Maximizing Success: A Guide for Growth Marketing Managers
Maximizing Success: A Guide for Growth Marketing Managers
As a growth marketing manager, you’re on the front lines when it comes to expanding the reach and impact of your company’s products or services. The competition for user retention is intense, and the business environment is constantly changing, making it a challenging and demanding role.
Despite this, if you’re up to the task of consistently experimenting, adapting, and making data-driven decisions to create the best possible user experience, your efforts are almost guaranteed to pay off in terms of driving user acquisition and referral growth.
That being said, it’s always good to get a little help!
In this article, we explore the objectives and KPIs you should have in mind when prioritizing user acquisition on your platform. We also provide some solutions for meeting these objectives and discuss how the LiveLike engagement suite can help growth marketing managers to achieve their retention goals. By following the strategies outlined in this article, growth marketing managers and business owners alike will be able to turn the challenge of user acquisition into a powerful opportunity to drive more revenue.
Goals & KPIs for Driving More Acquisition on Your Platform
The objectives and KPIs for a growth marketing manager can vary depending on the specific goals and targets of the organization. For example, a startup might be more inclined to focus on acquiring new customers, while a more mature business that has already garnered initial brand awareness might be more focused on customer retention and brand loyalty.
For any business, however, growth marketing managers should have a deep understanding of their target audience and be able to develop and implement strategies that align with their organization’s goals to drive business growth. Some common objectives and KPIs include:
OBJECTIVES
Increase User Acquisition: Drive more traffic to the company’s website or app to increase the number of new users.
Improve User Activation: Ensure that new users have a positive first experience and take desired actions, such as making a purchase, completing a tutorial, or signing up for a service.
Boost User Retention: Keep users engaged and coming back to the company’s product or service through personalized experiences, incentives, and effective communication.
Drive Revenue Growth: Maximize conversion rates, upsell opportunities, and customer lifetime value to increase revenue.
Foster Referral Growth: Encourage current users to refer friends and family, effectively expanding the company’s reach without spending additional resources on user acquisition.
KPIs
Acquisition Rate: Number of new users acquired over a specific period of time, typically measured as a percentage of the target number of new users.
Activation Rate: Percentage of new users who take desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service.
Retention Rate: Percentage of users who continue to engage with the company’s product or service over a specific period of time.
Conversion Rate: Percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
Average Order Value (AOV): Average amount spent by a customer in a single transaction.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Estimated total amount a user will spend over their lifetime as a customer.
Referral Rate: Number of new users acquired through referrals over a specific period of time, typically measured as a percentage of the total number of new users.
8 Tips to Supercharging Your Growth Marketing Efforts
Now, having knowledge of the best metrics to measure your retention is important, but only if you are going to take the necessary steps to improve them. That’s why it is crucial for growth marketing managers to implement effective strategies with these metrics in mind to drive growth via their digital platforms.
We compiled a list of the top tips and strategies we recommend for maximizing your growth marketing efforts and improving your retention metrics. These include:
1. Personalization
Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a personalized experience? That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure the experience on your platform is tailored to your users’ unique needs and preferences.
Whether it’s adapting your platform to different user preferences such as language, time zone, or device type, using your customer data to create personalized blog posts, or offering different promotions to different users based on their demographic information, personalization can work to build stronger relationships with your users and increase their engagement on your platform.
2. A/B Testing
Otherwise known as ‘split testing’ A/B testing essentially means creating two versions of something—copy, images, CTAs, etc—and testing them with different groups of users to see which version performs better. By gaining this information, a growth marketing manager is able to make much stronger data-driven decisions when it comes to improving their platform user experience. By continuously testing different platform elements, they are able to identify areas for improvement and enhance the user experience to drive growth and increase conversions.
3. Paid Advertising
Paid or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be an extremely valuable strategy it comes to acquiring new users and driving traffic to your platform. In fact, PPC can generate over twice the number of visitors compared to SEO, with a stunning 200% ROI rate when used effectively. It’s no wonder it’s so crucial for growth marketing managers to prioritize!
Paid advertising can come in the form of search engine ads, social media ads, and display ads, and involves using targeted campaigns to reach relevant users that are likely interested in the products or services you are offering. By creating these targeted campaigns, paid advertising can be a great and cost-effective way to reach large audiences quickly and efficiently in the hopes of acquiring new users.
4. Content Marketing
We’ve all heard the saying: content is king. And it only becomes more important as the markets get more and more saturated. Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content that will provide value to your target audience.
This content can take the form of blog posts, videos, social media posts, or even podcast episodes, depending on the type of audience you are trying to reach. The idea behind this is that by consistently publishing valuable content, your users will engage more frequently with your platform and be more likely to share your content with others, driving more organic traffic. By doing this, you’re able to reach new customers without breaking the bank and use your marketing budget for other areas of growth promotion.
5. Referral Marketing
This leads us to the topic of referral marketing. When users are loving your platform—whether it’s because of the content you put out, the experience you provide, or the actual products and services you offer—they are more likely to spread the word.
While great content and a quality product are both key, referral marketing can be achieved by offering incentives or making the referral process more engaging. By gamifying your referral process and making it more interactive via points, badges, leaderboards, or discounts works to incentivize users to recommend your brand to others and results in customer acquisition and brand awareness.
6. Email Marketing
Did you know that in 2022, the number of email users worldwide was 4.3 billion? Email is an easy, cost-effective way to reach the most amount of people at once, and with such strong ROI opportunities, it’s no surprise that it’s a favourite content distribution method for most growth marketing managers. Use email marketing to build and maintain relationships with your users by sending regular, personalized communications to inform them about your company updates.
Make sure to segment your audience based on their behaviors and interests, using customer data and A/B testing to craft messages that are relevant and engaging for your target recipients. By taking the time to nurture these relationships, you’ll ultimately be able to direct more conversions for your business, boost brand loyalty, and encourage desired actions from users.
7. Search Engine Optimization
It’s no secret how effective SEO can be in terms of driving organic traffic to your platform. If you want to boost growth through SEO, it’s important to do some keyword research and make sure you’re using best practices for on-page optimization. This means creating great content that includes the keywords you want to target, using meta tags, adding descriptions to images and videos, and making sure your website is easy for search engines to understand.
And don’t forget the importance of backlinks—getting links from other high-quality websites can give your platform a big boost in search results. By focusing on SEO, you can increase your visibility and reach a more engaged audience, which can lead to more growth and success for your platform.
8. User Onboarding
User onboarding is a critical component of any growth marketing strategy, as it prioritizes those users who are experiencing your brand for the first time. A streamlined, informative, and interactive onboarding process can greatly impact how a user feels about your brand, and ultimately increases the chances of them taking desired actions on your platform. By providing new users with a positive first impression, they are more likely to continue using your platform and engaging with your brand. A well-designed onboarding process can also reduce friction and minimize drop-off rates, ultimately leading to higher user retention and conversion rates.
Now that you’ve gone through all of our growth marketing tips, you might have noticed a pattern—each strategy involves some kind of interactivity. Almost every step to effectively deepening audience engagement on a digital platform involves how well you’re able to grab and hold your users’ attention, and build a sense of community around your brand.
It can seem daunting to find new and innovative ways to enhance the interactivity of your platform, but with the help of LiveLike’s engagement toolkit, it has never been easier. Our innovative tools, including interactive widgets, live chats, and loyalty and rewards programs, are designed to increase fan engagement and attract new customers to your platform. With LiveLike, infusing interactivity and community building strategies into your platform is a seamless and straightforward process created with growth marketing managers in mind.
Get in touch to learn more about growth marketing strategies or to find out how LiveLike can enhance your platform experience.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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