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Growth Marketing: Is Your Company Ready to Hire in This Data-Driven Discipline?

Growth marketing is a data-driven discipline that is rapidly evolving into a must-have for startups and tech giants alike. If your company depends on digital marketing channels, it might be time to jump on the growth marketing bandwagon.

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What is growth marketing?

To understand growth marketing, it’s important to know how traditional marketing works. Historically, marketers have taken the long view. They implement a few carefully chosen campaigns and wait to see if they have the desired effect, which is usually to increase brand awareness and get customers into the sales funnel.

Growth marketers take a faster, data-driven approach. They use a wide variety of digital strategies, each paired with data-collection tools that provide immediate feedback, so it’s possible to see how each campaign is performing in real time. Using that information, growth marketers tweak the strategy to improve results on a daily basis.

Unlike traditional methods, a growth-oriented strategy doesn’t focus only on the top of the marketing funnel; rather, it aims to strengthen the customer experience at every stage, from awareness to advocacy. The goal of growth marketing is to build an ever-growing base of loyal customers.

How does growth marketing work in comparison to traditional marketing?

To illustrate the difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing, it’s helpful to consider how each one is applied in business.

Imagine that your company wants to bring in more customers. Using traditional marketing, you might spend your budget on a print ad campaign and a direct mailer to boost awareness. After the campaigns end, you’d review the sales and lead-generation data to determine the ROI. If the return is adequate, you’d continue spending money on similar campaigns. If not, you might try a different strategy, such as a billboard or local radio ads.

With growth marketing, your company would take a more holistic approach. First, you’d spend small amounts of money on several smaller-scale strategies. You might:

  • Publish optimized blog posts to bring new visitors to your website
  • Pay to promote social media posts to re-engage existing followers
  • Buy Google ads to increase sales for a specific product

Each strategy would be accompanied by data analytics that allow you to track the performance. You might also implement tests. For example, you could use A/B tests in blog posts to find out which title gets the most clicks.

As soon as data starts coming in, you’d measure the success of each effort and make small tweaks. If a specific Google ad has a high conversion rate, you’d spend more on it. If a promoted social media post gets no clicks, you’d tweak the copy or divert funds to a more effective strategy.

Traditional marketing and growth marketing aren’t mutually exclusive; you can use elements of both disciplines simultaneously.

Benefits of growth marketing

If digital channels are the core of your company’s promotional strategy, growth marketing has significant benefits. This type of marketing is:

  • Cost effective: A growth marketing strategy is agile and easy to change; it doesn’t lock you into expensive contracts with unknown ROI. Instead, it enables you to shift course on a daily basis to maximize your investment.
  • Comprehensive: Growth marketing can help strengthen every part of your company’s marketing funnel. In addition to bringing in new leads, it can boost sales, keep existing customers interested, encourage repeat business and incentivize referrals.
  • Adaptable: Things change quickly in the digital world; growth marketing allows you to make swift changes to your campaigns, so you can jump on new opportunities as they arise.

When to hire a growth marketer?

Companies of all sizes and stages can benefit from growth marketing. Organizations that typically see the biggest returns are:

  • Startups
  • Companies looking to expand to new markets
  • Businesses who want to increase revenue without major operational changes
  • Established brands that want to increase customer retention or referral rates

Before you hire a growth marketer, it’s important to have an established digital presence. At a minimum, you should have a professional website, developed social media profiles and an online ordering system, if necessary. You should also have products or services that are ready to promote and sell to customers.

In most cases, you should hold off on hiring until you have a data-collection system in place. At a minimum, install Google Analytics, Google Search Console and the proprietary analytics for your chosen social media platforms. The bigger your historical data record, the easier it is for a growth marketer to make an impact.

Infrastructure is also a key consideration. When done well, growth marketing often leads to a rapid increase in activity. If your goal is to increase web traffic, you’ll need an adequate amount of server bandwidth. If you want to increase conversions, make sure you have the customer service capacity to handle inquiries.

Finally, consider your budget. In addition to the employee’s salary, you’ll need to invest in digital tools to track and tweak your marketing. At a minimum, expect to pay for subscriptions to:

If you don’t have any other marketing employees, keep in mind that a growth marketer can’t do it all alone. You’ll likely need to outsource jobs such as graphic design, web development and copywriting.

What does a growth marketer do on a daily basis?

The duties of a growth marketer will vary based on your company’s goals and the seniority of the position. Common tasks include:

  • Identifying digital marketing channels: The marketer decides which channels to use based on the goals your company wants to achieve. This might include paid ads, digital referral programs, standard social media posts, influencer marketing, email campaigns and affiliate marketing.
  • Running experiments: The employee starts and monitors small-scale experiments on many different channels to gauge what resonates best with your customers.
  • Monitoring data analytics: This is one of the biggest responsibilities of a growth marketer; they constantly track analytics for your website, sales, ads, social media and brand mentions.
  • Tweaking campaigns: Growth marketers make small changes—either alone or with support—to the design, copy, frequency or target audience to improve the ROI of each campaign.
  • Tracking trends: To ensure that your marketing strategy is current, the marketer stays on top of the latest trends. That way, they can be the first to try a new tool or tie your marketing strategy into relevant current events and viral sensations.
  • Communicate with customers: Using comments, polls and online surveys, growth marketers keep tabs on customer needs and preferences.

How to hire a growth marketer?

The first step is to decide how the new hire will fit into your existing marketing team. This process can vary considerably based on the current structure of your company.

  • No in-house marketing employees: You’ll need a person with the confidence and experience to take the lead on strategy development; they should also be comfortable with traditional marketing techniques. Choose someone who can work with freelancers and agencies to fill in the gaps in your overall marketing strategy.
  • One or two in-house marketing employees: Your new growth marketer can collaborate with your current marketing team to create a well-rounded strategy. If you have an experienced senior marketing manager on staff, consider hiring a growth strategist at a more junior level.
  • Fully developed marketing team: If your company has an entire in-house marketing department, you have several options. You can test the waters with a growth marketer who reports to the marketing director. Alternatively, you can establish a dedicated growth marketing team with a manager and support staff.

Once you know how the new hire will fit in, you can choose a job title. Some common options are:

  • Growth marketing strategist
  • Growth marketing manager
  • Digital marketing manager
  • Growth marketer
  • Digital marketer

Keep in mind that growth marketing is a relatively new discipline; you may need to use the job description to explain exactly what you’re looking for. Many data-driven professionals use growth marketing tactics intuitively, even if they don’t label them as such.

Things to look for in a growth marketer

As you’re considering applicants for a growth-marketing position, look for the following qualities:

  • Analytical
  • Curious
  • Ability to manage multiple platforms
  • Prioritizes data over personal assumptions or preconceived ideas
  • Strategic thinker
  • Interest in emerging trends
  • Familiarity with a broad range of marketing channels
  • Open to new opportunities
  • Willingness to experiment
  • Generalist rather than a specialist

Successful growth marketers juggle a wide variety of projects on any given day. They thrive on variety and new information. A good candidate must be able to think quickly and take action immediately.

Succeeding with growth marketing

As businesses move even further into the digital space, growth marketing is the way of the future. By investing in a dedicated employee now, you can reinforce your market position and prepare your company to capitalize on new opportunities and technologies.

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