flow.

Weeks 7–12
Scale winners, stop or iterate the rest. Improve reporting to board-ready clarity. Set the next quarter’s roadmap with budgets that follow impact.