Growth marketing: what it is and how it works

Marcel GarciaUpdated Sep 24, 2026

Growth marketing is the discipline that treats client acquisition as a system: strategy, digital assets and continuous experimentation, measured in clients and in cost per client, not in visits.

It is not "doing more marketing" or "doing digital marketing". It is an approach in which every euro invested can be attributed to a business metric (acquisition, conversion, retention or revenue), and in which whatever doesn't move that metric stops being done. The difference from classic marketing is the loop: a campaign is planned, run and measured at the end; an experiment is launched, measured daily and corrected before the week is over.

This guide is signed by Marcel Garcia, founder of HAKI, and is updated with what we learn in the systems we run. Every number in it is published on a case page.

Growth marketing and traditional marketing

It's not that one is right and the other wrong: they solve different problems. For awareness in consumer goods, the traditional kind still makes sense. To scale a business that sells something expensive, growth marketing is the honest route.

	Traditional marketing	Growth marketing
Objective	Brand awareness	Measurable growth: clients, CAC, LTV, revenue
Starting point	A creative brief	The data, the ideal client and the current funnel
Unit of work	The campaign	The experiment
Pace	Quarterly or yearly	Weekly
Main metric	Impressions, reach	New clients and the LTV:CAC ratio
Decisions	Intuition and experience	Hypotheses and data
How it is paid	By the hour or by deliverable	By result, when there is a growth partner

Growth marketing is not growth hacking

There is no trick that multiplies a business by ten. What people call a "hack" is usually one of three things: a tactical optimisation inside a system that was already well designed, a temporary edge on a channel that lasts until the channel saturates, or good marketing told in a sensationalist way.

Growth marketing is what's left once you remove the noise: a system that compounds small improvements, week after week, until the result looks like magic. That's why HAKI stopped calling itself a growth hacking agency: the name promised shortcuts and the work is the opposite.

The three layers of a growth marketing system

They hold each other up and move together. Skipping one makes the next ones unworkable.

Strategy and brand

Who you sell to, what problem you solve and why you rather than the competition. Without it, ads only lower the price. It's the most expensive mistake we see: 50,000 euros in Meta Ads with no positioning and zero pipeline.

Digital assets

The website is not a showcase, it's the conversion engine: fast, clean technical SEO, editable without developers and designed to convert, not to please the CEO. We build it in Webflow or Framer.

Acquisition, conversion and retention

SEO, Google Ads, content, outbound; dedicated landing pages and forms that qualify; automated follow-up. A euro in acquisition without retention is a hole; one in retention without a working channel is expensive perfectionism.

How it is measured: the five numbers

If you can't answer these five questions with a number, you're not doing growth marketing: you're spending money. Everything else (impressions, reach, followers) is noise unless it connects to them.

CAC

Customer acquisition cost: everything you spend on acquisition (media, tools, hours) divided by the new clients of the period. Calculated per channel, not in total, or it hides the channel that loses money.

LTV

What a client pays you over the relationship. In a business that sells something expensive it's usually the number nobody has calculated and the one that changes everything.

LTV:CAC ratio

Above 3:1 the system can scale. Below 1:1 you're burning capital, even if sales are growing.

Conversion per stage

Visit to request, request to appointment, appointment to client. Each ratio points at a different constraint, and only one of them limits growth at any given time.

Payback

The months it takes a new client to pay back what it cost to acquire them. It decides how much you can invest without financing growth with debt.

What it looks like when it works

Clínica Albareda, a sports traumatology clinic in Barcelona, went from depending on referrals to receiving 1,048 appointment requests in a year from Google, with organic traffic multiplied by 3.5. Laura Jové, a health practice, multiplied booked appointments per month by 5 with a new website, SEO and Google Ads campaigns that return 15 euros for every euro invested. Both cases are published with their figures.

What they have in common is not the sector: it's that they sell something worth more than their marketing conveyed, that the decision maker was at the table, and that the system was measured every week from day one.

Selected projects

Embat

Fintech, Tech & SaaS

Clínica Albareda

Health

Laura Jové

Health

View all projects

What a growth marketer does

The profile that runs the system. Not a channel specialist or a creative: someone who thinks in numbers and can execute across several channels at once.

Finds the constraint

Reads analytics, the CRM and the ads to know whether the problem is visibility, conversion or scalability. Only then picks the channel.

Designs experiments

One hypothesis, one metric, one deadline. Runs few at a time, with enough volume to conclude something, and kills the ones that don't work without attachment.

Builds and automates

Landing pages, forms that qualify, automated follow-up, dashboards. Knows enough about web, data and automation not to depend on anyone for the small things.

Answers for the numbers

Every week, new clients, CAC and pipeline, on one page. If growth doesn't come, the plan changes, not the presentation.

When it makes sense to hire it outside

Four situations where an external team pays off. And one where we'll tell you no.

You're not sure who you sell to

Ideal client, value proposition and positioning before touching a single channel. It's the work with the most long-term leverage.

You have traction and depend on one channel

Almost always word of mouth. The full system (brand, website and acquisition) is built so the next client doesn't depend on a referral.

You've hit a ceiling

A brand, website or funnels that worked up to a size and no longer do. What exists is audited, the bottleneck located, and only that piece rebuilt.

Your team runs things but has no bandwidth

Strategy and multichannel execution as an extended layer of the team, with the decision maker at the table.

When not: if you compete on price

With no margin to reinvest, with a client who picks the cheapest quote, or when what's missing is product, pricing or sales rather than marketing. We say so on the first call and recommend the next step, even if it isn't us.

A growth partner is growth marketing with the invoice tied to the result

An external team that designs, runs and measures the system and is paid a base plus a share of what it generates. What it is, what it costs and when it fits better than an agency or a fractional CMO.

What a growth partner is

An opinion, signed

Ten years of projects have taught me the same thing every time: growth isn't fixed with more of everything, it's fixed by removing what holds it back. The growth marketing that works is boring: one number a week, one experiment at a time, and the discipline not to change strategy because one month was bad. The rest, the whiteboard full of hacks, is content for LinkedIn.

Marcel Garcia, founder of HAKI. Growth partner to businesses that sell on value, from Barcelona.

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Growth marketing FAQs

It is the discipline that treats client acquisition as a measurable system: strategy, digital assets and continuous experimentation, judged by new clients and by what each one costs to win, not by visits or reach.

Digital marketing is the set of channels: SEO, ads, email, social. Growth marketing is the approach that combines those channels with strategy, data and experimentation to move business metrics. You can do digital marketing without doing growth; you cannot do growth without digital channels.

No. Growth hacking is the term startups popularised for one-off tactics and shortcuts. Growth marketing is the serious version: a system that compounds small improvements and is measured every week. That is why HAKI stopped using the word hacking.

It depends on the channel. Google Ads can move appointments in weeks; SEO and brand need three to nine months. A complete system starts compounding results between the third and the sixth month and accelerates from there. Clínica Albareda received 1,048 appointment requests in a year from Google.

As a standalone service, each project (brand, website, campaigns) has its own budget. As a growth partner, between 1,000 and 5,000 euros a month as a base plus a variable part tied to new clients, sized so the total stays between 10% and 25% of the new revenue. The details are on the growth partner page.

When there is no margin to reinvest, when results are expected in four weeks, or when what is missing is product, pricing or sales rather than marketing. And when the client chooses on price: the system cannot sustain the investment. If it is still unclear who you sell to, it does make sense, but starting with strategy and brand before paid channels.