How to Become a Top Growth Marketer

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If you’re trying to drive growth for your business, you might have heard of a growth marketer. But there’s no “hacking” involved in growth hacking; it’s just data-driven marketing being used as a method to optimize demand generation, which is why we think growth marketing is a better name.

Growth Marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that.

Growth marketing teams are responsible for

Determining areas to test and improve upon
Developing and designing experiments to optimize the identified processes
Conducting experiments to test hypothesized improvements
Analyzing results and conducting further experimentation as needed

Growth marketers use the scientific method to design and carry out these experiments.

Within an organization, growth marketing is an analytically minded function that focuses more on the data side of marketing than the creative aspects.

While experiments are aimed to improve processes for growth and scalability, growth marketers need to be comfortable with failure and plan for it. If you create an experiment and it doesn’t produce the results you wanted or expected, you need to have the next option lined up.

Growth marketers should have solutions ready to address an experiment from all angles, so if one fails, the next step is ready.

Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking
How do you Become a Growth Marketer?
What makes a good Growth Hacker?
What skills do you need to be a Good Marketer?
What is a Marketing Growth Hacker?
What are the four Growth Strategies in Marketing?
How do you Hire a Great Growth Marketer?
What is Growth Strategy?
How Much Does a Growth Marketer Make?
What Does a Growth Marketer do?
What Makes a Good Growth Hacker?
How to Get Into Growth Marketing
Growth Marketer Marketerhire
Difference Between Growth And Marketing
How Much do Growth Hackers Earn?
What is a Growth Lead?
Are Marketing Jobs in Demand?
What is The Best Marketing Job?
Growth Marketer Salary
Growth Marketing Course
Growth Marketing Executive
Growth Marketing vs Digital Marketing
Why Should I Hire a Growth Marketer?
What is a Growth Marketing Specialist?
What is a Growth Marketing Strategy?
How do You Develop a Growth Strategy?

Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking

While the terms “Growth Marketing” and “Growth Hacking” are often used interchangeably, there are some subtle differences between these roles at many companies.

Growth hackers are more like expert consultants brought on to solve a specific problem, and to solve it fast. They are tasked, often on a small budget, with finding creative solutions to tough problems. To a growth hacker, speed is everything, and problems need to be solved yesterday.

Growth marketers tend to take a longer-term approach. They have to strategize on how to scale many different SaaS growth metrics across many different dimensions, and how to do so sustainably.

Growth hacks can be thought of as akin to day trading in the stock market. Sure, you can make money like that, but it’s not necessarily going to be a stable source of income for the long term.

An effective growth marketing process distills the best attributes of growth hacking (namely, the desire to think outside the box to gain traction) down into a sustainable practice based on rock solid principles.

In that way, growth marketing is the opposite of day trading — it’s investing for the long term based on data-driven metrics that are always being optimized.

How do you Become a Growth Marketer?

Step 1: Understand Growth Marketing

First, you’ll learn and understand what growth marketing means and how it’s different from growth hacking and digital marketing.

You will also see some examples of growth marketing experiments.

Step 2: Build the mindset of a growth marketer

Next, you will learn how to build a growth marketing mindset. There are multiple mentalities a growth marketer uses that form the growth marketing mindset. These mindsets will make you an elite growth marketer.

Step 3: Learn the growth marketing process

The next step to becoming a growth marketer is to learn the growth marketing process. Once you have a process, you can rely on it to execute and build multiple growth marketing systems that I call “growth marketing machines”.

It’s all about learning the process so you can rely on it for the future to repeat successful growth experiments.

Step 4: Master the growth funnel and metrics

Next, it’s the funnel and the growth metrics in different stages of the funnel. All your growth marketing experiments will focus on specific growth metrics.

What makes a good Growth Hacker?

Growth hackers are making their mark in technology. Job postings are popping up all over the web looking for a growth hacker. Companies at all stages are itching to find these professors of growth and often recruiting as aggressively as UX and CS candidates.

Sean Ellis was right when he first coined the title growth hacker in 2010 when he wrote, “Where are all of the growth hackers?” The demand for growth hackers became widespread when Andrew Chen wrote “How to be a growth hacker” that went viral.

Despite the buzz and increasing commercialization, most companies are unaware of the true meaning of growth hacking other than the simplistic acknowledgment that “they grow stuff” or “get users”. Unlike most professions in technology, a growth hacker isn’t a set of skills or stock of knowledge.

Dan Martell, a founder of Clarity, says, “Growth hacking is a mindset more than a toolset.” It is a set of disciplines learned through doing and out of necessity.

Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feet of growing a user base into the millions.

Data

Growth hackers have a passion for tracking and moving a metric. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel out of place and uncomfortably exposed. This strong bias towards data drives a growth hacker away from vanity metrics towards metrics that will make or break the business.

Data and metrics are paramount to the scientific way a growth hacker discovers a path to growth. Rather than looking at metrics as strictly a reporting mechanism or data as a way to geek out, growth hackers view both as inspiration for a better product through a process of theorizing and testing.

A growth hacker’s focus is to attain growth through moving specific metrics with iterations. These metrics can be anything from a sign up conversion rate to a viral coefficient. Data inspires new product and actionable segmentation.

Creativity

Michael Birch, one of the first growth hackers and co-founder of Bebo, says, “growth hacking is both an art and a science.” While driven by data and moving metrics, growth hackers are also creative problem solvers. A growth hacker has a vibrant mental dexterity to think of new ways to acquire and loop in users.

Growth hackers do not stop at data but build into new and unknown frontiers to find growth. Greg Tseng, the co-founder of Tagged, says data and creativity of a growth hacker go hand-in-hand, “Are you good with both sides of the brain? If you are only creative, you’ll never know how good your ideas are. If you only have an analytical mindset, then you’ll know precisely how bad your ideas are!”

This creative and analytical mashup is the defining characteristic of growth hackers. “The creative folks intuitively design what’s best for the user, while data folks provide great insights.

The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics,” says Matt Humphrey, co-founder of HomeRun.

Growth hackers operate across disciplines and functions, involved with UI/UX to metric decisions. The combination of both a creative and analytical mindset allows a growth hacker to have a cohesive and systematic picture of product.

Curiosity

A growth hacker has a fascination at why visitors choose to be users and engage and why some products fall flat on their face. With today’s distracted users, growth hackers are habitually exploring to find new ways to push metrics up and to the right. “Growth hacking has a subtle message of ’what have you done for me today?’. You never stop as a growth hacker.

Facebook still has a growth team and they have a billion users”, says Blake Commagere founder MediaSpike and a pioneer of social games. Growth hackers are constantly curious and have an insatiable desire to learn. They look deeply into user behavior and explore the edges of behavioral economics.

Jesse Farmer says, “Good growth hackers have a deep understanding and curiosity of how the internet works. A good growth hacker will read Nudge and Predictably Irrationality and see possible growth hacks.” This curiosity leads to a grasp of product and user experience way beyond the surface.

A growth hacker does not so much care that growth occurs but desires to understand the user mindset and product flow to replicate the method over and over. Growth hackers are just “geeks who are human”, says Jim Young, co-founder of Hot or Not and founder of Perceptual Networks.

Growth hackers are a rare breed and a highly unlikely mashup of data, creativity, and curiosity. As it is a fairly newly defined field, some would argue that today there only a few hundred growth hackers in Silicon Valley.

Although a small number now, there is no glass ceiling and the door is open for all. “I hope when people read this article, they will want to learn our methods and want to become a growth hacker. Come one, come all!” says Danielle Morrill, co-founder of Refer.ly and former growth hacker at Twillio.

Most growth hackers say they learned out of necessity from starting a company with a zero marketing budget. The next post in this series will explore the practical applications of growth hacking and how marketing is reinventing itself.

What skills do you need to be a Good Marketer?

The field of digital marketing is an expanding industry. To help career-mined marketers, we’ve rounded up the top 10 skills needed by marketers today.

1. An ability to understand buyer needs and the sales process

Marketing needs to drive actions. Yet the Business to Consumer (B2C) marketer will motivate actions differently and target different audiences than the Business to Business (B2B) marketer. Further, nonprofits aren’t engaged in sales so much as they are in fundraising and driving donations.

Even within each of these categories, the particular market will have distinct demands also (e.g. an artificial intelligence company will have a different B2B focus than a pest control firm seeking franchisees).

2. Solid grasp of analytics

We could have added quantitative communication to our first skill needed by marketers today, but this was important enough to separate out. The successful marketer will be agile with analytic tools such as Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo, Optimizely, etc.

Marketers today make decisions driven by data and appropriate metrics correlated to campaign goals and key performance indicators. Marketing automation software and other analytics tools make it increasingly easy to track impacts campaign success. So, the marketer should be able to look at an analytical dashboard without breaking into a cold sweat.

3. Strong understanding of Inbound marketing

Inbound marketers attract, convert, and nurture qualified sales leads using strategies designed specifically to be helpful and relevant. The focus is on informing and entertaining those who are seeking to understand and address a need.

On the other hand, outbound marketing is disruptive and invasive. This interruption marketing involves trying to get the company’s message out to as many prospects as possible and hoping it resonates.

4. The ability to communicate clearly, without jargon

Successful marketing communications demand a clear message directed to a target audience, using the appropriate tone. While this requires a firm grasp of industry terms, it doesn’t mean sentences should be overwhelmed with jargon. Instead, the ability to phrase concepts simply can demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of complex topics.

This encompasses communication in writing, online via digital channels, and verbally. Fluency in technological and visual communication also help the marketer better understand all stages of the marketing process. Yes, it would be a good idea to advance your speaking and presentation skills.

5. Basic spreadsheet skills

Marketers will use spreadsheets — say Excel or Google Docs — in modeling, planning, and studying trends. For instance:

tracking social media marketing week-over-week
blog post traffic tracking
CTA audits
SEO keyword planning
determining when people are visiting site
reviewing campaign metrics

6. Ability to tell a story. Excellent writing ability

Certainly, today’s marketers must also be very comfortable with web publishing. Understand the difference between a blog, a landing page, a thank you page and gated content and know how to post all of these online. But, more importantly, marketers today need to be able to tell a great story.

A strong marketer must be able to publish content, as well as create content and participate in the content strategy process. Content is the fuel for inbound marketing.

Content marketing is an essential component of driving traffic and converting leads. Yet content marketing isn’t about attracting someone to your site just once.

The lead often needs to return time and time again. That’s why we’re rounding out this list of skills marketers need today with a focus on writing. Knowing how to structure a narrative well is the first step to quality content.

7. Experience with contemporary digital tools, platforms, and channels

If you pride yourself on remaining loyal to flip phone technology, you should probably just stop reading. Another of the skills needed by marketers today is understanding how to leverage social media channels, as well as apps, and websites such as Medium or LinkedIn.

Know also there is a distinction between what a marketer might post on the client’s own proprietary channels and via paid digital content placements.

8. Digital advertising experience

That distinction we just mentioned? That’s what we’re talking about in this skill. Digital advertising involves facility with Google Adwords and remarketing.

Remarketing is a powerful tool in a marketer’s toolbox when used appropriately. It uses programmatic buying to display ads on a broad array of participating websites. Within the Google ad network, a prospect who previously visited a brand website may see the advertisements of that brand on third-party websites.

9. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Remember how your college professors went on and on about developing your critical thinking skills? They were doing you a favor. Marketing is more than simply sharing a message with an audience. Well, successful marketing is at least. That’s because marketing requires an understanding of why and how something is working.

Problem-solving skills are going to come in handy when someone on your team or on the client-side throws a curveball. You may need to catch and run with that new development by EOD (that’s End of Day — an important acronym to know).

10. Continuous learning. Vertically and horizontally

Marketers today must engage and demonstrate continuous learning. Their learning should dive deep into digital marketing skills, such as inbound marketing, lead generation, content strategy, SEO, advertising, and analytics.

Marketers should also build related-field skills such as writing, UX research, some technology, subject matter expertise (in the industries related to their clients/job), and sales strategy.

What is a Marketing Growth Hacker?

Growth hacking is an umbrella term for strategies focused solely on growth. It is usually used in relation to early-stage startups who need massive growth in a short time on small budgets.

The goal of growth hacking strategies is generally to acquire as many users or customers as possible while spending as little as possible. The term “growth hacking” was coined by Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of GrowthHackers, in 2010.

A growth hacker is someone who uses creative, low-cost strategies to help businesses acquire and retain customers. Sometimes growth hackers are also called growth marketers, but growth hackers are not simply marketers. Anyone involved in a product or service, including product managers and engineers, can be a growth hacker.

Growth hackers tend to be obsessive, curious and analytical:

Growth hackers focus solely on strategies related to growing the business.
They hypothesize, prioritize and test innovative growth strategies.
They analyze and test to see what’s working.

The ideal growth hacker knows how to set growth priorities, identify channels for customer acquisition, measure success, and scale growth.

How Growth Hacking Works

So, how does growth hacking work? For each company, it’s about figuring out why you grow, and looking for ways to make that happen on purpose.

Many startups use Dave McClure’s “pirate funnel” as a recipe for growth. These are acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (AARRR). Others include raising awareness as a key part of growth hacking. Either way, the point is to get traffic and visitors, turn visitors into users, and retain those users as happy customers.

How to Start Growth Hacking

Here’s how a company can get started with growth hacking. First of all, create your product and test to make sure people want it, and are willing to pay for it. This will help you gather data so you understand your key buyer personas and can target growth marketing tactics accordingly.

Update your product at regular intervals, and keep getting customer feedback so you always know if you’re on the right track. At the same time, market your product to foster continued growth, and track the success of those results. A/B testing and other conversion optimization techniques are crucial for effective growth hacking.

Growth Hacking Strategies

Most growth hacking strategies fall into three main areas:

Content marketing
Product Marketing
Advertising

Depending on the tactics used, content marketing can be a low-cost way to get the word out about your product. Typical content marketing activities include:

Starting a blog and creating valuable, shareable content
Guest blogging
Creating social media content
Writing ebooks and white papers
Podcasting
Running webinars
Running contests and giveaways
Getting bloggers to review your product
Joining relevant forums, groups and subreddits
Influencer marketing
Using email marketing to build a stronger connection with users
Improving content visibility with SEO
Getting listed in relevant marketplaces and sites, such as Product Hunt

Product marketing includes techniques for making your product more appealing, and building the user base. They include:

Leveraging the fear of missing out (FOMO) by using an invite-only signup system
Gamifying the user onboarding process to make it more enjoyable, and offering rewards
Offering incentives for referrals that benefit both the referrer and the new user
Affiliate marketing, which will also use content marketing growth tactics

Growth hackers can also use social advertising and pay per click (PPC) advertising to promote their business.

Growth Hacking Examples

Some well-known examples of successful growth hacking campaigns include:

Dropbox, which rewards existing users for inviting new ones with additional storage
Hotmail, which appended a line to each outgoing email encouraging people to sign up for a new account
AirBnB, which used Craigslist to find and market to people looking for affordable accommodation

What are the four Growth Strategies in Marketing?

The four main growth strategies are as follows:

Market Penetration

The aim of this strategy is to increase sales of existing products or services on existing markets, and thus to increase your market share. To do this, you can attract customers away from your competitors and/or make sure that your own customers buy your existing products or services more often.

This can be accomplished by a price decrease, an increase in promotion and distribution support; the acquisition of a rival in the same market or modest product refinements.

Market Development

This means increasing sales of existing products or services on previously unexplored markets. Market expansion involves an analysis of the way in which a company’s existing offer can be sold on new markets, or how to grow the existing market.

This can be accomplished by different customer segments; industrial buyers for a good that was previously sold only to the households; New areas or regions about of the country; Foreign markets

Product Development

The objective is to launch new products or services in existing markets. Product development may be used to extend the offer proposed to current customers with the aim of increasing their turnover. These products may be obtained by Investment in research and development of additional products;

Acquisition of rights to produce someone else’s product; Buying in the product and “branding” it; Joint development with ownership of another company that needs access to the firm’s distribution channels or brands.

Diversification

This means launching new products or services on previously unexplored markets. Diversification is the riskiest strategy. It involves marketing, by the company, of completely new products and services on a completely unknown market.
Diversification may be divided into further categories:

Horizontal Diversification: This involves the purchase or development of new products by the company, with the aim of selling them to existing customer groups. These new products are often technologically or commercially unrelated to current products but that may appeal to current customers. For example, a company that was making notebooks earlier may also enter the pen market with its new product.

Vertical Diversification: The company enters the sector of its suppliers or of its customers. For example, if you have a company that does reconstruction of houses and offices and you start selling paints and other construction materials for use in this business.

Concentric Diversification: Concentric diversification involves the development of a new line of products or services with technical and/or commercial similarities to an existing range of products. This type of diversification is often used by small producers of consumer goods, e.g. a bakery starts producing pastries or dough products.

Conglomerate Diversification Is moving to new products or services that have no technological or commercial relation with current products, equipment, distribution channels, but which may appeal to new groups of customers. The major motive behind this kind of diversification is the high return on investments in the new industry. It is often used by large companies looking for ways to balance their cyclical portfolio with their non-cyclical portfolio.

Based on the strategies used and its ambitions, a company can choose one of these four strategies. This choice especially depends on the approach of a company’s product/market and the latter’s taste for risk.

How do you Hire a Great Growth Marketer?

Startups often set themselves back a year by hiring the wrong growth marketer. With it, early-stage startups can identify and attract a great first growth hire.

It’ll also help you avoid unintentionally hiring candidates who lack broad competency. Some marketers master 1-2 channels, but aren’t experts at much else. When hiring your first growth marketer, you should aim for a generalist.

Great marketers are often founders

One interesting way to find great marketers is to look for great potential founders.

Let us explain. Privately, most great marketers admit that their motive for getting hired was to gain a couple years’ experience they could use to start their own company.

Don’t let that scare you. Leverage it: You can sidestep the competitive landscape for marketing talent by recruiting past founders whose startups have recently failed.

Why do this? Because great founders and great growth marketers are often one and the same. They’re multi-disciplinary executors, they take ownership and they’re passionate about product.

You see, a marketing role with sufficient autonomy mimics the role of a founder: In both, you hustle to acquire users and optimize your product to retain them. You’re working across growth, brand, product and data.

As a result, struggling founders wanting a break from the startup roller coaster often find transitioning to a growth marketing role to be a natural segue.

How do we find these high-potential candidates?

Finding founders

To find past founders, you could theoretically monitor the alumni lists of incubators like Y Combinator and Techstars to see which companies never succeeded. Then you can reach out to their first-time founders.

You can also identify future founders: Browse Product Hunt and Indie Hackers for old projects that showed great marketing skill but didn’t succeed.

There are thousands of promising founders who’ve left a mark on the web. Their failure is not necessarily indicative of incompetence. My agency’s co-founders and directors, including myself, all failed at founding past companies.

How do I attract candidates?

To get potential founders interested in the day-to-day of your marketing role, offer them both breadth and autonomy:

Let them be involved in many things.
Let them be fully in charge of a few things.

Remember, recreate the experience of being a founder.

Further, vet their enthusiasm for your product, market and its product-channel fit:

Product and market: Do their interests line up with how your product impacts its users? For example, do they care more about connecting people through social networks, or about solving productivity problems through SaaS? And which does your product line up with?
Product-channel fit: Are they excited to run the acquisition channels that typically succeed in your market?

The latter is a little-understood but critically important requirement: Hire marketers who are interested in the channels your company actually needs.

Let’s illustrate this with a comparison between two hypothetical companies:

A B2B enterprise SaaS app.
An e-commerce company that sells mattresses.

Broadly speaking, the enterprise app will most likely succeed through the following customer acquisition channels: sales, offline networking, Facebook desktop ads, and Google Search.

In contrast, the e-commerce company will most likely succeed through Instagram ads, Facebook mobile ads, Pinterest ads and Google Shopping ads.

We can narrow it even further: In practice, most companies only get one or two of their potential channels to work profitably and at scale.

Meaning, most companies have to develop deep expertise in just a couple of channels.

There are enterprise marketers who can run cold outreach campaigns on autopilot. But, many have neither the expertise nor the interest to run, say, Pinterest ads. So if you’ve determined Pinterest is a high-leverage ad channel for your business, you’d be mistaken to assume that an enterprise marketer’s cold outreach skills seamlessly translate to Pinterest ads.

Some channels take a year or longer to master. And mastering one channel doesn’t necessarily make you any better at the next. Pinterest, for example, relies on creative design. Cold email outreach relies on copywriting and account-based marketing.

To summarize: To attract the right marketers, identify those who are interested in not only your product but also how your product is sold.

Other approaches

The point is to remind you that great candidates are sometimes a small career pivot away from being your perfect hire. You don’t have to look in the typical places when your budget is tight and you want to hire someone with high, senior potential.

This is especially relevant for early-stage, bootstrapping startups.

If you have the foresight to recognize these high-potential candidates, you can hopefully hire both better and cheaper. Plus, you empower someone to level up their career.

Speaking of which, here are other ways to hire talent whose potential hasn’t been fully realized:

Find deep specialists (e.g. Facebook Ads experts) and offer them an opportunity to learn complementary skills with a more open-ended, strategic role. (You can help train them with my growth guide.)
Poach experienced junior marketers from a company in your space by offering senior roles.
Hire candidates from top growth marketing schools.

Vetting growth marketers

Now that you have a candidate, how do you assess whether they’re legitimately talented?

You can ask your most promising leads to incrementally complete three projects:

Create Facebook and Instagram ads to send traffic to our site. This showcases their low-level, tactical skills.
Walk us through a methodology for optimizing our site’s conversion rate. This showcases their process-driven approach to generating growth ideas. Process is everything.
Ideate and prioritize customer acquisition strategies for our company. This showcases their ability to prioritize high-leverage projects and see the big picture.

You allow a week to complete these projects. And you pay them market wage.

Here’s what you should be looking for when you assess their work.

Level 1: Basics

First — putting their work aside — you should assess the dynamics of working with them. Are they:

Competent: Can they follow instructions and understand nuance?
Reliable: Will they hit deadlines without excuses?
Communicative: Will they proactively clarify unclear things?
Kind: Do they have social skills?

If they follow your instructions and do a decent job, they’re competent. If they hit your deadline, they’re probably reliable. If they ask good questions, they’re communicative.

And if we like talking to them, they’re kind.

Level 2: Capabilities

A level higher, you can use these projects to assess their ability to contribute to the company:

Do they have a process for generating and prioritizing good ideas?
- Did their process result in multiple worthwhile ad and landing page ideas? We’re assessing their process more so than their output. A great process leads to generating quality ideas forever.
- Resources are always limited. One of the most important jobs of a growth marketer is to ensure growth resources are focused on the right opportunities. I’m looking for a candidate that has a process for identifying, evaluating and prioritizing growth opportunities.
Can they execute on those ideas?
- Did they create ads and propose A/B tests thoughtfully? Did they identify the most compelling value propositions, write copy enticingly and target audiences that make sense?
- Have they achieved mastery of 1-2 acquisition channels (ideally, the channels your company is dependent on to scale)? I don’t expect anyone to be an expert in all channels, but deep knowledge of at least a couple of channels is key for an early-stage startup making their first growth hire.

If you don’t have the in-house expertise to assess their growth skills, you can pay an experienced marketer to assess their work. It’ll cost you a couple hundred bucks, and give you peace of mind. Look on Upwork for someone, or ask a marketer at a friend’s company.

If you’re an early-stage company with a tight budget, there are creative ways to source high-potential growth talent.
Assess that talent on their product fit and market fit for your company. Do they actually want to work on the channels needed for your business to succeed?
Give them a week-long sample project. Assess their ability to generate ideas and prioritize them.

What is Growth Strategy?

A growth strategy is an organization’s plan for overcoming current and future challenges to realize its goals for expansion. Examples of growth strategy goals include increasing market share and revenue, acquiring assets, and improving the organization’s products or services.

How Much Does a Growth Marketer Make?

The average annual pay for a Growth Marketer in the United States is $66,090 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $31.77 an hour. This is the equivalent of $1,271/week or $5,508/month.

While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $123,500 and as low as $35,500, the majority of Growth Marketer salaries currently range between $53,500 (25th percentile) to $73,000 (75th percentile) with top earners (90th percentile) making $88,500 annually across the United States.

The average pay range for a Growth Marketer varies greatly (by as much as $19,500), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience.

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.

What Makes a Good Growth Hacker?

Data

This scientific approach to growth is called engineering distribution by Jesse Farmer, co-founder of Everlane. “The best growth hackers take a rigorous, empirical approach to growth and distribution,” says Jesse. A growth hacker’s focus is to attain growth through moving specific metrics with iterations. These metrics can be anything from a signup conversion rate to a viral coefficient. Data inspire new products and actionable segmentation.

Creativity

Greg Tseng, the co-founder of Tagged, says data and creativity of a growth hacker go hand-in-hand, “Are you good with both sides of the brain? If you are only creative, you’ll never know how good your ideas are. If you only have an analytical mindset, then you’ll know precisely how bad your ideas are!”

This creative and analytical mashup is the defining characteristic of growth hackers. “The creative folks intuitively design what’s best for the user, while data folks provide great insights. The true unicorns are those who can go end-to-end designing, building, measuring, analyzing, and iterating with a combination of user intuition and deep analytics,” says Matt Humphrey, co-founder of HomeRun.

Curiosity

A good growth hacker will read Nudge and Predictably Irrationality and see possible growth hacks.” This curiosity leads to a grasp of product and user experience way beyond the surface.

How to Get Into Growth Marketing

If you want a jumpstart in bringing growth strategies to your team or you want to include “growth marketer” in your LinkedIn headline, here’s everything you need to know:

Step 1: A Must-Have Product

That is a pretty obvious one but often doesn’t get approached the right way. Start getting feedback as soon as you are done with the first version and ask your customers whether they like where things are going.

Involving customers in the product development phase is a good way to ensure their trust and support. As soon as you have an idea, don’t hide in your basement and come out when it’s fully developed. Throw it out in the shade and get as much feedback as you can from the get-go.

Talk to your friends, family, and relatives. Get their feedback on the product and ask them whether it’s something they would pay for.

Once you get the green signal, don’t wait up for your product to be perfect before you reveal it to the world.

Step 2: Develop a Framework

Growth marketing is a data-driven marketing approach. It makes use of modern-day software and tools to analyze different distribution channels and go all-in on those that perform best.

According to growth hacker Sean Ellis, growth is all about high-velocity, high-tempo testing. This type of testing involves quick deployment of your best ideas, generate data points and meaningful insights, and determine what works and what doesn’t, all in the hopes of formulating a process that can be repeated for success.

The process for running high tempo tests involves the following:

Brainstorm ideas with your team
Prioritize your ideas
Execute the ideas
Measure the outcomes
Continue with the good and scrap the bad

Step 3: Optimize Your Funnels

It’s advisable to start at the top. The first thing you need to optimize and experiment with is your landing page. When a customer decides to come to your homepage, he/she expects a user-friendly experience that is easy to navigate and drives them to stay and click on your call-to-action button.

For starters, you can optimize your website speed for faster load time. Even a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. In a world of constant notifications, nobody has time for a slow loading website.

Secondly, you must have a clean and intuitive landing page. Your homepage should include a small description of your value proposition and a clear call to action.

Step 4: Move Further Down the Funnel

As previously explained, growth marketers, unlike traditional marketers, focus on the entire funnel to increase engagement and retention.

From your landing page, you can move onto various elements of your website, your content strategy, or your monetization structure to improve virality. This will allow you to break even on your customer acquisition cost quickly.

Step 5: Make Use of Social Media and Viral Loops

Social media is an obvious channel to skyrocket your growth efforts and leverage word-of-mouth marketing. Posting content around your product on social media and having it shared on a large scale is the key to growth.

The steps that a user goes through between entering and inviting more users to the site is called a “viral loop.” Each customer gets one (or more) more people to also become a customer.

This viral loop is responsible for the rapid growth rate and is one of the prominent tactics in growth marketing.

Growth Marketer Marketerhire

MarketerHire is the best place to find and hire freelance growth marketing experts. They accept less than 5% of applicants, and as marketers ourselves, they put every applicant through a rigorous multi-step vetting process, testing their experience, skills, and expertise against the latest and greatest marketing strategies to ensure the businesses we match them with reach their growth goals.
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Clients often save between three to five times as much money as they would if they hired a marketing agency. Why pay agency prices when you can get higher quality service and personalized support with one of their freelance growth marketing experts?

Don’t waste your time using a run-of-the-mill freelance farm. You could spend hours scouting and negotiating with under-qualified and/or under-performing freelancers on other sites. If you need to execute on your growth goals quickly with reliable talent and flexible pricing, MarketerHire is for you.

They are a full-service network connecting you with the exact freelancer(s) you’re looking for. The marketing industry is complex and ever-changing and any ‘ole freelancer won’t do.

Difference Between Growth And Marketing

For some, marketing is branding, while others view marketing merely as sales or growth. Still others simply lump anything that has to do with getting and keeping customers into one big marketing bucket.

Adding to the confusion is the current emphasis on the word growth and its leaner cousin – growth hacking.

What is marketing?

One way to look at the term marketing is to say that it is everything a business does to get an ideal customer to know, like and trust them.

Still, that’s a pretty broad swath, but note that it’s not really about growth or even lead generation just yet.

To me marketing is how you define your ideal customer, how you position your business in a way that either makes competition irrelevant or changes the context in which your business is viewed by your market, and finally, the intentional aspects of how you guide your prospects and customers on the journey they want to take.

These foundational elements are essential if growth is to follow. Sure, you can sell some stuff to anyone that you can attract or growth hack your way to some new followers, but long term momentum only comes about when you build a strong marketing foundation and strategy first.

That’s not to say that this foundation won’t experience evolution and change as you grow and discover new opportunities, but without it you will be slave to the new idea or hack of the week, and that’s a recipe for spinning your wheels.

What is growth?

Growth, on the other hand, is the process by which you discover which channels allow you to attract and convert the largest amount of customers at the highest amount of profit.

From there you simply use the process to find, test and analyze more and better ways to profitably attract and retain additional clients.

Of course, a great deal of what goes on in your growth system is dictated by the stage your business currently resides.

How Much do Growth Hackers Earn?

The average Growth Hacker salary is $71,853 as of April 27, 2021, but the salary range typically falls between $65,406 and $79,473. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.

What is a Growth Lead?

A growth hacker focuses on the implementation of Growth. A Growth Manager, or Growth Lead, takes this one step further:

Growth managers are responsible for building agile organizations – organizations that align teams with growth across companies.

While growth hackers usually coordinate independently between different departments, growth managers have responsibility for a team. This can be a team of growth hackers, or even responsibility for interdisciplinary marketing and product teams, such as as “Chief Growth Officer”

Responsibilities:

Optimize yield across channels through A/B testing, ROI analysis, and experimental campaign design;
Develop and execute the short-term and long-term Growth strategy;
Work with Data Science/Analytics to develop real-time performance marketing reports and statistical models;
Optimize web pages for copy, metadata, internal and external links and landing pages for Search;
Set-up, manage, and monitor day-to- day performance of paid acquisition campaigns across multiple channels – SEM and social channels;
Monitor SEM health via Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and related software & reporting tools;
Capitalize on popular trends and brainstorm wacky ideas to attract PR and attention from creators;
Hire and manage a team of content creators and a content strategy;
Manage and operationalize acquisition channels that are working, including SEO and content marketing;
Own content development on the Kapwing resources library, YouTube channel, and website;
Collaborate with the CEO to develop strategic marketing initiatives that increase the number of Kapwing Pro subscribers;
Monitor SEM health via Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and related software & reporting tools;
Experiment with new channels to develop promising acquisition campaigns.

Are Marketing Jobs in Demand?

Digital roles in marketing are among the fastest growing in the industry, with demand for social media jobs and skills increasing at the highest rate, according to data collected exclusively for Marketing Week.

With the pandemic forcing people to stay at home, consumer behaviour has changed dramatically over the past 12 months. Brands have responded by shifting focus and spend onto digital channels, which has had a massive impact on the jobs market.

There has been a vast increase in demand for marketers with social skills, with paid social media rising in demand by 116.4%, according to the data from LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, demand for social media advertising has increased by 45.9%, proficiency in Instagram is up 28.4%, social media optimisation has grown by 26.2%, and knowledge of LinkedIn is up 25.7%.

Jobs in digital marketing were some of the fastest growing in the UK last year across any sector, according to LinkedIn, which shows a 52% rise in demand for such roles.

What is The Best Marketing Job?

let’s jump right into the marketing roles, listed here from highest to lowest total average compensation:

1. Corporate Communications Director

Average salary: $124,054
Salary range: $77,000 – $173,000

Corporate communications directors are in charge of crafting a company’s messaging and overseeing delivery of that messaging via press releases, corporate speeches and presentations, internal communications, media responses, and more. They often oversee a team that writes, develops, and implements the communications strategy they’ve created (for example, they might manage PR or communications managers).

Generally, corporate communications directors have at least a bachelor’s degree (although many have MBAs or advanced business degrees) and extensive experience in public relations, media, and/or communications.

2. Marketing Research Director

Average salary: $111,907
Salary range: $74,000 – $157,000

In order to develop a sound marketing strategy, marketers need to have a clear understanding of their market and customers—and that’s where the marketing research director comes in. Marketing research directors typically oversee a market research team in its efforts to analyze the company’s industry, competitors, and customers.

Marketing research directors typically work with a number of different teams and departments across the organization and are continually sharing insights, making recommendations, and developing guidelines to optimize marketing efforts and ensure the overall marketing strategy is headed in the right direction.

Market research is an extremely quantitative and analytical role, and most directors have a bachelor’s degree (or higher) in marketing or a related field with a strong background in marketing analytics and research.

3. Director of Email Marketing

Average salary: $102,588
Salary range: $58,000 – $161,000

One of the cardinal rules of marketing is to “get people where they are”—and for many people, “where they are” is in their inboxes. Email marketing directors are responsible for developing and implementing an email marketing strategy to connect with customers, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic, engagement, and/or sales.

They often manage a creative team (which can include copywriters, designers, and web developers) to craft the emails—and an analytics team to continually optimize the email campaigns for better results.

Email marketing directors generally have significant experience in email marketing (seven to ten years) and additional experience in design, marketing analytics, and/or content development.

4. Director of Digital Marketing

Average salary: $99,040
Salary range: $60,000 – $148,000

Directors of digital marketing are responsible for spearheading a company’s digital marketing strategy, increasing a brand’s visibility online, and driving conversions and revenue from their digital campaigns.

Typically, the director of digital marketing creates the overarching digital marketing strategy—which can include digital advertising campaigns, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and more—and then oversees a team of marketing managers to implement that strategy.

The director of digital marketing also tracks the analytics of the campaigns and adjusts the strategy as necessary to drive the best results for the brand.

Generally, directors of digital marketing have extensive experience (10 or more years) in a variety of digital marketing modalities and, because digital marketing is constantly changing, are expected to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, tools, and best practices.

5. Content Marketing Director

Average salary: $95,854
Salary range: $56,000 – $139,000

As the name suggests, content marketing directors are responsible for all things content: heading up content strategy, content development, content scheduling, and content marketing, as well as managing content creators. Depending on the business and content strategy, they can oversee a variety of content mediums, including written content (like blog posts and ebooks), video content, and social media content.

Most content marketing directors have a bachelor’s degree or higher and start off as some sort of content creators themselves (for example, a content marketing director for a business with an editorial content strategy may have started off as a writer or editor). As they get experience managing direct reports, teams, and strategies, they rise through the ranks to the director level.

6. Product Marketing Manager

Average salary: $90,769
Salary range: $60,000 – $130,000

When a company releases a new product, they want their customers not only to be excited about it, but also to fully understand how it works, what features it offers, and what benefits they’ll get from using it. Product marketing managers work on researching, positioning, messaging, and launching new products as well as on continuing marketing efforts.

They are responsible for developing and implementing the marketing strategies that generate excitement and communicate the functionality, features, and benefits of a new product to customers in a digestible, easy-to-understand way (and to help salespeople do the same).

Generally, product marketing managers work for tech or software companies (where the features of a product are typically more complex) and often have at least a bachelor’s degree in marketing or a related field.

7. Demand Generation Manager

Average salary: $83,143
Salary range: $59,000 – $117,000

This is a multifaceted role that covers any marketing initiative or effort that could fall under the umbrella of “generating demand” for an organization’s product or service—whether those efforts are B2C (geared toward individual people) or B2B (geared toward other businesses).

Their responsibilities can include everything from driving new leads through a content campaign to building buzz around a new product launch through influencer marketing partnerships to developing loyalty programs to transform first-time customers into repeat business.

Generally, demand generation managers have significant experience in a variety of marketing roles and feel comfortable wearing different hats and moving between platforms and strategies. While a bachelor’s degree is helpful to get your foot in the door, if you can show that you’re able to produce results, it’s not required.

8. Brand Marketing Manager

Average salary: $73,357
Salary range: $49,000 – $107,000

A company’s “brand” is the way it’s perceived in the market. Brand marketing managers are basically the “keepers” of any organization’s brand. They oversee the brand strategy, ensuring that the products, marketing campaigns, events, and any other initiatives that they manage are in line with the way the business wants to be perceived—and received—by their target demographic.

While much of the role is creative, brand marketing managers also analyze the success of different initiatives and look for ways to optimize future efforts, so analytical skills are a must as well. Typically, brand marketing managers have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and three to five years of experience working in a more junior brand marketing role.

Growth Marketer Salary

The average Growth Marketer salary is $84,386 as of April 27, 2021, but the salary range typically falls between $67,713 and $98,730. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.

Growth Marketing Course

1. Growthminded – Mastering Growth Series

Want to become a growth expert by undertaking hands-on work?

That’s exactly what this course is all about.

You will learn ways to drive sustainable growth and will emerge with a personal playbook you’ll use long after the program.

This action-packed curriculum keeps you 100% focused and driving results day by day. The course is trusted by startups, founders, and growth-stage companies like Jolly, Contiq, and Votion.

It’s the #1 growth marketing course on this list for a reason. It’s rock solid.

Founder: Craig Zingerline – check out his profile on GrowthMentor
What you’ll learn: Foundations of growth, structuring growth teams, building your growth framework, acquisition channels, growth loops, and growth product management.
Who’s it for: Founders, growth marketers, traditional marketers looking to get into growth, growth-minded product managers.
Price: $500

2. CXL – Growth Marketing Minidegree

Are you serious about building your growth marketing skills?

Ready to put in the work required to complete a mini degree?

This extensive certification program by CLX Institute is for you. After completing 7 cumulative tracks and 113h 39 minutes of video courses, you’ll have mastered the methodologies and processes top growth executives leverage to drive companies like InVision and Lyft.

This practical, hands-on curriculum teaches you the right skills for the marketplace. Watch video lessons, use resources like checklists and spreadsheets, and complete practice exercises to unlock the certification tests.

The course is taught by top industry practitioners, including John McBride, Paul Boag, Morgan Brown, Sean Ellis, and others.

Founder: CLX Institute
What you’ll learn: Growth marketing foundations, data and analytics, channel-specific growth skills, and growth program management.
Who’s it for: Full-stack marketers, UX folks working with data, and people who want to join growth teams.
Price: $599 for the first user and $299 for each additional user

3. Reforge – The Growth Series

Originally developed by Brian Balfour, The Growth Series teaches the main elements of growth from acquisition and retention to habit formation and psychology.

Instead of covering hacks, tips, tactics or tricks, the course teaches proven, actionable frameworks from the fastest-growing companies – to help you build a powerful engine for your company.

It also features several up-to-date examples, real case studies, and private conversations with leaders from companies like Netflix, Uber, Dropbox, Slack, and others.

Reforge allots slots within the program on a first-come, first-served basis. To get the most out of the course, you should spend at least 5 hours per week; 2-3 hours on course content, 1 hour applying the frameworks, 1-2 hours participating in an in-person or online event.

Founder: Brian Balfour
What you’ll learn: Retention and engagement, acquisition strategy, monetization, growth models and user psychology.
Who’s it for: Product and growth practitioners with a minimum of 3 years of working experience and B2B and B2C practitioners.
Price: $3,495

4. General Assembly – Digital Marketing On-Demand

Want to indulge your curiosity or enhance your job performance?

This course offers a fun, flexible learning path to skill up your digital marketing fundamentals.

The expert-crafted lessons and easily accessible mentors will help you upscale your professional toolkit. Upon completion of the program, you’ll have acquired core digital marketing skills, launch brand acquisition, and retention campaigns and improved your resume.

Other benefits include 53 unique lessons, 1-on-1 mentor sessions, 12-month access to General Assembly’s platform, and downloadable lesson guides. The program also includes a bonus Certified Marketer Level 1 (CM1) study guide, assessment, and practice assessment, all worth $200.

Founder: General Assembly
What you’ll learn: Customer insight, CRM, analytics, marketing technology and marketing channels
Who’s it for: Digital marketers
Price: $950

5. Demandcurve – Growth Marketing Full Course

The Demandcurve course will help you cover the full breadth of growth marketing – with each experience tailored to your market and company.

This self-paced course will dive into your landing pages, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and emails, correct errors, and suggest better ideas.

Once you register, you access the entirety of its curriculum for 1 year, extended access to a team for deeper feedback and growth instructors for 6 months.

You also have the option to purchase individual sections of the course. On average, you need 2-3 months to complete the course.

Founder: Julian Shapiro, Neal O’Grady, and Justin Setzer
What you’ll learn: Customer acquisition, growth strategy, analytics and tracking, user onboarding and landing pages.
Who’s it for: Founders and business owners, junior marketers, startup employees and senior marketers.
Price: $349 to $5,800

Growth Marketing Executive

A growth executive is a combination of digital strategist, inside salesperson, community manager, data analyst and marketing executive.

Five tips from a growth executive:

Build strong digital communities creating social influence with your influencers – Give them the gift of sharing their content & stories – Engage digitally with your influencers
Be more concerned about building relationships than getting a short term sale
Think like a marketer creating long term brand awareness focusing on the human element of the brand – Great book “There is no more B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human, #H2H” by Bryan Kramer
Timing is everything in business – If timing is off right now – Ask them when do they make these decisions and to be involved with their business & marketing process
You will need to be persistent and have at least (5-8) different touchpoints with the decision-maker or influencer – For example, email, phone, mobile phone, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other forms of social media like Snapchat – One of the most important secrets that leads to growth is persistence & grit

It is important that we recognize that our environment has changed where businesses & people now rely on influencers in their digital communities to purchase a product or service and it is at their fingertips with their mobile device.

Growth Marketing vs Digital Marketing

The biggest difference between digital marketing and growth marketing is methodology. Digital marketing is a set of marketing tactics that are applied digitally. Everything from SEO to email marketing to PPC and digital advertising is considered digital marketing.

Growth marketing is a marketing methodology that places a high value on goal-setting, data analysis, and testing & experimentation. Growth marketing often uses a number of digital marketing techniques, but its primary goal is to deliver measurable growth for your company.

Now that we’ve got a better understanding of both digital marketing and growth marketing, it’s time to get to the important point for you — which delivers the greatest ROI?

While ROI is entirely dependent on how your company implements and optimizes marketing strategies, I can say with a high degree of confidence that growth marketing will deliver the greatest ROI.

Why not digital marketing?

It comes down to the strategy portion of growth marketing.

You can absolutely implement a range of digital marketing techniques and see serious ROI. But, when you implement those same digital marketing tactics with a growth marketing mindset, your company is more likely to see the return you’re looking for.

Why?

Because you know what you’re looking for.

Growth marketing forces your company to set clear, specific goals that you can measure constantly. If one digital marketing tactic — say email marketing — isn’t pushing your company to your growth goals, you know you need to either change your approach, or put that time, money, and effort into a marketing tactic that will get you to your goals.

Why Should I Hire a Growth Marketer?

Before product-market fit, founders typically lead sales & marketing, and they should. It’s critical that those holding the vision are soaking up as much direct customer feedback as possible.

Once you’ve hit product-market fit, it’s time to hire your first growth marketer. You need a person focused full-time on understanding your target audience, determining how to reach them, and the best way to persuade them to buy or use your product.

Over time, your growth marketer can optimize different parts of your lifecycle, but at this stage, the acquisition is most likely the priority. As you invest in acquisition, don’t forget to closely monitor your retention rates – leaky buckets don’t scale!

What is a Growth Marketing Specialist?

As a Growth Marketing Specialist, you will be responsible for constructing and executing growth marketing strategies and plans for assigned clients via the following steps:

Check-Up: At this stage, we run a comprehensive check-up for the brands consisting of internal analysis, competitive analysis and customer insights analysis; in order to build up our growth marketing strategy.
Growth Marketing Strategy Development: At this stage we create ‘Minimum Viable Strategy Outputs’ which are Persona(s), Targeting, Positioning Statement, Growth Funnel Structure and Targeted Growth Metrics
Growth Marketing Plan Development: At this stage we build our Owned, Paid and Earned Media Plans according to our Growth Strategy outputs
Growth Driven Strategic Management: Since our approach is data driven, we always iterate and optimize Growth Marketing Plans according to targeted growth metrics.

You will be working as a part of our Growth Services Brand Team with the ultimate mission of providing Growth for NBT Clients.

You will be collaborating closely with:

Brand Team – Consultants and Growth Marketing Specialists
The Growth Service Director
Growth Marketing Team – Content Marketing, Performance Marketing, Design
Product Team

What is a Growth Marketing Strategy?

A growth marketing strategy can be based around metrics including customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, customer retention rates, and customer lifetime value. Here are some of the leading tactics that today’s growth marketers use to attract, convert, create, and retain engaged customers. All of these tactics are used frequently in the e-commerce space, but can be useful for brick-and-mortar businesses, too.

1. A/B testing

A/B testing, or better yet, multivariate testing, is one of the core practices of a strong growth marketing strategy. A/B testing and multivariate can be used in a number of formats, including email marketing, landing pages, social media ads, and others.

This involves deploying either an “A” and a “B” test, or a series of multiple tests, to understand which variation of your content (with customizations around graphics, copy, design, and other features) does a better job of engaging your audience and increasing your conversion rate. You can then optimize future marketing campaigns around that variation—continually iterating on your successes to enhance performance with every test.

It’s important to remember that just because the “B” test proved most effective with one audience segment, “C” might work better with another: Don’t just send your A/B tests out in batches; focus on customized segments for each one to understand what content resonates with that particular audience group, and then keep testing new variations to enhance performance.

2. Cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing focuses on building a strategic channel plan to reach your customers, and can include email marketing, SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, and other channels, based on your audience’s preferences.

When incorporating a cross-channel marketing plan into your growth marketing strategy, you need to focus on the individual user to understand their communication preferences, and then build your campaigns accordingly. A/B testing can help you first understand that a particular user responds to push message offers at a 60% higher rate than email marketing offers, for instance, so you can customize future campaigns to focus on push offers.

It’s also valuable to build a holistic marketing plan that integrates multiple channels, so that you will be able to engage with your audience wherever they are, using contextual campaigns that help you understand their past behavior across each platform.

3. Customer lifecycle

A customer lifecycle is the journey your customers embark on as they learn about, interact with, buy or convert, and re-engage with your company. For simplification, there are three critical lifecycle stages that growth marketers focus on: activation, nurture, and reactivation. Each stage plays a specific role as a contributing factor to customer experience and is often marked by specific campaigns.

The activation stage is the initial stage of the lifecycle where companies seek to activate consumer attention and interest. Growth marketers target customers with welcome, onboarding, trials, and other introductory campaigns to build familiarity and credibility.

The nurture stage is where companies nurture and engage consumers to strengthen relationships. This stage typically accounts for the majority of cross-channel marketing customers receive from brands: sales, promotions, recent updates, newsletters, and more.

The final reactivation stage focuses on re-engagement. It’s this stage where companies reactivate customer engagement to drive retention and loyalty through campaigns like: post-purchase, abandonment, loyalty, or win backs.

No single stage outweighs another in terms of importance. Customers naturally progress through this lifecycle at their own speed, but growth marketers proactively accommodate their changing needs using an arsenal of need-specific campaigns.

How do You Develop a Growth Strategy?

The key with any growth strategy is to be deliberate. Figure out the rate-limiting step in your growth, and pour as much fuel on the fire as possible. But for this to be beneficial, you need to take the following steps:

1. Establish a value proposition.

For your business to sustain long-term growth, you must understand what sets it apart from the competition. Identify why customers come to you for a product or service. What makes you relevant, differentiated and credible? Use your answer to explain to other consumers why they should do business with you.

For example, some companies compete on “authority” — Whole Foods Market is the definitive place to buy healthy, organic foods. Others, such as Walmart, compete on price. Figure out what special benefit only you can provide, and forget everything else. If you stray from this proposition, you’ll only run the risk of devaluing your business.

2. Identify your ideal customer.

You got into business to solve a problem for a certain audience. Who is that audience? Is that audience your ideal customer? If not, who are you serving? Nail down your ideal customer, and revert back to this audience as you adjust business to stimulate growth.

3. Define your key indicators.

Changes must be measurable. If you’re unable to measure a change, you have no way of knowing whether it’s effective. Identify which key indicators affect the growth of your business, then dedicate time and money to those areas. Also, A/B test properly — making changes over time and comparing historical and current results isn’t valid.

4. Verify your revenue streams.

What are your current revenue streams? What revenue streams could you add to make your business more profitable? Once you identify the potential for new revenue streams, ask yourself if they’re sustainable in the long run. Some great ideas or cool products don’t necessarily have revenue streams attached. Be careful to isolate and understand the difference.

5. Look to your competition.

No matter your industry, your competition is likely excelling at something that your company is struggling with. Look toward similar businesses that are growing in new, unique ways to inform your growth strategy. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice. Ask yourself why your competitors have made alternate choices. Are they wrong? Or are your businesses positioned differently? The assumption that you’re smarter is rarely correct.

6. Focus on your strengths.

Sometimes, focusing on your strengths — rather than trying to improve your weaknesses — can help you establish growth strategies. Reorient the playing field to suit your strengths, and build upon them to grow your business.

7. Invest in talent.

Your employees have direct contact with your customers, so you need to hire people who are motivated and inspired by your company’s value proposition. Be cheap with office furniture, marketing budgets and holiday parties. Hire few employees, but pay them a ton. The best ones will usually stick around if you need to cut back their compensation during a slow period.

Developing a growth strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. In fact, due to changing market conditions, making strategic decisions based on someone else’s successes would be foolish. That’s not to say that you can’t learn from another company, but blindly implementing a cookie-cutter plan won’t create sustainable growth.

You need to adapt your plan to smooth out your business’s inefficiencies, refine its strengths and better suit your customers — who could be completely different than those from a vague, one-size-fits-all strategy.

Your company’s data should lend itself to all your strategic decisions. Specifically, you can use the data from your key indicators and revenue streams to create a personalized growth plan. That way, you’ll better understand your business and your customers’ nuances, which will naturally lead to growth.

A one-size-fits-all strategy implies vague indicators. But a specific plan is a successful plan. When you tailor your growth strategy to your business and customers, you’ll keep your customers happy and fulfill their wants and needs, which will keep them coming back.

Final Thought

A dynamic growth strategy guides you and your team towards the future of your company. When you know what you want and have a way to get there, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of making hasty decisions that cost you in the long run.