Growth Marketing Isn't Just for Big Tech. Small Businesses Can Win With It Too.

I've been working in marketing for years, and I'm pretty obsessed with growth marketing. Not because it's trendy or because everyone's talking about it, but because I've seen firsthand how it can transform businesses of all sizes. From freelancers to large public companies, the scrappy optimization mindset of growth marketing just…works.

But there's this misconception that growth marketing is only for well-funded startups or large tech companies with massive data. Sure, data is crucial for a solid growth marketing strategy, but it’s absolutely false that small businesses with small data cannot reap the benefits of growth marketing.

What is growth marketing, really?

While traditional, brand, or digital marketing tends to focus on specific goals like selling products or creating brand awareness, growth marketing focuses on optimizing the entire customer lifecycle, using data-driven insights to achieve repeatable business growth, rather than just focusing on customer acquisition.

It doesn't stop at getting people through the door. It cares just as much about what happens after someone becomes a customer. It cares about keeping them happy, getting them to buy more, and turn them into raving fans who bring their friends along.

Instead of needing massive budgets for flashy campaigns, growth marketing allows you to get a bit scrappier to optimize what’s working and fix what’s not at each step of the customer journey.

Some of my favorite growth strategies have included:

• Helping a new handcrafted decor company realize that their biggest sales opportunity wasn’t in diversifying the products they sell to reach to a wider audience, but instead in developing a system that captures purchaser reviews and offers referral incentives so they could turn their existing customer base into advocates that drive referral sales.

• Working with a tech company to discover their growth bottleneck wasn't user acquisition, it was activation and engagement strategies, which we solved with content marketing and rapid experimentation to increase content engagement and drive ad revenue.

• Working with an organization that wanted to increase the ROI of their marketing tactics, without reducing their audience size. We found ways to streamline their tech stack, reducing wasted spend, while maintaining the same audience size.

Yep. Sometimes your biggest growth opportunity isn't a marketing campaign, it's fixing an operational issue that's driving customers away.

What I love about these examples is that they show growth marketing's true power. A solo entrepreneur can use these principles just as effectively as a Fortune 500 company, sometimes even more effectively because they can move faster and get closer to their customers.

Growth marketing helps you see the whole picture, and I love that holistic approach.

Where Growth Marketing Fits in the Big Picture.

Growth marketing blends Marketing, Sales, Product, and Client Services, but it doesn't work in isolation. It needs brand marketing for awareness, content marketing for engagement, and product marketing to ensure people actually get value from your offering.

Growth marketing is also channel agnostic. It looks at your customer journey holistically and identifies the best channels for each step. It invests in channels that drive impact, not just the ones you think you should be on.

Dare I say it? Maybe you don't need TikTok. Maybe hiring an email marketer for your 5 subscribers isn't the best use of budget. A growth marketer helps you identify the smartest way to spend your time, energy, and money for real impact.

When you combine different marketing and sales strategies with channel agnostic tactics, you create sustainable growth that doesn't depend on constantly chasing new customers or burning through ad budgets. You're building a brand people genuinely want to engage with while being smart about turning that engagement into business growth.

How I Actually Do Growth Marketing

I'm a big fan of the AARRR framework (also known as the Pirate framework), seeing each stage as interconnected parts of one system:

Acquisition strategies I develop are always informed by retention data. When I discover that a client's best customers come from referrals, we focus on creating more referral opportunities rather than just buying more ads. It's about being smart with limited resources.

Activation is where I get really nerdy with testing. I don't just guess what content will drive the highest engagement, I test different onboarding sequences, welcome experiences, and first-touch interactions to optimize for that magical moment when someone goes from "maybe interested" to "I'm in."

Retention is where I think growth marketing really shows its difference from traditional approaches. Instead of generic "we miss you" campaigns, I dig into the data to understand why people leave and what makes others stick around for years. This often leads to product or service improvements, not just marketing tweaks.

Referral programs I design aren't just about asking for reviews, they're about creating experiences so good that people can't help but share them. Sometimes this means improving the product, sometimes it's about how we handle problems when they arise.

Revenue optimization is where I look at the entire relationship. Often, the path to more revenue isn't selling more products, it's helping customers get more value from what they've already bought or optimizing processes to reduce wasted spend, ultimately putting more revenue back into the business. I love these kinds of strategic insights.

How do clients know when they are ready for growth marketing?

I get asked often when growth marketing makes sense, and honestly, it’s about mindset and organizational commitment vs business stage or budget thresholds. Growth marketing efforts works best when businesses are willing to experiment and make strategic changes to their marketing efforts, product offerings, or customer service interactions based on what the data tell us. They are willing to let go of previous assumptions, current tactics, or even organizational silos to invest in more impactful efforts that support growth.

The clients I work best with are the ones already starting to ask the tough questions:

• "Where do we start?"

• “Is [channel xyz] really worth it?”

• “Is my brand resonating?”

• “How much budget do I really need to spend on ads to make an impact?”

• “Why am I losing customers before the point of sale?”

• “What else should I be doing?”

• “How can I be doing this better?”

If you're asking these kinds of questions, you're exactly the type of client I get excited about working with. Regardless of business size. Instead of just throwing more money at Facebook ads and hoping for the best, you understand that marketing should drive measurable business outcomes, you want to be strategic about your investments, and you're looking for an approach that connects directly to your growth goals.

That’s where Funda Marketing comes in.

I work with you to see the whole picture and guide you on how to achieve the outcomes you want. Maybe your biggest growth opportunity isn't in traditional advertising. Maybe it’s a channel you haven’t tried yet. Or maybe it’s a channel you need to stop investing in. Maybe it's not your sales process. Maybe there's an operational improvement or an automation that would make everything else work better.

With Funda Marketing, you get someone who understands your goals, sees the connections others miss, and helps you make smart decisions about where to focus your energy. Think of me as the strategic partner who's committed to helping you think about what's best for your organization's long-term, sustainable, success.

If you're ready to have a strategic growth marketing partner who can help you see what's possible and make it happen, I'd love to explore how we might work together. Contact us to get started.