Growth marketing has become increasingly popular over the last decade, and rightly so. Traditional “set it and forget it” marketing tactics no longer work. Neither does focusing exclusively on awareness and acquisition, as many marketers once did.
Today, only building brand awareness and putting campaigns on autopilot won’t get you far. Success requires a strategy — and an expert —that takes the entire funnel into account.
Enter: the growth marketer.
True growth marketing experts – once known as growth hackers – know how to optimize the entire marketing funnel for maximum growth, from awareness all the way through to retention. In this way, they are essential players on any digital marketing team, whether it's at a startup or a Fortune 500 company.
Finding that skillset is increasingly hard, though. As the demand for growth marketing experts increases, so does the number of marketers who claim they can do the job.
Growth marketers are the most hired role at MarketerHire, and they’re in demand across the marketing industry — for good reason.
Often considered modern marketing managers, they can strategize across all marketing channels, from paid digital campaigns and new customer onboarding to retention marketing and loyalty programs.
If you launch a product and people like it, that’s great! You’ve found some level of product-market fit. Scaling that initial success is another beast, though, and it’s essential for your business’s longevity.
That’s what growth marketers specialize in. With their data-driven approach to marketing, they help businesses hone in on the specific tactics that will grow revenue in their niche — rather than repeating overly general (and often dated) marketing platitudes.
There’s no advice that’s right for everyone, and no one marketing effort that will lift every business’s North Star metrics. There’s only one universal when it comes to growth: Every company has limited bandwidth and needs smart priorities to succeed.
Growth marketers come in handy here, too, helping their clients prioritize the marketing channels and opportunities that will unlock growth the fastest. For one company, that might be social media marketing or influencer marketing; for another, it might be PPC advertising, or a referral program.
A growth marketer builds out a custom growth strategy just for you. They’ll look at your website or product and work to create relevant “pushes” — whether that’s an email marketing effort, a paid social media ad, or SEO updates — geared towards increasing conversion at every stage of your funnel.
For SaaS companies, that might mean boosting new users' signup rates; for startup e-commerce businesses, it could mean laser-focusing on customer retention.
Sean Ellis, former head of growth at Dropbox, once said: “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
It’s true — but how do you find a person who not only cares about growth, but can engineer it from scratch? You look for key, omni-channel skills that they can use whether they’re lifting activation rates or tackling a churn problem.
Here are some of the top skills every growth marketer should have:
If you have serious growth goals but can’t tell if your current marketing strategy and tactics are setting you up to reach them, it’s time to hire a growth marketing expert. With their expertise, growth marketers help you figure out what to stop, tweak, or double down on.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for new creative marketing strategies to test, growth marketers excel at that, too. Hiring them as strategic partners to help shape, inform, or level up your marketing strategy is a surefire way to improve your conversion rate and bottom line.
True growth marketers are ninjas at leveraging data to make strategic decisions. They're hyper-focused on attracting and converting customers – typically with a conversion rate optimization (CRO) angle.
They dig deep to find the exact target audience they need, going beyond traditional demographics. Their job is to think outside the box, finding overlooked distribution channels or strategies that set you apart from your competition.
Making a full-time growth marketing hire is risky and time-consuming. You can spend hours on LinkedIn combing through profiles. If you’re not a growth marketing expert yourself, you can easily make the wrong hire and cost your business thousands.
To avoid this issue, some people look to digital marketing agencies’ growth marketing teams. Yet agencies often hire freelancers themselves to meet client demands.
By hiring a freelance growth marketing expert, you get the best of both worlds –– the expertise you might find at an agency, but now, you get to work directly with that person rather than talk to them through an account manager.
This can save you time and money –– not to mention the benefit of no long-term contracts. With a growth marketing freelancer, you can spin them up to accelerate growth, or let them know it isn’t working out. There are no long-term contracts or fees for needing to go in another direction.
The best growth marketers know they’re amazing at what they do and value the flexibility and autonomy of freelance work, anyway. That's why the top freelance growth marketers are in MarketerHire’s network.