Tips & Guides — 13 Apr 2022
Who is Growth Marketer?
Do you want to grow your business and expand your marketing reach? If the answer to those questions is a resounding “yes”, then it might be time to invest in a growth marketing strategy – and manager.
First up: what actually is growth marketing? It’s a term bandied about a lot in the marketing world, and it’s often bundled together with the concept of ‘growth hacking’. Although both approaches are results-driven marketing methods, the processes are very different.
Growth hacking is a marketing strategy typically deployed by startups. A promise of quick win, minimal spend fixes to increase user acquisitions is certainly appealing for new businesses. Growth hacking was lucrative for SaaS businesses like Dropbox, whose marketing strategies included a runaway success referral scheme.
Growth marketing on the other hand refers to the process of seeking rapid business growth in a longer-term, organic way. The growth marketing method’s primary focus is to attract, engage, nurture and retain customer relationships. Growth marketing offers businesses a multi-channel marketing approach, whereas growth hacking typically involves one specific channel focus at a time.
All growth marketing processes revolve around creating and sustaining loyal customer relationships. This provides a solid foundation for business growth opportunities. We’ll start by introducing you to growth marketing in more depth, before exploring the role of a growth marketing manager, and whether you need one in your business.
Compared to traditional marketing, growth marketing is more of a hands-on approach to different aspects of the business, including product development. A growth marketing manager suggests iterations during development to improve the customer experience, based on data gathered from various channels via a tool like Affise BI. Growth marketing methods take the initiative to seek opportunities for improvement across every section of the business.
A traditional marketing manager’s role is to market the completed product in the best way they can. This is done with no input with the creation of the product, pricing, and a limited range of market research. In contrast, a growth marketing team handles not only the marketing of the product, but all stages of the marketing funnel, including working with the product team.
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Focus areas: exclusively on business growth
Typical business model: established tech businesses looking for rapid growth
Growth focus: comprehensive analysis of the entire marketing funnel
Key metrics: growth, conversions, bounce rates
Typical marketing activities: experimental approaches covering marketing, sales and products to seek growth in any area of the business
Marketing spend: flexible
Decision-making style: data-backed and exploratory
Focus areas: broad business, brand and product marketing
Typical business model: well-established businesses seeking higher volumes of product sales
Growth focus: purely handle the awareness and acquisition stages of the marketing funnel
Key metrics: clicks and impressions
Typical marketing activities: established SEO strategies and content marketing to drive more product sales – they tend not to think outside the box or utilize long processes
Marketing spend: larger than growth marketing strategies
Decision-making style: campaign-driven
Typically reporting to the CEO, VP of Product or Marketing, a growth marketing manager is a customer-focused role responsible for driving business growth through acquisition, activation, retention and referrals. A growth marketing manager’s position involves establishing and executing a growth plan to increase revenue.
A growth manager’s activities during each stage of the customer funnel can include:
At this stage, it’s all about ensuring customers are aware of what you’re offering. Growth managers use marketing tactics such as optimized SEO, social media marketing, and partnerships with brands and agencies to drive high quality website traffic.
Content is key for this stage of the user journey, so a growth manager seeks to create and deliver educational and informative content to prove their business will help the customer. A growth marker checks landing pages, pricing details, and blog articles to ensure these key pages are optimized to provide the best answers and a smooth user journey.
Approaching the conversion stage, a growth marketer looks at the best way to onboard customers and makes sure there are no drop-offs in the process. The use of customer onboarding templates facilitate smooth transitions, and ensure no crucial details are missed during the onboarding process.
Aligning value with the potential conversions, a growth manager seeks to deliver the most value to the user at this stage to nail conversion and encourage future repeat business. Call to actions are explored for maximum conversion effect, in addition to making the landing to conversion journey as smooth and optimized as possible.
A growth manager looks at how often repeat purchases are made, as well as exploring potential upselling opportunities. Another aspect of the revenue stage is Identifying customer churn rates and post-sale engagements to continue building customer relationships by delivering great experiences.
This last stage of the funnel examines any existing referral schemes to increase referral traffic. Iteration suggestions are made to schemes, together with important social proof elements to establish brand trustworthiness. Media monitoring tools are utilized to judge referral rates and potential future growth opportunities, and solutions like Affise used to boost partnership marketing.
A growth manager works cross-functionally across design, analytics and product management departments to create growth strategies.
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What is required from a growth manager? There are some specific skill sets applicable to this particular full-time job role.
A growth manager explores all channels of acquisition to identify the most fruitful areas for growth. Website impressions and clicks aren’t enough by themselves – conversions arevital. A growth marketing manager explores the customer journey in intricate detail.
They ask questions at each stage, such as:
A successful growth marketing manager will assess all the business’s marketing channels and analyze which are the most successful for the lowest CAC. Growth marketing involves looking at areas such as remarketing and optimized Google ad campaigns to reduce CAC.
Another aspect of lowering CAC is addressing customer retention rates. Smart growth marketers implement retention strategies by exploring the reasons for high customer churn to fix them. They understand how to spot weak points in the process, and how to resolve them.
A growth marketing manager is a strategic planner. Quite the opposite to a growth hacker, a growth marketer plans many steps ahead and strives for success in the long-term. Rather than focusing on a single campaign, they examine every stage of the customer lifecycle and delegate tasks to appropriate teams.
A wealth of knowledge about paid ads is essential for a growth marketing manager. We aren’t talking about just running a one-off paid ad campaign and hoping for the best. Instead, statistics analysis is conducted, then utilized to maximise opportunities according to current customer preferences.
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No growth marketing manager is perfect. To really succeed, they’ll work best with the business’s wider team of specialists. A multi-tasking mentality is key for this role, but there are some areas that require backup from the rest of the digital marketing and sales team.
The development of a business’s branding typically falls to the sales team, who report to the growth marketing manager. A growth marketing manager’s role is to see the big picture and the overall strategy, while brand and audience development work on the specific details thanks to their in-depth customer insights and research.
Product design is carried out by the graphic design team, incorporating information from the growth marketing manager. A growth marketing manager does not typically have graphic design skills, but they would understand enough to be able to see what works, what doesn’t, and what changes need to be made to succeed.
A growth marketing manager works together with the copywriting team to deliver engaging marketing campaigns. Their role is to work out what content the brand needs – and then leave the actual copywriting to the experts.
Typically handled by the business’s SEO specialist, the growth marketing manager will collaborate with them on their researched goals. Together, they can identify SEO growth opportunities and stay on top of SEO trends.
Coordinated by the content digital marketing team, the growth manager oversees the content marketing operations to ensure all content initiatives are optimized for success. However, the fine details such as the exact calendars for email marketing campaigns will be left in the hands of the digital marketing content team.
Working together as a cross-functional team delivers the best ROI from marketing efforts. Ecommerce partnerships benefit businesses by increasing brand awareness through collaboration.
A growth marketer’s track record generally includes a bachelor’s degree, with plenty of years experience in marketing roles. However, businesses should remain open to those with experience even if they don’t have a degree.
The job description for a growth marketer’s role includes, but is not limited to by any means, some of these tasks:
A successful growth marketing manager is a visionary as much as a strategist. Growth marketing at its core is finding new and creative ways to optimize marketing to drive business growth. So a growth marketing manager must have the creative skills to think outside of the box for groundbreaking ideas and marketing methodologies.
A data-driven approach is crucial for a growth marketing manager. As much data as possible is gathered from numerous sources to deliver a marketing plan with realistic goals using workflow software.
Some metrics deployed by growth managers include:
Growth managers analyze key metrics to ascertain the best channels to implement and promote strategies.
A growth marketing manager is not limited to traditional marketing channels. Instead, they need to be keen to explore all the available options.
Channels to explore include partner marketing offers. If your company deals with time-consuming manual partner offers, smart managers should be open to investigating automated processes such as CPAPI. As the market-leading data transfer platform for partner marketing offers, CPAPI facilitates a fully automated process for transferring and synchronizing data.
A growth marketing manager’s focus is always on the customer and their experience with the business. Obsessed with customer data, a growth manager combines these insights with their soft skills of perception and user feedback for better experiences.
An example of this is how a growth manager works with the business’s product team. Let’s say that, after analyzing the user website journey, the data shows that users aren’t signing up for product resources. Previous research demonstrates that the resources are both relevant and informative for the users. A growth manager will deliver this information and undertake new research with the product team for them to work on iterations.
A growth manager’s skill set includes engineering every step of the customer funnel to full optimization. This job role requires working with all channels and all aspects of the business to drive productivity and, ultimately, revenue.
While growth marketing managers are all about long-term success, they should be enthusiastic about short term strategies too. This way, they can monitor success and iterate quickly to pivot the marketing focus if necessary.
Growth managers are open to new technologies in addition to marketing channels. From using tools like Affise Reach for working with influencers, to AI and automation – if a new technology offering is going to increase productivity, they will explore its potential. Exploring each step of the customer funnel to determine what’s necessary for peak optimization at each specific stage.
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But what’s the best way to master these skills? Here are four great areas to focus on:
As part of their job role, a growth marketer engages with other marketing experts in different industries, and talks to colleagues and customers for their viewpoints and experiences. The best business apps allow easy communications between managers and customers. A growth marketing manager is a naturally inquisitive character, who enjoys in-depth conversations with different people to gain knowledge to help progress his role.
Always looking to upskill, a growth marketing manager typically enjoys learning about things that will elevate their role and deliver value. These types of environments include like-minded individuals, whom a growth manager seeks conversation with.
Creating side projects enables a growth manager to perform out of the box thinking to come up with fresh ideas. Activities like this enhance their job role, as it puts them firmly in the mind of the customer; seeking solutions to solve their problems.
Utilizing all analytics tools available, a growth marketing manager looks at business trends and aligns them with their business’s model. They constantly seek to answer customers’ questions and solve problems with their business’s products. Working with historical data to ascertain if they can predict future growth opportunities is an integral part of a growth manager’s role.
If you’re at the stage of business where you have existing customers, established marketing campaigns, and want to scale up, it’s probably time for a growth marketer. A growth marketer will take existing strategies and run with them for maximum traction and business growth.
A growth marketer will help your business to grow, but it can only help if your business is ready for growth.
This means having:
Assuming your business ticks those boxes, seeking a growth marketing manager to drive your business’s revenue is a wise decision.
Seasoned brands – no matter how small – benefit from a growth marketing manager. Growth managers take a brand’s identity and run with it to create optimized customer journeys and experiences. Due to this, it’s best to have business data for a growth manager to enable them to work with context.
A growth marketer role isn’t just for thriving businesses in San Francisco. If your business is ready to start scaling and, with a recognized market for your products, a growth marketer would be a very good addition to your team. Your growth marketing manager will quickly tell you which marketing efforts are working, and which aren’t. Using data analysis, you’ll then learn how to improve your digital marketing to improve the customer journey and increase revenue.
A staggering 250 billion dollars was allocated to US businesses’ marketing services in 2021. This figure demonstrates just how vital it is that your business’s message is heard in the digital space. Hiring a growth marketing manager as part of your digital marketing strategy will help you cut through the noise.
Written by
Alister Esam is the CEO and Founder of Process Bliss, a work management software that is reinventing how businesses execute day to day tasks. He is an expert in strategic planning, business process management, and business process optimization. With more than 15 years of experience in helping businesses run at peak efficiency, Alister has dedicated his career to make work easier, and more motivating for managers and employees alike.
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