Unlike traditional marketing, which often focuses on top-of-funnel activities (awareness and acquisition), growth marketing looks at acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (the “AARRR” framework).
Growth marketers run quick experiments to find high-leverage opportunities — for example, optimizing onboarding emails to increase activation rates, or A/B testing landing pages for higher conversions.
Dropbox’s famous referral program (offering extra storage for inviting friends) is a classic growth marketing tactic that fueled viral growth at low cost.
Growth marketing blends product, engineering, and marketing to create scalable, compounding growth loops.