Brand Marketing vs Growth Marketing – Key Differences6 min read

Marketing is a constantly expanding and ever-changing field. Over the years, several types of marketing have emerged that are better than the ones before them. 

Two of the most common types of marketing are brand marketing and growth marketing. These two concepts have been on the rise in recent years. 

Both play a critical role in the growth of a business, but they are different from each other. This article discusses what brand marketing and growth marketing are and how they are different from each other.

What Is Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing requires an in-depth analysis of a brand and involves structuring, building, and boosting a company’s brand. It defines a brand based on its target audience, competitors, and brand’s core values. 

Brand marketing revolves around solving questions regarding a brand like the following:

• Who is the brand’s target audience?
• What are they looking for?
• What is the brand’s identity?
• What are the brand’s objectives and core values?
• Who are the brand’s competitors, and how does the brand differ from them?

Brand visibility and awareness are two essential factors for brands to get maximum recognition from the audience. Brand marketing aims to enable this by creating strong and personal customer relationships. Brand marketing is all about intriguing and attracting customers by telling interesting and impressive stories.

To succeed in brand marketing, a brand should follow three important factors: consistency, expression, and delivery.

Consistency

The marketing campaigns run by the brands should be able to attract and convert customers. For this, they need to stay consistent. Brands need to regularly stay in touch with customers (through messages, email, etc.) and improve the content to attract their attention. 

Expression 

A strong relationship with customers is needed for them to buy your products or services. Emotionally connecting with them and being empathetic to their pain points is an important factor in increasing sales.

Delivery

Speed of delivery is also another factor that can build trust among customers. It can also result in customers having a good impression of the brand. Speed delivery can sometimes be rather challenging because delivering products along long distances can take time. 

Brand marketing uses several such factors to ensure that the brand stays at the top compared to its competitors. Some of the main objectives that it aims to achieve for a brand are

• media coverage,
• creating impact through influencers, and
• increased social media presence. 

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses completely on the growth of a business. It uses tested and proven, data-driven marketing strategies that are a result of repeated experimentation processes.

Growth marketers repeatedly experiment with new and creative ideas and measure them using various growth marketing tools to understand which strategy works best for their business. They then develop the idea into a marketing strategy to attract customers.

Unlike other marketing strategies, growth marketing ams for full funnel growth. That is, it goes through all the stages of the customer’s journey with the brand, right from the awareness stage to the referral stage. 

A customer’s journey with a brand can be divided into six stages. It can also be called the pirate funnel. The six stages of the pirate funnel are

• Awareness,
• Acquisition,
• Activation,
• Retention,
• Revenue,
• Referral.

Consistent experimentation and coming up with creative, out-of-the-box ideas are some of the core principles of growth marketing. Through this approach, marketers don’t need to rely on their gut feeling about whether a marketing strategy will succeed or not. 

Growth marketing is the preferred marketing method for any company that aims for long-term growth. It benefits the growth of a business in many ways:

Data-driven 

Growth marketers use data-driven marketing strategies that are experimented on and proven to give the results that they want.

Focuses on full-funnel growth

Growth marketers travel with the customers throughout their journey with a brand. Right from the awareness stage to the referral stage, growth marketers tend to all the needs of the customers.

Cost-efficient 

Unlike other marketing methods, growth marketers only implement strategies that will succeed and give the results they aim for. They don’t have to spend a huge amount of money on a single marketing strategy and hope for it to succeed.

Brand Marketing vs. Growth Marketing – What Are the Major Difference

When thinking about the differences between brand marketing and growth marketing, brand marketing encourages the promotion of products and aims to create a strong brand identity. 

Growth marketing, on the other hand, revolves around constant experimenting with different marketing ideas and implementing them to enhance the overall results of the marketing strategies. 

Implementing brand marketing and growth marketing together in their marketing strategies can enhance the reach and efficiency of a business. It can bring substantial growth to the business and helps with reaching more customers. 

Brand marketing and growth marketing complement each other. They are essential for a business’s growth in their own ways, and one shouldn’t be prioritized over the other. 

When brands prioritize brand marketing

When a company prioritizes brand marketing over growth marketing, they don’t express the value the brand can offer to its customers. No matter how much brands spend on PPCs, SEO marketing, and influencers to establish their brand unless they offer value to their customers, they can’t gain the trust of the customers.

When brands prioritize growth marketing

Often, brands put all their efforts into adding valuable content to their customers and don’t focus on branding. They try to create valuable blog content, videos, infographics without paying equal attention to creating a compelling and brand. 

This can make the brands and their content feel stuffy, impersonal, and not compelling enough to look at. Putting equal consideration into the company’s branding, content, and image can add more value to the customers and build trust in the brand. 

Key Takeaway

Each type of marketing has its advantages and helps a business’s growth in its own ways. Their level of skill sets and creativity required are different, but they help the company succeed. When implemented together, they can help businesses grow faster in a relatively shorter amount of time.