Is your business ready to hire a growth marketer?
Maybe it already has. It is not an easy task to succeed with this goal. And that’s where a good understanding of how to hire a growth marketer (often referred to as a growth hacker) comes in to lay the ground for a solid growth marketing strategy. Let me explain:
There are two paths to pursue growth in a company:
Seeking customer acquisition at all costs with short-term growth hacking tactics.
Pursuing customer acquisition that has a foundation of longevity in the marketing strategy.
The first way is super fast, and the second is sustainable. The companies that have a structured growth and digital marketing strategy based on the second path find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is a structured solution that flows through the entire customer journey looking for opportunities to optimize scalability.
And the results happen through the competency of growth marketers.
What Does a Growth Marketer Do?
Growth marketers design and conduct experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is the method to achieve that.
A growth marketer lives for systematic processes. These processes are based on these steps:
Identifying challenges throughout all departments, not just the marketing team;
Developing hypothetical solutions to address these problems, including a/b testing;
Prioritizing experiments;
Executing MVT’s;
Evaluating results;
Creating a structured procedure.
Yes, just like the scientific method. Growth marketers watch for opportunities to improve and come up with creative growth strategies from SEO to email marketing to make the company grow with new customers and reduce churn. It's based on metrics and how to achieve them.
But you might be wondering, what is the difference between the good-old marketing and growth marketing?
Growth Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing
As a marketer, have you ever felt like there was a gap between the company’s departments?
Or there was something you wanted to tweak in the product, but did not have any control over that?
That’s because traditionally, marketing efforts have been separated from the product.
But growth marketing has some authority over product development.
Growth marketers have the power to suggest changes in the product as necessary with the goal to improve the conversion rate and retention.
For example, LinkedIn noticed that users valued the information displayed at their profile pages. So, they took advantage of this to convince users to give out more information.
Growth marketers go deeper into the customer funnel.
They oversee all the details necessary to propel the organization.
While a marketing team is responsible only for awareness and acquisition, the growth marketing team takes care of the entire funnel: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral.
Also, many growth marketers take advantage of systems based on loops.
The fastest-growing organizations are built on a system of compounding loops.
These growth loops are closed systems where inputs generate more and more outputs. And these outputs can be reinvested to generate more outputs.
SurveyMonkey, for example, has a powerful growth loop:
A new user subscribes
Creates a survey and send it to others
Others complete the survey and see SurveyMonkey landing page
Others sign up as they need the product (going back to step 1)
Do you see how this generates a never-ending cycle of growth?
Furthermore, different from most traditional marketers, growth marketers are T-shaped.
In 2013, the concept of T-shaped marketers was grounded by Brian Balfour and Buffer. Having a T-shaped skillset means mastering the basics and going deep on one or two specific areas:
The basic knowledge corresponds to the non-marketing skills that will suit you well, no matter what.
The marketing foundation skills are subjects that will be helpful across all marketing channels.
Finally, the channel expertise is related to the audience and acquisition channels.
Because growth marketers must have a holistic approach and look for improvement opportunities over all departments to create hypotheses, it is crucial to have enough knowledge of the basics.
Should You Hire a Growth Marketer?
Do you know what Airbnb, Facebook, Uber, and Google have in common?
Besides being all worth more than 1 billion dollars, they can attribute a huge part of their success to their growth marketing and growth hacker teams.
If you have product-market fit, then it is time to hire a growth marketer.
But don’t ignore the “if you have product-market fit” portion of the sentence. Making sure that your product satisfies a strong demand is key. Because if not, you will end up having tons of leads going straight to the drain.
However, if people love your product, the next step is to grow.
Hiring a competent growth marketer will help you to achieve your goals. Here is what you should be looking for in the growth marketer job description:
To make your customers stick around.
A typical SaaS company loses between 2% and 3% of its customers every month.
That means that these companies must grow between 27% and 43% every year if they want to keep the same revenue.
Enough said.
To create a bridge between gaps.
Without a growth team, all other departments will not be optimized to grow to its full potential.
Your marketing team will often have to stop its creative process to wait for developers to get work done. Or can't optimize expected positive results since they don't have the ability to make changes to the product.
Growth marketers bridge the gap between engineering, product, sales, and marketing.
To sum the small parts.
Companies do not grow because of one single practice. They grow because of combined efforts in the same direction.
Growth marketers are the vital piece that removes the boundaries of marketing to empower every aspect of the customer experience to focus on one goal: growing by attracting more engaged customers.
Time to Grow
No doubt growth marketers can do wonders for your business. But before you start growing, you must find product-market fit and the right growth marketer candidate fit.
When you get these two aspects balanced together, the equation will result is sustainable growth.
Keep in mind, hiring the ideal growth marketer takes time and effort. But it will certainly be worth the investment.
Ready, set, grow.