Growth Marketing Mini Degree Review 1.0
An Introduction to Growth Marketing and What it Takes to Become A Growth Marketer.
I recently decided to take a deep dive into growth marketing using the best bridge available — the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing mini degree (featuring a course series taught by experienced growth marketers).
This article is the first installment of my Growth Marketing learning diary.
Going Down Memory Lane…
Before growth marketing became a full-blown thing, there was growth hacking. The growth hacking term was introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010. According to Sean, “a growth hacker is someone whose true commitment is growth and all resources are directed to improving growth potential.”
This widely popular term was further expanded by Andrew Chen in a 2012 blog post titled Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. In this viral blog post, Chen described growth hacking techniques used by AirBnB, which was a startup at the time, as opposed to the traditional strategies employed by other organizations. He described a growth hacker as a marketer and coder hybrid — a person who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph, etc.”
Growth marketing and growth hacking are both experimental at their cores, which means there is built-in room for failures (and successes!). — Julie Zhou
Growth Marketing: What is it?
Growth marketing is primarily focused on growing or scaling a business via customer data-driven tactics and strategies. See it as traditional marketing but on steroids.
Traditional marketing focuses on the awareness and acquisition parts of the funnel (activities that drive short-term wins).
BUT
Growth marketing looks at the entire customer life cycle, gathering insights and using them to build out strategies to retain and keep customers engaged.
A typical Traditional Marketer would say:
“I’d like to come up with the best possible campaign that’ll take my client’s sales/business from point A to point B.”
This strategy is sometimes counter-intuitive when data is not gathered to discover aspects of the campaign performing sub-optimally.
A Growth marketer would rather form a hypothesis and then build a set of small campaigns, using data gathered to further tweak or optimize the campaign as it progresses towards the overall goal.
Experiments: The Core of Growth Marketing
The most important aspect of growth marketing is TESTING and this singular activity differentiates it from other marketing strategies.
Testing during the growth marketing process is only possible when SMART goals are set — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-based.
A growth marketer would often say, “I want to grow Doe sales by 40% in the 4th quarter of 2020” instead of “I want to ensure Doe has the best sales in the industry this year”. Based on the SMART goal, a growth marketer creates a plan with a set of small steps to reach the 40% sales target.
Growth marketers are master experimenters at every stage of the funnel and they work closely with the whole business to gain better insights.
In lesson 2 of the Growth Marketing course, John Mcbride describes 3 different layers a growth marketer/agency can operate:
Level 1 — Easy: Deciding to learn if running an email marketing campaign, sending out push notifications or changing the landing page will lead to any form of conversion.
Level 2 — Less Easy: Level 1 and going a step further to uncover the right message and campaign. The Level 2 growth marketer asks questions like: ‘How do I come up with the best email?’ and ‘How do we make better landing pages?’
Level 3 — A Tad Difficult: The Level 3 marketer can tailor content types to particular customers.
Everyone operates on the first level. Going down to levels 2 and 3 sets a marketer up to win as fewer people operate at these stages.
Growth Marketer: What Makes You A Successful One
There’s no set path to becoming a growth marketer and to succeed in growth marketing, an individual should possess the following characteristics:
- Channel Level Expertise: have a basic to expert understanding of how channels work. Channels of focus could be email marketing, push notifications, SEO, Facebook ads, etc. You can only optimize what you understand.
- Analytical Capabilities: you’re probably not a good fit for growth marketing if crunching numbers and uncovering insights doesn’t excite you. Growth marketers depend on data and insights(gathered during marketing experiments) to inform campaign/project next steps.
- Cross-Functional Strategic Thinking: a growth marketer functions as a product manager in most cases and should be able to come up with good ideas, pick the right experiments, discover opportunities for growth across the consumer journey roadmap and being able to work with other departments — creatives, sales, etc.
Having expert knowledge in one and baseline knowledge in the other two areas and a willingness to learn is enough to get you started in growth marketing.
Growth in the context of business is about trying new things and constantly improving and constantly getting better, and the best growth marketers are people that apply that same thinking to themselves in their own life. — John McBride
Growth Marketer: Building A Career
Building a career in growth marketing involves analyzing the required characteristics (mentioned above), discovering your areas of strength and deciding to build on the others. As someone who dove into marketing from a non-marketing background, constant study and a dedication to building relevant projects will give you a leg-up into growth marketing and set you for constant wins. Need study material? Visit CXL Institute, Udemy, YouTube, Coursera for courses related to specific characteristics.
If you’re considering a change to Growth Marketing — I say go for it. You’ll be a valuable asset to growth-focused organization when you arm yourself with the required skills and a hunger for continuous learning.
Let me leave you with this:
For meaningful growth, startups must completely change the rules of traditional channels or innovate outside of those growth channels. They are too desperate and disadvantaged to adapt to the old rules of marketing. They have to dig deep creatively, and relentlessly test new ideas. If they don’t figure it out quickly, they will go out of business. — Sean Ellis
