This is one a series of posts trying to explain marketing jargon to my engineer friends. I will explain as many terms as possible without the marketing jargon so it’s easy to understand.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth Marketing is a data-driven, experimental approach to growing a product’s user base, revenue, or engagement across the entire customer lifecycle, not just acquisition. Think of it as constantly running experiments on all the channels that your customers can see you on. Follow the model of hypothesis >> experiment >> measure >> iterate.
Growth marketers care about the full funnel:
- Acquisition: How do new users find you?
- Activation: Do they have a great first experience?
- Retention: Do they come back?
- Referral: Do they tell others?
- Revenue: Do they pay, and keep paying?
This framework is commonly known as AARRR (or “Pirate Metrics”, coined by Dave McClure) and it’s basically the engineer’s system design doc for a growth team.
What Makes It Different from Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is campaign-focused: launch a campaign, hope it works, measure after. Growth marketing is always on: run 10 small experiments simultaneously, kill the losers fast, double down on winners. It’s much closer to how an engineering team ships features — small, iterative, data-backed.
Growth marketing is a scientific way for companies to measure what works. There is more math than creativity into growth marketing. Bayesian and Frequentist statistical methods are most commonly used to measure the success or failure of an experiment. Read more about the differences here.
What Growth Marketers Actually Do Day-to-Day
- Write copy variants for landing pages and test which one converts better
- Set up email drip campaigns triggered by user behavior (e.g., “user signed up but never completed onboarding”)
- Analyze funnel drop-offs and work with engineers to fix friction points
- Understand activation signals, the “Aha!” moments and lead
- Run cohort analyses to understand which acquisition channels bring users who actually stay
- Instrument tracking events to understand where users are getting stuck
Engineers Are Secretly Great at Growth Marketing
Growth marketing has more in common with engineering than most people realize. It’s hypothesis-driven, data-dependent, and iterative. Engineers who understand the product deeply often make excellent growth collaborators because they can spot technical friction in the funnel that marketers can’t. If you’ve ever noticed that your signup form has 12 fields when it only needs 3, you’ve already done growth marketing thinking. Or you have been seeing friction if one of your fields errors out every other time, you have thought about the purchase funnel.
Another term commonly thrown around is “growth hacking”. Growth marketing is not the same as Growth hacking. “Hacking” implies one-off tricks. Growth marketing is a systematic, repeatable process. The hacks are just individual experiments within that process.
[All opinions expressed are my own and have no relation with my employers – past or present. I use Huffl.AI to structure my thoughts. ]
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