What is 'growth marketing' & why does it matter?

What does a growth marketer do? 

Given that the function of growth marketing is fairly new, the question of what the function is or why a company even needs one is quite common. In fact, when I first became a growth marketer, I didn’t even know what my role fully encompassed.

I learned that growth marketers use data and marketing to create business growth through innovative and data-driven strategies across various digital channels, including paid search, social media, display advertising, and SEO, overseeing the whole user funnel from acquisition to retention.

A growth marketing manager prioritises experimentation by testing different approaches to see what yields the best results, building a data-driven growth culture within the company. This culture is characterised by continuous testing, learning, and iterating, which leads to sustained business growth.

What I love about it though, is it’s a cross-functional role that transverses both product and data and marketing. 

Who needs growth marketers anyway?

According to Stuart Brameld, Growth Method CEO & Growth Advisor: ‘Every modern business should have a growth marketing manager because they can help the company drive customer acquisition, convert leads, and expand market reach through tested, data-driven strategies.’

Growth marketing roles are growing! 

Growth and growth marketing related roles were consistently placed in the top 10 fastest-growing roles worldwide. According to LinkedIn’s study of jobs on the rise in 2023, growth-related roles were at the top. 

Lenny’s Newsletter showed that growth roles have increased by over 117% in the US in the past 2 years. In the US, growth roles are one of the fastest-growing roles right now within the tech industry. (Data as of July 2024)

‘To give you a sense of scale, there are about 80,000 active “growth” roles in the U.S. right now and about 1,000 to 2,000 growth hires made per month.’

This is because as many companies try to find profitability and revenues, the growth role becomes increasingly crucial to maintaining their edge over competitors. 

It’s an exciting time to be in a ‘growth’ role now, right?

But what a ‘growth’ role is varies from company to company.

Having looked at various job descriptions for growth roles, I’ve seen growth roles also encompass what were typically ‘business development’ or ‘sales’ roles’; it’s so widely applied that it has become hackneyed.Here is a sample description from a ‘growth director’ role I found on LinkedIn:

As an Account Director, your role will focus onbringing in / growing new and existing client accounts, whilst working with members of the senior leadership team. What you'll be doing:

Leading new business pitches - finding clients, creating and overseeing pitches
Growing existing client accounts
Leading and delivering new business efforts, such as RFI, RRQ and RFPs
Helping to convert warm leads into clients

This sounds more like sales and business development, which I suppose is expected as the company is an agency and growth means finding new clients for them.

Here’s another for ‘Head of Growth’:

Join us as the mastermind behind our global user acquisition, engagement, and retention strategies! As the Head of User Growth, you'll lead a newly established team in performance marketing, gamification, CRM, operations, and content to drive sustainable growth for our mobile app on a global basis.

The job title is similar but the description is different. That’s because not all growth roles are not created equal.

I believe that every growth role will be unique and that the level of the skill set required will vary across companies. However, I do believe that what’s critical for success within the role is fundamentally the same across all companies.

What’s critical for success in the role: 

In my opinion, there are 5 key criteria or factors that are critical for success in any growth role:

1. Understanding the company’s key business growth drivers

This is probably critical to any business role but sometimes it’s a lot harder to truly understand what makes a company tick if you just joined the company. It’s hard to deliver value if you’re still unsure about what drives the company’s growth. Oftentimes, what matters is the focus. Focusing on factors that will help your business to grow in the short, medium and long term will help drive growth. And drivers are different from channels. Increasing demand for your product is a growth driver, but what are the factors that drive that demand for your product? Is it an aging population (for a healthcare product; an increase in the number of people who are facing a particular problem or issue?

For my current company, at the early stage, a big driver of growth was simply the no. of banking partners we could have, as without the banking partners, our users couldn’t onboard. Once we expanded the no. of banking partners, the no. of users increased exponentially. Later once we had a good number of banking partners, other factors mattered more.

2. Understanding your target users/customers (it’s almost like you are the customer)

This sounds obvious, like any marketer should know who their target users or customers are. But do you really know your customers? Can you put yourself in their shoes? Creating any campaign or communicating to the user becomes difficult if you don’t understand them well. 

An example, we were asked us to communicate to customers that they were reducing interest rates for a savings product. We knew that the company would face some flak over this given the sentiment within the community, and therefore decided to manage the messaging by engaging with our community managers to let our VIPs and influential customers through different channels rather than simply sending them an email.

We invited them to an in-person meet and greet session with senior leaders where we gave them product updates and kept them informed on why they company was making the changes. By emphasising how the product was being improved in other ways and explaining the USPs of our product, we managed the customers effectively using a softer approach through a mix of messaging and communications along with community engagement.

3. Knowing how to analyse and interpret data effectively to draw conclusions (and act on them)

Data is the bedrock of growth. Understanding its foundations, where to get data, how data flows and what kind of data you have is crucial to understanding the ins and outs of growth marketing. 

If you don’t have a good understanding of your data sources and what kind of data you have available to you, you’re limiting yourself in what insights can be obtained.

Having a data analyst or data scientist who can help you pull that data and work with you to create charts and analyses helps to unlock superpowers.

What’s better is a growth marketer who can do the basic data pulling and analysis by himself or herself. Only then can one unlock the true power of growth.

Data has saved me multiple times from making bad decisions, or rather helped inform my decision making. I ran a survey once that helped me understand my users better and I was surprised to learn that many of our users actually came from referrals, which we always thought was a rather ‘deprioritised’ channel for the company. We also then found out that referred users tend to be stickier and generate higher revenue than users who came purely from paid ads channels. Knowing this, we pivoted our growth strategy to focus on referrals and gained a large portion of our early users through this. 

4. Understanding the different channels out there for growth and how to leverage them (there’s more than SEO and paid marketing)

You need to understand what the different marketing channels out there are and how you can leverage them for growth.If you’re doing B2B marketing, there are an array of channels you can employ. For B2C marketing, the sky’s the limit. 

Where are your target audiences? Which platforms do they spend time on and what kind of content do they engage with? Knowing this will help refine your growth marketing strategy. Different channels have different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to advertising so one needs to be as in-depth as possible in understanding the different channels and their nuances.

When I started out, my focus was on content marketing for social media and email, my focus was always on organic growth. From there I branched out into paid ads and SEO, with a strong focus on paid ads at the moment. I’m also looking into affiliate marketing channels and referral strategy to help drive user acquisition for a more sustainable growth trajectory.

Some platforms or channels are better for targeting, some are better for awareness. Knowing which channels suit your target audience and the pros and cons of each type of channel can help you tailor your approach.

Ideally you’d have experience in all of the different channels and know what works and what doesn’t. Save yourself time and resources by creating a strategy that works.

5. Strategic thinking, along with execution ability, and an ability to manage and work with different stakeholders

I combined this point into one point as I thought about it, it is multiple skills but strategic thinking requires big picture thinking while execution ability involves working with others sometimes. No man is an island after all.

How one manages one’s time is entirely up to one’s discretion but having to juggle multiple projects simultaneously and having to manage that usually requires a skill that I think it’s quite hard to come by.

Examples of times where I’ve had to be strategic and manage multiple projects that required execution are many but I like to reflect on my time working as a head of growth for a crypto exchange that went bust. 

Working with 3 different legal teams (for 3 different jurisdictions: Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia) and being the main POC for customer communications meant that I often had to juggle sending emails to over 200,000 affected users daily, while also providing ‘legally approved’ responses on our website, which was read by the press all over Southeast Asia. It was an exciting yet stressful time where I truly learned what it meant to get one’s head down, make very few mistakes and get things out as quickly as possible.

What are your top factors critical for success?

Want to learn more about growth marketing and in-depth case studies? I hope to update this periodically as I reflect and think about the things I’ve learned and the mistakes I’ve made over the past 4 years as a growth marketer.