How To Be The Growth Marketer That Every Business Wants
Rule #1: You know nothing, Jon Snow…
If you are reading this article, it’s most likely because you are new in the world of growth marketing, or you want to be a better growth marketer…or maybe you just want to hear what it is I have to say. Either way, I’m glad to have you hear. Be sure to read till the end.
In this article, I am going to be sharing the characteristics of a successful growth marketer, skills that you need to have, and insights on how to win businesses over as a growth marketer especially when you are going for that big interview. Pay attention to “Rule #1”, we will get to it. Everything I am sharing is coming from the knowledge I am currently acquiring at CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing minidegree program. So trust me, it’s worth the read.
Question 1: “How do I become a good growth marketer?”
The question on almost every growth marketer’s mind…especially if you are new in the field. Truth is, there is no pre-determined path or a step-by-step manual to being a good growth marketer. But, there are some things you can always apply to yourself to stand out from the crowd.
There are three(3) main components to being a successful growth marketer:
Channel Level Expertise: This is having good understanding or a level of expertise in one or more of the many growth marketing channels. It could be SEO, email marketing, Facebook ads, or any of the others. This component is really important, especially for a new growth marketer.
Analytical Capabilities: Having this is a level up! The ability to extract data to gather insights, analyze your own experiments, interpret results, track growth, and come up with fresh ideas for the future, is super important for any growth marketer. You can’t grow it if you can’t measure it. Data is the lifeblood of growth.
Leadership/Management: The ability to think strategically, make decisions, and work with other stakeholders’ is a plus. Growth is cross-functional and if you are not particularly good at working with the creative team or analytics team, you will have a hard time running the right experiments and bringing projects to a close.
Question 2: “How do I become a BETTER growth marketer?”
Continuous learning is the secret recipe for becoming better at growth marketing. Evaluate yourself with the three components in the previous paragraphs to figure out your strengths and weaknesses. Double down on your strengths to become a wizard at it. As for your not-so-strong suit, you can start by learning from another growth marketer who is an expert in that area. Learning from others who have walked that path will help you avoid pitfalls. There is nothing as frustrating as running into blockers when learning something you don’t know.
Invest in learning and constantly getting better. Set next level goals for yourself, and invest in learning the skills that will help you crush those goals when the time comes. Challenge yourself and apply the growth methodologies to yourself. It might be hard to drown out the noise, and the distractions, but if you can get yourself to focus, it is always worth it.
You know nothing, Jon Snow…
Growth, when it comes to businesses, is about trying new things and constantly improving and constantly getting better. The best growth marketer is the one that can apply this same philosophy to his/her own life. As a growth marketer, do not assume that you know exactly what to do to grow a business. What you know are “ideas” that you are willing to test. “Ideas” that you should be willing to discard if it fails. A good growth marketer is constantly improving in strategic thinking, channel expertise, and understanding data. Business owners can spot a good growth marketer when you are asked to talk about the trajectory of your career because they will hear the passion and excitement when you talk about the new skillset you recently acquired or the new experiment you tried with some sample data.
How to get hired as a growth marketer?
When I started learning growth marketing a year ago, I struggled with a couple of insecurities — lack of experience, not enough knowledge…why would they pick me? It’s okay to have those fears, what’s not okay is taking those fears with you to your big interview. The three main components I talked about earlier are things employers and hiring managers are looking out for.
As a new growth marketer, what you need the most is channel level expertise. Take a course on a particular marketing channel, it could be email marketing, whichever works for you. You can find self-paced courses with certifications in platforms like Udemy and Hubspot. These two have always come through for me. The same thing goes for analytics, ain’t nothing stopping you from going online and learning SQL or Excel. There are several resources with practice data to get hands-on experience. It helps to show your desire for learning, your hunger for growth.
Understand the basic foundations of how growth works in the industry you’re interested in. Find a business that is similar to the company you want to work at, learn from them. How did they start their business, what were their frameworks? What are the channels they used? It will help you spot growth opportunities for the business and you can go into that interview with cool ideas about experiments they should run, get into their current funnel, do a deep analysis of it, and come up with ideas for how they can improve it. You can show that you know what the right experimentation framework is, what are the best ideas to be testing, you can apply that to any part of somebody’s business you’re interviewing with them. This method has always worked for me and it still does.
I am going to stop here for now, and I hope you have gained a thing or two. Another article will be coming up next Sunday, and hopefully, I can make this twice a week. Thanks for reading, kindly follow and share.
