Influencer vs. Growth Marketing: Which is better for your business?

Marketers are now employing new marketing strategies to reach customers while ensuring maximum retention. Two such marketing strategies are influencer marketing and growth marketing.

While these two types of marketing are great for all kinds of businesses, you will have to choose one to focus on at a time.

So, which one deserves your attention and resources? Influencer marketing or growth marketing.

In this article, we will briefly explore these two types of marketing and the benefits they offer to help you decide which is right for your business.

Influencer Marketing

For good reasons, influencer marketing is making the buzz in the digital marketing world. It offers enhanced brand visibility and viable lead generation. This will, in turn, increase sales and signups.

However, many people hear the phrase for the first time and ask, “What is influencer marketing?”

Influencer marketing happens when a brand collaborates with an online influencer to market its brand or products. The target audience is the audience based on the influencer.

In simple words, influencer marketing is celebrity endorsement on steroids. The online celebrity invites their following to take specific actions in exchange for a commission from the sponsoring brand.

Influencer marketing is not limited to celebrities. It revolves around anyone who has a big enough audience. If you have a large enough following, you too can start making money as an influencer.

Anyone that can influence people to make a decision, particularly on the internet, is an influencer. That person can influence others due to their position, large follower base, authority, personal experience, or knowledge.

What qualifies as a big enough audience depends on the niche.

For instance, within the world of women’s beauty products, you can have influencers with an audience base from hundreds of thousands to millions.

On the other hand, an influencer in electric guitars might be very powerful with an audience size of only a few thousand as the market size for that niche is smaller than the beauty products market.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is popular due to its numerous benefits to small, medium, and large companies. Here are some benefits your business can enjoy from utilizing influencer marketing:

• Increased reach: With influencer marketing, you can combine the reach of your online platforms with the audience reach of the influencer you are contracting to work with you. You get more eyes on your social media content leading to better performance results.
• Establish trust: Most people trust their influencers more than their brands. So, the fastest way to get people to trust your brand or at least get them to try your products is to let their favorite Instagram influencer do the convincing on your behalf.
• Increase social media following: Many brands have grown their social media following by working with influencers regularly. All it takes is a single shoutout for many people to check out your social media pages. If they like what they see, they can give you a follow.
• Generate viable leads: An influencer in the niche you are targeting knows the best way to generate great leads for your marketing campaigns. You can convert these leads into long-term customers with the proper sales funnel.

Growth Marketing

Growth marketing helps brands to grow their user base as widely as possible using cost-effective options. The growth hacker or growth marketer is constantly experimenting with strategies and tools to increase the brand’s customer base.

The concept of growth marketing began in 2010 when Sean Ellis put out an advert for a marketing role. He wasn’t looking for a traditional marketer. He needed someone who would help him grow his user base quickly. That job advert was the beginning of the growth marketer role.

Today, growth marketing has evolved from simply growing the company’s customer base to employing AI, psychology, and big data to align marketing strategies with users’ online behavior. For instance, collect.chat is a great tool that can help businesses get vital information from their customers and learn more about their preferences.

Today’s growth hackers develop highly personalized campaigns to reach their target audience across multiple channels and convert them into customers. They can also leverage AI tools like Jasper.ai to quickly create content that aligns with their audience.

Rather than simply focusing on the numbers, growth marketers focus on building a highly engaged audience of lifetime customers. Research has shown that this approach reduces lead costs, boosts revenue, and promotes overall efficiency.

Benefits of Growth Marketing

Growth marketing offers many benefits to start-ups and established businesses. Here are some of the benefits your business can expect:

• Brand building: Growth hackers look for ways to expand your brand awareness and generate viable leads. Growth marketing does so by experimenting with different methods, assessing results, and leveraging effective strategies.
• Audience knowledge: While growth marketing sounds like a quick frenzy to generate customers using clickbait, it is not. It focuses on those interested in your brand and creates the necessary data points to form their profiles. These can then be used to develop people-centered, data-driven tactics that can convert those interested people into customers.
• Lead generation: The most significant advantage of growth marketing is its ability to generate many high-value leads. However, this works more as a mindset than a one-time marketing event. Any business can employ growth marketing regardless of the size or the industry.
• Get new customers: The traditional goal of growth marketing is to acquire and retain paying customers. Growth marketers achieve this by analyzing existing customer data and fine-tuning marketing strategies to connect with audiences on deeper levels. This connection helps converting new audiences into customers.

So Which is Better for Your Business?

Both Influencer marketing and Growth marketing are great for businesses. The best choice depends on your company’s current level and marketing objectives.

Growth marketing should be the primary approach for businesses that require the paying customers base to grow and develop effectively.

On the other hand, businesses with a solid paying customer base can use influencer marketing to boost brand awareness and increase sales.

However, these two marketing types are not exclusive. A growth marketing strategy can include influencer marketing as one of the ways through which marketers achieve their marketing goals.

Conclusion

This article covered the different aspects of influencer and growth marketing, including how they work.

Your choice of marketing strategy should depend on what your marketing goals are. You don’t have to include both in your campaign. Stick to what works for your business.

Furthermore, marketing tools like Social Pilot and Active Campaign can help you automate processes and optimize your marketing to the fullest.