What is growth marketing? experiments across the whole journey
Growth marketing grew out of "growth hacking", a term Sean Ellis coined in 2010.
He described a growth hacker as a person whose true north is growth, and the job as a disciplined loop: prioritize ideas, test them, keep the ones that work and cut the rest.
"The faster this process can be repeated," he wrote, the more likely you are to find scalable ways to grow.
Growth marketing is that loop applied to the whole customer journey, not just the top of it.
A growth team works on acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral, and judges every idea by one metric that reflects real customer value.
Reforge's Brian Balfour and colleagues pushed the idea further: the fastest-growing products are a system of loops, not funnels, where the output of one cycle (a new user, a piece of content, a referral) feeds the next.
A good growth agency looks for those loops, not just cheaper clicks.
Growth marketing vs traditional marketing
Traditional marketing plans campaigns, ships them and reports on reach and leads.
Growth marketing runs many small tests, measures each against a growth metric and moves budget weekly.
It also reaches past marketing: onboarding emails, pricing pages, in-product prompts and referral schemes are all fair game.
What does a growth marketing agency do?
It sets up tracking, picks a growth metric, builds a backlog of experiments and runs them across paid media, SEO, conversion rate optimization (CRO), lifecycle email and creative.
The agencies below list exactly these services on their own sites.
The good ones also tell you when the problem is the product, not the marketing.
