The term “growth marketing” is new and trending, but some marketers are skeptical about what the role even means. Growth marketing is a new role that is responsible for growing a brand. This role is important because it helps brands to increase their reach and grow their business. If your brand is not growing, then a growth marketer can help you to reach new customers and grow your business.
If you had a marketer on your team who could look at your entire marketing strategy and make quick changes based on data, you could win new customers and keep the ones you have.
If it sounds good to you to be a growth marketer, you are not alone. Interest in growth marketing has been increasing since 2011, according to Google Trends.
Growth Marketing Explained
Growth marketing is focused on improving engagement and conversion rates at each stage of the marketing funnel. The goal is to increase the number of leads that become customers. To do this, growth marketers use data and analytics to identify areas of the funnel that need improvement. They then create and test marketing campaigns that aim to increase conversions in those areas.
Growth marketing is the process of acquiring users from the top of the funnel to retaining those users, as explained by Uber growth marketing manager Jonathan Martinez to MarketerHire.
what’s growing, exactly?
Growth marketers might focus on lifting:
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Monthly active users
Growth marketers don’t only care about top-of-funnel metrics.
A growth marketer’s main goal is to find ways to effectively reach new customers and increase revenue. This can include identifying new marketing channels, solutions, and ideas.
The definition of growth marketing is largely based on the process of iterative testing, rather than the results achieved.
Cheap Tests Can Lead to a Big Payoff
A growth marketer who is good at their job will think big and test their ideas cheaply and iteratively to see if they work. They should be able to see any opportunity, no matter how small, as a potential marketing channel.
For example, when Nik Sharma, a growth guru and investor, worked with Hint Water, every major strategy change began with a small, but significant, test.
This allowed the brand to save money by avoiding costly mistakes and also be the first to use influencer marketing as we know it today.
Sharma told MarketerHire that, years ago, nobody else was doing what he was doing and people thought it was sketchy.
Content marketing is growing in popularity and approaching the popularity of social media marketing.
The beauty of growth marketing is that it’s a method that lets you invest without hesitation in a new channel. You just need to start small and experiment as you go.
Ways Marketing Leaders Can Drive More Value
As I work with CMOs on the data-driven transformation of marketing, ecommerce, and every aspect of the customer journey, I see the need for marketing leaders to consider these actions to create more impact.
Your company now recognizes that marketing drives revenue. Seize the shift.
Marketing wasn’t enjoyable when it was a cost center because the CFO would often need to cut areas of spending that weren’t essential. However, now marketing is understood to be a revenue driver that is connected to sales.
Media today is highly measurable, and this has led executives to expect results from marketing spending. While it is important to focus on long-term results, the shift to performance-based spending has made it easier for leaders outside of marketing to see the impact of marketing.
This provides an opportunity for marketers to have a more equal footing with sales in terms of revenue and should take advantage of this shift. In 2022, it will be key to be able to show results to a wider range of people within the company in a way that is easy to understand. Attribution, or the way of measuring which marketing campaigns led to the results, is still difficult as mobile platforms, browsers, and e-commerce and social media sites continue to change and fragment. However, marketers should not be afraid to create a “good enough” method to understand how spending relates to performance throughout the entire process, from the initial awareness stage to the final purchase. The more companies see spending as a whole driving some form of performance, the better off they will be. The key is to focus less on each line of spending and more on the predictive value and how they work together.
Grab the end-to-end growth agenda as the rightful domain of marketing
The current growth agenda doesn’t adhere to the former organizational boundaries set by marketing and other similar functions. Marketers must be clear about their leadership role in driving the growth agenda.
This text is about creating connections within the company so that the customer has a good experience. Customers do not want to have to deal with different parts of the company not working together. Creating a good customer experience is more important than having different parts of the company trying to get data or money.
The growth of social commerce is an example of the new growth agenda. Precisely targeted media should connect directly to an effective, personalized e-commerce experience. The journey should also recognize that users are most likely on a mobile device and therefore require a fast, frictionless, mobile-first payment experience. Any barrier to check-out prevents marketing from turning into a sale. Marketers must work with colleagues who create online product pages and payment mechanics to create an experience with minimal friction. In other words, it all must flow naturally, which will require more real-time coordination than most current organizational boundaries allow.
The majority of marketing executives surveyed believe that the marketing department should have a stronger influence over corporate strategy. This is because areas of marketing such as data-driven marketing, e-commerce, and CRM are integral to creating a smooth customer journey and therefore increasing growth.
Stop ignoring the foundational data work
While the pandemic has united many C-suite leadership teams, digital transformation success still relies on data transformation success. Companies may have implemented technology like CRM, or consolidated sources into a single data lake, but key questions such as data quality and data health management still need to be addressed. Marketers should be focused on sources of quality data that will drive last-mile decisions, rather than siloed, one-off solutions.
Only by working together can business leaders in sales and marketing, technology, data/analytics, and finance create meaningful and sustainable change. The EY/Financial Times survey, which polled 600 senior executives from across these departments, found that data strategy is now the responsibility of many different roles, including the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CISO, and CMO.
To get the best results, you need to make sure the data, technology, and business transformation are all working together. Having a good dashboard or data visualization alone isn’t enough. It can be hard to get all the data to work with digital technology and process on a large scale, but if you do it right, it will start to create value and people will start to believe in it.
Prioritize talent issues ASAP, and don’t be afraid to try something new or radical.
Based on conversations with CMOs, the most vexing challenge in 2022 is likely to be the talent issue. There is wide agreement on the talent challenges, including data-driven skill scarcity, overall retention challenges, and incentive alignment.
To be successful, marketers today need a mix of diverse and specific skills, as well as a wide range and a deep level of expertise. This is making it necessary for leaders to rethink the way they organize and train their teams, manage and work with external partners such as advertising agencies, and adopt new approaches to staffing, while maintaining the right balance between consistency and flexibility. Many leaders are taking matters into their own hands by developing new programs to transform their existing workforce into modern, full-fledged marketers. These efforts create more consistency and even more opportunities for advancement within the company.
As you get more data-driven, don’t lose that creative spark
Marketers today should focus more on using predictive analytics to plan for the future, rather than analyzing past results. This change is due to the data revolution, which has given marketers new abilities to forecast and target advertising. These superpowers can help marketers achieve both growth and efficiency. For example, by targeting ads and making sure that the company is able to deliver the products when they are advertised.
Though it is important for marketers to use data to inform their decisions, they should not rely solely on data or automation. Storytelling and creativity will still be important to connect with humans. New marketing options and formats will continue to emerge, and marketers should take risks to be distinctive.
In 2022, marketing leaders will be able to connect the customer journey to the full-growth agenda in more meaningful ways than ever before by retaining their creativity while scaling data and technology. The speed at which decisions need to be made will become faster and more complex, but those who can build the internal connective tissue will be able to transform their companies to be more competitive and unlock new levels of value creation.
Growth Marketing Changes as Companies Mature
The objectives of growth marketing change as companies scale from startups to large corporations.
On Testing and Innovation
If you’re a startup and not sure which type of marketer to hire first, go with a growth marketer. They’re especially good if you have product-market fit, hypotheses about your existing customer base, a marketing funnel, and strong brand guidelines.
At early-stage companies, growth marketers are especially impactful because there is not enough conviction to invest heavily in one given channel without validation, said Trevor Sookraj, founder and CEO of growth agency Divisional.
Early stage startups typically are not ready for a senior growth marketer or a head of growth, roles that are more strategy focused and less about execution. Instead, mid-career growth marketers who can get things moving quickly tend to be the best fit for early stage startups, Andrew Capland, former head of growth at Postscript, told MarketerHire.
Focuses on Incremental Changes
If your organization is well-established and your current marketing strategy feels outdated or even slightly suboptimal, it may be helpful to bring in a growth marketer.
start-up companies are hoping to find significant changes that will make a big difference, while large organizations focus on improving even small details that can generate large profits. “Even a tiny increase in conversion rates can have a huge impact on a large company,” said Sookraj.
When channels have been active for a long time, there is a lot of data to go through. With the help of a marketing analyst who knows a lot about data, a growth marketer can optimize existing channels.
How to Spot a Growth Marketer
Growth marketers tend to spend their days monitoring paid media accounts; adjusting spending, messaging, and creativity; and providing clients with a summary of the week’s activity.
Paid ad campaigns are a lot like day trading, according to Jordan Finger, CEO of growth marketing agency Noal Partners. Just as strategies that worked yesterday may not be effective today, the campaigns that stay the same can still see different results due to ever-changing CPMs and effectiveness.
Growth marketers are similar to stockbrokers in that they stay on top of trends and can communicate market nuances to clients.
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