What is a growth marketer

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The way management structures and operates a team is constantly evolving. Instead of siloing departments to work on projects alone, marketers are working together to advocate for their business. One of the best examples of this is the emerging discipline of growth marketing.

Historically, a group of decision makers puts together an idea for a new product, a group of engineers builds it, and then marketing and sales works together to promote it.

Recently growth teams have emerged—working horizontally across all of these internal teams. Typically their job can entail:

Working with the product team to find unnecessary points of friction and other areas to optimize for growth.
Using their own engineering resources to run lightweight tests that serve to validate and fuel the growth engine.
Owning significant portions of how new products are marketed.
Designing these different marketing initiatives and crafting in-app tests.

But what else do growth marketers do on a day-to-day basis? We dive deeper into this burgeoning field to answer this question.

The rise of technical marketing

One of the biggest changes for marketers deals with how they take advantage of their own user data. They can now track how potential customers interact with their marketing efforts, from first awareness to eventual conversion. They can also more efficiently track CRM data across their entire martech stack. These strategies remove guess work—allowing marketers to effectively test different pieces of content and different approaches to see which channels are driving the most growth.

One of the most important things for growth teams to understand is that it is necessary to have a good grasp on who your target audience is and what value your product will provide for them. Luckily, this new analytical approach to marketing, along with the rise of new technological tools, has greatly improved how messaging is delivered to customers. It’s now easier to reach your target audience and convince them of the value your products provide.

Qualities of a Growth Marketer

Just like the other members in a company’s growth team, the growth marketer has a diverse set of skills that allows them to do everything from design and implementing experiments to running data analysis afterwards. In addition to this, the effective growth marketer should understand:

How to collect and analyze Data – Being able to pull and visualize marketing data is essential. A growth marketer should be able to dive deep into their data to see where their company can improve marketing throughout every stage of the funnel. This will helm them prioritize what experiments they run and how they measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
HTML, CSS, & Javascript – With the rapid improvement of martech tools, growth marketers no longer need to have an extensive background in front-end coding. However, having this skillset is certainly a plus. Being able to design tests will help run experiments quickly and iterate faster.
The company product and user base – No matter how good a growth marketer’s analytical and creative skills are, they will not be able to influence their target audience until they can effectively communicate the advantages of their own company’s products over their competition’s. Digging into the data can help surface friction points, but coupling this qualitative data is the real key to success.

While all of these skills are important, an effective growth marketer must also have a strong growth mindset. It’s important to remain curious and not be afraid to break the mold and branch out from what’s been tried before. Testing these different approaches may result in failure. That’s ok. It’s important to not be disappointed and learn to take those learnings and move on.

A growth marketers typical workload

We’ve discussed how technical marketing has risen to prominence, and what skills are necessary to excel in this field. But what do growth marketers actually work on?

Since growth marketers should act as an extension of many different teams throughout a company, they can help improve metrics across multiple stages of the funnel:

Acquisition – Using content, social media, and paid marketing to drive prospective customers to landing pages. The goal of this is to lead your audience further down the path to conversion.
Conversion – Designing different life cycle journeys for users that will nurture them to convert after visiting your site or signing up for a service.
Upselling and retention – Nurturing customers with marketing efforts that will convince them either adopt new products or continue using your services over an extended period of time.
Referral – Building viral features that are aimed at bringing in new users with little to no incurred acquisition cost.

The way a growth marketer fits into your organization largely depends on the size of your user base and the maturity of your product. At AdRoll, we have multiple growth marketers that focus on different stages of the marketing funnel. We also have an established growth mindset across all of our teams. While it’s the growth marketer’s job to move metrics forward, it’s the entire organization’s responsibility to help them by prioritizing growth initiatives that move business up and to the right.