Marketers today are accountable for business outcomes. Around the world, almost all marketing-focused CEOs and business owners make marketing-led growth a priority. High performers and agency marketers were twice as likely to make a significant step toward marketing-led growth as a key priority.
Growth marketing is about constantly driving new reach. Reaching new customers, driving better return on our ad dollars, increasing the lifetime value of our customer retention rate and lifetime value of our customers, increasing our basket size, transaction frequency — all of the metrics that I measure are growth marketing.
From a planning perspective, more than half of marketers see driving growth as a long-term pursuit, and one in four
view it as a mix of long- and short-term goals. Within low-performing marketing teams 22% think about
driving growth only in the short term.
Growth marketing is about constantly driving new reach. Reaching new customers, driving better return on our ad dollars, increasing the lifetime value of our customer retention rate and lifetime value of our customers, increasing our basket size, transaction frequency — all of the metrics that I measure are growth marketing.
Marketers measure growth through a balance of business and customer metrics such as longer-term brand equity and shorter-term top-line sales. While revenue is the main metric, additional customer-centric measurements (satisfaction/Net Promoter Score, lifetime value, brand loyalty, and return on marketing investment) round out the top five.
Ranking of Marketers Growth Metrics
- Sales and Revenue
- Customer Satisfaction / NPS
- Lifetime Value of Customer
- Brand Loyalty
- Return on Marketing Investment / ROI
From a growth perspective, the question is, ‘Are we growing in the right areas?’ How do we expand and where do we invest so that we can grow the quickest, and can we use data to help inform that strategy so that we’re investing in the right places?
When you look at the long-term outlook, you can’t just pump all your money into lower-funnel tactics to see a long-term return. You need to make sure you’re investing at all the right levels of the purchase funnel to make sure you’re building a long-term brand rather than it just being short-term returns.
Most marketers assess their company’s performance against these key growth metrics as at least “somewhat
successful.” However, there is some room for improvement: less than half consider their organizations “very successful” on any metric. Furthermore, less than 50% of marketers are very successful in achieving the very growth metrics that they deem most important (sales/revenue, customer satisfaction/NPS, customer LTV, and so on).
While growth marketing is a crucial mandate, there are different obstacles to achieving optimal growth. Nearly four in five marketers report that they are not exceeding growth goals, and low performers are eight times more likely to not exceed growth goals.
While there are multiple hurdles, several challenges are related to data: misalignment on measurement and reporting, lack of data management, and a lack of real-time insights among them.
Barriers to Marketing-driven Growth
- Misalignment on measurement and reporting
- Lack of resources and talent
- Lack of data governance/management
- Lack of real-time insights
- Return on marketing investment
Metrics to Assess Marketing Growth
