Growth Marketing vs. Digital Marketing vs. Growth Hacking: Difference and Comparison

The terms growth marketing, digital marketing, and growth hacking may sound similar and, at times, confuse you. At first glance, it may look like something coined for the sake of marketing, but each of these terms has its methodology, concepts, and goals. To clarify it for you, we’ve highlighted the differences between the three. 

Growth marketing

Let’s start with growth marketing. It encompasses all other forms of marketing that aim to acquire and retain customers at different stages in the buyer’s journey. 

Growth marketing experiments include the following:

1) Paid methods

2) Organic methods

3) Creative or Unconventional methods

4) Growth hacking leveraging influencers/ affiliates/ other people’s communities

5) Marketing automation

6) Lean analytics 

7) Behavioural psychology

 As you can see, growth marketing includes an array of methods such as:

• Digital marketing – paid and organic
• Growth hacking methods – behavioural psychology, A/B testing, and CRO techniques
• Data-driven methods – analytics

All these methods fit well within the growth marketing methodology. So, when the question of the difference between growth marketing and digital marketing arises, you would have understood that digital marketing is a subset of growth marketing. 

Digital marketing vs. Growth hacking

Now, let’s look at what each of these entails. When it comes to digital marketing, the marketers, in this case, strive to achieve customer loyalty and brand awareness. It requires digital marketers to find the best avenues to make the offering appealing to customers. 

Digital marketers use an array of digital tools and platforms to get their message across to the audience. Companies carry out marketing campaigns and work on PPC campaigns. 

When it comes to growth hacking, it is typically associated with startups as they look for exponential growth on a low-cost budget. Rather than finding specific ways to market a product, growth hackers work on the product. Growth hackers work across cross-functional teams such as sales, marketing, and product development. 

YouTube can be considered one of the first businesses to leverage the growth hacking strategy to their benefit. They did so using a simple embed option where anyone who wanted to use a YouTube video could do so with a video embed code. It allowed for easy use of videos without uploading them, thus saving time on operations. 

The responsibilities of growth hackers include stimulating growth and trying to make the product fit as per the customer’s requirements. Rather than looking to achieve the marketing goals, growth hackers wear many hats to achieve growth. 

Now, let’s look at the two terminologies of growth. 

Growth marketing vs. Growth hacking

We’ve already seen that growth hacking falls under the umbrella of growth marketing, and various growth hacks can be designed to support growth marketing experiments. In the case of a startup, this difference is blurred, and people might use these terms interchangeably. 

Now let’s look at how growth marketing and growth hacking are similar. 

There are four basic similarities between the two as follows:

• The goal of both the marketing approaches is revenue growth by leveraging innovative methods to acquire customers.
• Both methods of marketing use data to develop marketing strategies.
• The marketing process of both approaches is based on experimentation to drive improvement in work methodologies continually.
• Growth marketing and growth hacking both are dependent on the quality of the product for either of them to be useful.

And that’s where the similarities end. 

So, what’s the difference between the two. Let’s take a look. 

• The primary difference between the two marketing approaches is the concept. Think of growth marketing as the company’s mission, whereas growth hacking can be seen as a tactic employed to achieve growth.
• Growth hackers aim for rapid growth, whereas growth marketers look for sustainable growth. In practice, it means that when faced with the same problem, a growth marketer and a growth hacker would approach the problem from two different angles.
• Growth hackers shuffle between a marketer and a full-stack developer. On the other hand, growth marketers are wizards when it comes to conducting, analysing, and making use of qualitative research.

Growth Marketing vs. Digital Marketing vs. Growth Hacking

If you were to compare the three, you could rightly say that growth marketing is the main category whereas, digital marketing and growth hacking fall under growth marketing. There can’t be an explicit comparison, as varied marketing strategies can be applied at different stages of your business development cycle. To help you grow, expand, and acquire customers, we at AmuraTech, are always there at your disposal. We are among the top digital marketing agencies in Mumbai. We leverage our extensive digital marketing expertise to ensure the growth of your business.