How Growth and Digital Marketing are Different - and Why It Matters for Your Business
If you’re a growth-stage business, you’ve likely heard the buzz about “growth marketing” and wondered how it differs from good old “digital marketing.” In this blog, we’ll break down growth marketing vs digital marketing in plain language, and discuss why the distinction matters for driving real ROI. We’ll also explore how a full-funnel growth approach – spanning acquisition, retention, and revenue – can transform your marketing strategy.
Along the way, we’ll address common questions (e.g. “What is growth marketing?”, “Which departments does growth marketing support?”, “Why do you need a growth marketing strategy?”) and share insights from industry experts. By the end, you’ll see why growth marketing is more than a buzzword – it’s a strategic mindset that modern businesses (especially B2B SaaS and retail/service companies) are adopting to fuel sustainable growth.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the practice of promoting your business through online channels – think social media, search engines, emails, and websites. I used to tell my team that “everyone is a digital marketer”, because inherently almost all of our efforts are online these days. The Mad Men branding agencies of the past still exist, flaunting multi-million dollar billboard, print and TV projects - but for the modern business, digital marketing is cheaper, more tangible, and has a clear path to ROI (return on investment).
It’s the modern evolution of advertising and brand-building, using the internet to reach and engage customers. Key aspects of digital marketing include:
- SEO: improving your search engine ranking placements (SERPS), search engine optimization is a key
- PPC advertising: paid ads on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc
- Content marketing and development: blogs, PDFs, videos and more.
- Social Media Management: fairly self-explanatory
- Email Marketing, Chatbots, and Automation
The main goal of digital marketing is typically to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads or online sales through these channels.
In short, a digital marketing strategy is often about executing specific campaigns on digital platforms to attract an audience. Success is usually measured in metrics like impressions, clicks, website visits, and conversions (e.g. form fills or ecommerce purchases).
For example, a digital marketing agency might run a Facebook ad campaign for a local retailer to drive foot traffic to their store, or optimize a SaaS company’s website to rank higher on search engines with an SEO-driven content strategy.
Digital marketing has become ubiquitous – according to recent statistics, over 200 billion dollars are collectively spent on marketing each year, much of it on digital channels. Without a doubt, digital marketing is a vital part of any modern marketing effort. However, it often focuses heavily on the top of the funnel – building initial awareness and acquiring new leads, clicks or follows – and that’s where growth marketing takes things to the next level.
What is Growth Marketing (and Why Is It Important)?
Growth marketing is often described as “marketing 2.0”– a more comprehensive, data-driven approach that goes beyond just getting new leads. Instead of running one-off campaigns and hoping for the best, growth marketing looks at the entire customer journey from first touch to retention and loyalty. One industry expert summed it up well: “Growth marketing goes beyond traditional digital marketing. Instead of just focusing on getting new customers, it looks at the entire customer journey—from first interaction to long-term loyalty.”
Growth marketing focuses on optimizing every stage of the customer journey, driving retention, and ensuring that all strategic priorities are aligned for sustainable growth. In other words, a growth marketer cares not only about acquisition but also activation, retention, revenue, and referral.
Growth marketing is inherently full-funnel and ROI-driven, optimizing the entire marketing funnel from awareness to retention. It uses many of the same digital channels and tactics as digital marketing, but with a broader strategic goal: maximize overall business growth, not just vanity metrics. A growth marketing strategy might start with setting a concrete goal (e.g. “increase monthly recurring revenue by 20% this year”) and then work backwards to build a marketing system to achieve it. Tactics are chosen and tuned based on data, continuous experimentation, and what moves the needle on key business KPIs (like revenue, conversion rates, or retention). This strategic and long-term approach aligns marketing closely with sales, product, and customer success teams, and using full-funnel tactics (from awareness ads to retention emails) to drive sustainable, scalable, and repeatable growth.
Crucially, growth marketing emphasizes keeping and delighting users after you win them. Delighting users is central to growth marketing, as it drives engagement, loyalty, and referrals. Why is that so important? Because retaining customers and increasing their lifetime value has huge payoffs. Studies have shown that acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. And according to research by Bain & Company, boosting your customer retention rate by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Those numbers are eye-opening – and they underscore why growth marketing invests heavily in things like customer onboarding, engagement, and loyalty programs (areas traditional marketing might ignore). A growth marketer will ask not only “How do we get customers?” but also “How do we make sure they stay, spend, and refer others?” If digital marketing is about filling the funnel, growth marketing is about fueling that funnel from end-to-end.
Another hallmark of growth marketing is its experimentation and data focus. Growth marketers operate a bit like scientists – they form hypotheses, run A/B tests, measure results, and iterate quickly. They might test two versions of a landing page to see which converts better, or experiment with different email subject lines to improve open rates. This culture of continuous testing means a growth strategy keeps improving over time, rather than set-and-forget campaigns. Modern growth marketing also embraces technology like marketing automation and even AI tools to personalize at scale and find efficiencies. (In fact, the “modern growth marketing” toolkit often involves AI-enabled analytics, chatbots, or content generation – letting you work smarter and turn data into actionable insights). All of this makes growth marketing especially powerful for growth-stage companies that need to maximize ROI and adapt quickly.
So, in summary: Growth marketing is a strategic, full-funnel approach to marketing that focuses on measurable business growth (not just marketing outputs). Growth marketing is important because it enables businesses to expand, adapt to market changes, and achieve sustainable growth through data-driven and innovative strategies. It’s important because it aligns marketing with revenue, prioritizes customer retention and lifetime value, and uses data-driven experimentation to continually improve results. In the next section, we’ll directly compare growth vs. digital marketing to highlight these differences.
Growth Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Key Differences
We’ve defined each approach – now let’s pit growth marketing vs. digital marketing head-to-head. How do they truly differ in practice? Below are some key differences between a traditional digital marketing approach and a growth marketing approach:
Focus & Goals
A typical digital marketing strategy often prioritizes top-of-funnel metrics – things like website traffic, ad impressions, clicks, or social media followers. At dotfun, we call those vanity metrics as they are not related to actual business growth (but do tell a good story of how marketing efforts are affecting the online landscape). The focus is on delivering specific marketing outputs or campaigns (e.g. launching X ads, writing Y blog posts) and hitting channel-specific KPIs. Growth marketing, on the other hand, is goal-driven rather than tactic-driven. It measures success by business outcomes – think revenue growth, conversion rates, customer retention – not just marketing activity. Every initiative in growth marketing is tied to long-term business goals like increasing market share, improving LTV, or driving sustainable revenue growth.
Funnel Coverage
Perhaps the biggest difference is the funnel scope. Traditional digital marketing tends to concentrate on awareness and acquisition – getting your brand out there and attracting leads/customers. Stages lower in the funnel (activation, retention, referral) are often overlooked or left to other teams. Growth marketing covers the full funnel. In growth marketing, activation (ensuring new users have a great first experience), retention (keeping customers happy and returning), revenue (upsells, cross-sells, higher AOV), and referral (customers promoting you) are all critical. This holistic approach means growth marketing doesn’t stop at acquisition; it pushes for continuous growth through customer life cycle.
Approach & Tactics:
Digital marketing campaigns are often “set it and forget it” – e.g. you launch an ad campaign with a set budget and then mostly let it run its course. The mindset can be more static: execute proven tactics and hope for expected results. Growth marketing is iterative and experimental. Growth teams are constantly tweaking and testing. They rely on A/B testing, personalization, and rapid experimentation to find what works best. When something doesn’t work, they pivot quickly (“fail fast”) and try a new angle. This dynamic, agile approach often uncovers innovative strategies (for example, discovering a viral referral program that drastically lowers customer acquisition cost). Growth marketing is about optimization at every step – whereas digital marketing might be about implementation of a planned campaign.
Cross-Functional Alignment
In many companies, digital marketing can operate in a silo – separate from sales, product development, or customer service. The digital marketing team might hand off leads to sales and not be deeply involved beyond that. Growth marketing breaks down these silos. A growth marketing effort usually works as a strategic partner across departments.
Growth marketers collaborate closely with sales (to ensure lead quality and follow-through), with product teams (to improve the product based on marketing insights or to implement growth hacks in the product), and with customer success/support (to improve onboarding and reduce churn). In fact, growth marketing is often part of a RevOps (Revenue Operations) strategy, aligning marketing, sales, and service toward shared revenue.
The upshot: growth marketing involves more teamwork and organizational integration, whereas digital marketing might stick narrowly to “the marketing department’s job.” Growth marketing is also about building a long term strategy for sustained, ongoing growth, not just short-term wins. (We’ll dive more into which departments benefit from growth marketing in the next section.)
Metrics & Accountability:
Because digital marketing often reports on marketing-centric metrics (click-through rates, cost-per-click, social engagement), it’s sometimes harder for a business to connect those metrics to bottom-line impact. A frustration many CEOs have with traditional marketing is “Okay, we got 1,000 likes, but how did that impact revenue?” Growth marketing avoids this by focusing on measurable growth metrics. Growth teams track things like CAC (customer acquisition cost), LTV (lifetime value), churn rate, monthly recurring revenue, etc. Everything is tied to ROI. If an initiative isn’t moving a meaningful needle, a growth marketer will know and adjust. This greater accountability is one reason growth marketing is gaining popularity – businesses are tired of marketing that can’t justify itself.
In fact, companies that align marketing efforts with sales and business goals see impressive improvements (one study found that aligned teams achieved 36% higher customer retention rates and significantly higher sales win-rates). Those are the kind of metrics executives care about – and they’re exactly what growth marketing targets.
Which Departments Does Growth Marketing Support?
One way to think of growth marketing is as a “team sport.” Because it focuses on the entire customer lifecycle, it naturally touches multiple departments within a business. A common question is “Which departments does growth marketing support?” The short answer: pretty much all the customer-facing ones, given enough collaboration. A 2022 Affise report put it succinctly: “Growth marketing obviously benefits your marketing department, but it also works together with and supports other less obvious departments in your business.”
Marketing
This is a given – growth marketing lives partly in the marketing department. By taking a data-driven approach, growth marketers help marketing teams figure out what messages, content, or channels resonate best with the target audience. Traditional marketing campaigns become smarter as growth marketing brings in A/B testing results, customer behavior insights, and KPI tracking. Also, growth marketing plans for the long term rather than just short blasts. The marketing team benefits by not just getting leads, but getting qualified leads and guidance on how to nurture them effectively.
Sales:
Growth marketing closely supports the sales department, and in some companies, sales and marketing are unified under Revenue Operations. It’s about generating leads that convert and giving salespeople better intel on prospects. For example, growth marketers might implement lead scoring, so sales knows which leads are hot. They also work on customer acquisition and retention strategies over long periods – effectively making sure there’s a steady pipeline of potential customers and that existing customers are primed for upsell. This makes the sales team’s job easier: they spend time on the most promising opportunities and have data (from marketing automation or CRM) to tailor their approach. In a well-aligned growth strategy, marketing and sales operate like a unified revenue team. (It’s no surprise that alignment here yields big benefits – companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy significantly higher win rates and retention.)
Customer Success / Support
Because growth marketing cares about retention and customer satisfaction, it naturally partners with customer success or support teams. Growth marketers will examine the customer experience to identify pain points – perhaps through surveys, NPS scores, or review site data – and then work on campaigns to address those. For instance, if research shows customers have unanswered questions post-purchase, growth marketing might create content (help center articles, how-to videos, onboarding emails) to preempt those support tickets. By smoothing the user journey and educating customers, growth marketing helps reduce the burden on support (fewer complaints) and boosts customer happiness. It’s a win-win: support teams deal with less firefighting, and customers feel more “supported” by the proactive outreach.
Product (R&D)
An often overlooked area, but vital – growth marketing can feed valuable insights to the product development or R&D department. Through analytics and experimentation, growth teams learn a lot about what users like or where they drop off. They might find, for example, that a certain feature is causing confusion and leading to churn or that G2 reviews show a statistically significant amount of customers wish the product had X feature. A growth marketer will relay this to the product team, perhaps advocating for a fix or new feature that could improve activation. In some organizations, growth and product are tightly integrated (growth teams might run in-product experiments, like tweaks to a signup flow, to increase conversion). This collaboration ensures that the product evolves in ways that support marketing goals and vice versa.
Management & Finance
Finally, growth marketing supports senior stakeholders by providing clear data and accountability. Because growth initiatives are tied to business metrics, the C-suite or finance department gains transparency into what marketing is doing and what the ROI is. Growth marketers present KPIs that matter to management – revenue, CAC/LTV ratios, retention rates – enabling better strategic decisions. For example, a CFO can appreciate a growth marketer who shows that “our marketing spend of $X last quarter directly yielded $Y in revenue and a 3x ROI, and here’s how we’ll improve it further.” This level of insight can justify budgets or guide where to invest more. In essence, growth marketing earns its seat at the table with executives by speaking the language of business results, not just marketing fluff.
In summary, growth marketing is an integrated approach that touches marketing, sales, support, product, and leadership. By sharing data and collaborating, it helps break down silos – everyone works together toward the common goal of growing the business. If you implement growth marketing in your company, don’t be surprised if it unites teams that previously barely talked. Growth wins require all hands on deck!
How Is Growth Marketing Changing the Industry?
Marketing as a field is evolving rapidly, and growth marketing is at the forefront of that change. In the past, many companies poured money into marketing hoping for elusive branding benefits or ran isolated campaigns without connecting to revenue. Now, the trend is shifting towards accountability, agility, and alignment – which is essentially what growth marketing embodies. Here are a few ways growth marketing is changing the industry landscape:
From Vanity Metrics to ROI Metrics:
Businesses (especially startups and growth-stage companies) have grown frustrated with vanity metrics that don’t translate to dollars. As one LinkedIn article put it, growth marketing is often more efficient and cost-effective than traditional digital marketing, precisely because it ties efforts directly to growth. We’re seeing more CMOs and marketing teams being held accountable for revenue targets, not just lead volume. Marketing teams are now expected to prove how campaigns drive business growth – a mindset shift driven by growth marketing success stories.
Faster Iteration and Experimentation:
The rise of growth hacking in Silicon Valley over the past decade showed what’s possible when you iterate quickly and base decisions on data. This ethos has spread to mainstream marketing. Today’s marketers are adopting tools and processes for continuous experimentation – something growth teams have championed. As a Forbes piece noted, brands are embracing a “test frequently, learn quickly, adapt effectively” blueprint in their marketing. In practice, this means shorter campaign cycles, A/B testing as a norm, and a willingness to pivot strategies based on cold, hard analytics. The industry is becoming more nimble and tech-driven, with growth marketers often leading the charge in using analytics platforms, user behavior data, and even AI to find new opportunities.
Blurring of Marketing and Product:
Growth marketing is also changing the traditional boundaries of roles. We now hear about “product-led growth” and “growth product managers,” reflecting a closer collaboration between marketing and product teams. Marketing is no longer just about comms and ads; it can involve optimizing the product experience. This holistic view – treating the product itself as a marketing asset – comes from growth marketing’s influence. Companies are reorganizing, with some creating Growth Teams that include marketers, engineers, and product folks all working together. The result is more cohesive user experiences and faster implementation of ideas that drive growth.
Rise of the Growth Marketer Role:
Ten years ago, “Growth Manager” or “Head of Growth” were rare titles – now they’re common, even outside of tech startups. Organizations are actively hiring growth marketers, and many marketing agencies are rebranding as growth agencies. In Austin, for example, agencies that used to call themselves digital marketing firms are now highlighting full-funnel or growth marketing services to meet client demand. This is a direct response to industry frustration with the old model. When business owners repeatedly see lackluster results from conventional agencies, they start seeking “growth” experts who promise a more rigorous, partnership-driven approach. Forbes even dubbed growth marketing “the next frontier of marketing,” noting that companies are increasingly seeking growth marketers who have a blend of analytical, creative, and technical skills to drive real business results.
In summary, growth marketing is pushing the marketing industry to be more data-driven, holistic, and accountable for business growth. It’s a response to the failings of old-school approaches and the opportunities of new technology. For marketers, it means learning new skills and collaborating more. For business owners, it means marketing is delivering tangible value, not smoke-and-mirrors. As one Quora commentator observed, the market has become far more dynamic and audience-driven, and “the growth mindset is always a game changer” in such a dynamic environment. Companies that embrace growth marketing are often outpacing those that don’t, which is why this approach is gaining ground fast.
Why Do You Need a Growth Marketing Strategy?
By now, you might be thinking: “This sounds great in theory, but why do I need a growth marketing strategy for my business?” Whether you’re running a B2B SaaS startup or a local retail/service company, there are several compelling reasons to adopt a growth marketing mindset:
Full-Funnel Optimization = More Revenue
If you’re only focusing on customer acquisition (as many traditional marketing plans do), you’re leaving money on the table. A growth marketing strategy ensures you are optimizing every stage of the funnel. Importantly, growth marketing is a long term strategy focused on sustained, ongoing growth and building lasting customer relationships, not just short-term wins. For example, you might double your revenue not by doubling new customers, but by reducing churn or increasing average purchase size for existing customers. A growth strategy will address those opportunities. It’s about working smarter, not just harder or louder.
Better ROI on Marketing Spend:
Marketing budgets are precious, especially for growth-stage companies. You want to make sure every dollar is pulling its weight. Growth marketing’s data-driven approach helps allocate budget to what actually works. Instead of blindly spending on a channel because “that’s what we’ve always done,” a growth strategy constantly evaluates performance and shifts resources accordingly. For instance, if Facebook Ads aren’t yielding good ROI but LinkedIn Ads are, a growth marketer will spot that and adjust spend quickly. Or if a certain blog post is unexpectedly bringing in high-converting traffic, a growth strategy would double down on that content angle. Companies with aligned, growth-focused marketing efforts can drive significantly more revenue – one study noted highly aligned organizations achieved 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts.
Staying Competitive in a Changing Market
Consumer behavior and digital channels evolve quickly. What worked in marketing a few years ago (or even last year) might not work tomorrow. A growth marketing strategy, with its emphasis on iteration and learning, helps you stay ahead of the curve. It bakes adaptability into your marketing DNA. Consider new technologies like AI in marketing: growth-oriented teams are early adopters of tools that can give them an edge, and have the data background to prove the results. Having a growth strategy means you’re not caught flat-footed when the industry shifts; you’re proactively seeking modern growth marketing techniques to leverage.
Alignment and Team Motivation:
Another underrated benefit of a growth marketing strategy is how it aligns your team with clear goals. When you pivot from vague marketing goals (e.g. “get our name out there”) to concrete growth goals (e.g. “increase free trial-to-paid conversion rate by 15%”), it gives everyone direction. Your marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams can rally around these objectives, which improves collaboration and morale. Everyone can see the impact of their work on common KPIs. This transparency can be motivating – wins are shared, and losses become lessons that drive the next experiment. Culturally, a growth strategy can transform your company into one that values data and innovation, not just hierarchy or routine. It’s empowering for team members to have a hypothesis, test it, and directly see results. Over time, this creates a culture of continuous improvement, which is a huge strategic advantage.
Because Your Competitors Might Already Be Doing It
Finally, consider that many businesses are now embracing growth marketing. If your competitors are working with full-funnel growth strategies (or partnering with growth marketing agencies) and you’re not, you risk falling behind. For example, if you’re a SaaS company in Austin and your competitor has a growth team optimizing every stage (and perhaps using advanced tactics like churn prediction models, targeted ABM campaigns, etc.), they will outpace you in acquiring and retaining customers. Similarly, local service businesses that employ growth marketing (maybe through loyalty programs, online review management, referral incentives, etc.) will start capturing more market share. Not having a growth marketing strategy in 2025 is a bit like not having a digital presence in 2010 – you can survive, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage.
The TL;DR? You need a growth marketing strategy if you want sustainable, efficient, and scalable growth. It provides a roadmap for how to grow systematically rather than haphazardly. It aligns your efforts with outcomes that matter and helps future-proof your marketing against changes. Perhaps the best endorsement comes from seeing the results: companies that execute growth marketing well often turn customers into lifelong fans and see compounding returns year over year. If you care about growing your business (and who doesn’t?), growth marketing isn’t optional – it’s essential.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the debate of growth marketing vs digital marketing isn’t about declaring one “better” in all cases – it’s about understanding what your business needs to truly grow. If you’re only looking for short-term boosts or isolated campaign help, a standard digital marketing play might suffice. But if you’re aiming for sustainable, long-term growth (and you want every part of your funnel to contribute to that growth), then adopting a growth marketing approach is the way forward. Growth marketing brings a strategic, full-funnel, and ROI-centric philosophy that modern B2B SaaS companies and retail/service businesses can greatly benefit from. It forces you to focus on what really matters: acquiring the right customers, keeping them happy, and generating more value from those relationships over time.
In this blog, we covered what growth marketing is, how it differs from traditional digital marketing, which departments it touches, and why it’s changing the marketing game. We also addressed common frustrations with the old ways and how dotfun’s approach is built as an antidote to those issues. If there’s one takeaway, it’s that marketing success today is not just about flashy ads or viral tweets – it’s about aligning marketing with growth. It’s about metrics that matter, creative experimentation, and cross-functional teamwork. Whether you partner with an agency like dotfun or build your own growth team, embracing this mindset can propel your business to new heights.
If you’re ready to move beyond the basics of digital marketing and truly accelerate your company’s growth, we’re here to help. Drop us a line at dotfun – we’d love to become your extended growth team and make your marketing not only effective, but dare we say, fun. Here’s to looking good, feeling good, and running good – cheers to your growth journey!
