Growth marketing is on the rise as is the need for growth marketers. Yet one or even more growth marketers can’t successfully manage a growth marketing program on their own. Growth marketers are and will continue to rely on graphic designers, copywriters and developers or engineers to help make their strategies come to life.
How can these creative roles best support growth marketing? What is changing for you?
As interest in and the practice of growth marketing increases, so increases the company need for the process and mindset required to make this practice a reality.
Is your in-house agency properly staffed and trained in growth marketing best practices and process?
Where traditional marketing focuses on the top of the marketing funnel, growth marketing encompasses the full funnel. As a result, it takes a certain mindset to be on a growth marketing team. There are unique attributes of this type of team.
- This is a team focused on experimentation to find the best solutions for customer marketing. This means that the team has to be allowed to fail – a lot.
- To get to the right answer, speed is imperative and when you have a need for speed, perfectionism is not the highest priority. That doesn’t mean the work should be of poor quality, improper branding, and /or questionable compliance to legal matters, though. In fact, these misses often shut growth teams down quickly. You need to know what you are doing in these areas and come up with a set of minimum requirements that allows for quick iterations.
- The team needs to be open to alternatives in both redefining the problem as well as the solution.
- A growth team has to be data driven. This isn’t an endeavor where you follow your intuition. One needs data to drive design and content choices.
- The team also has to have an affinity for technology. They should be able to adapt to the latest tech developments with ease.
- This is a team that is continuously learning and thrives in that environment.
To sustain your new team or to become part of growth marketing initiatives it is critical to educate yourself and your team and stay up to date on the growth marketing world. You also need to understand the business strategy and stay customer focused. Finally, you must work collaboratively and quickly. Fast experimentation will require a different process than your traditional work. Once experimentation of the growth team has identified the highest performing deliverables, the creative team can then perfect the work as required.
So how do the roles and skill-sets required for growth marketing fit into my in-house agency?
- Every organization is different so there in no one perfect structure that meets all needs, but there are some basic options.
- One option is to add team members with relevant skillsets to functional teams and then have them operate as a cross-functional growth team. The benefit of this model is an opportunity for career growth and potential upskilling of the other existing talent in the group as they see how the team performs.
- Another opportunity is to create a stand-alone core growth team. It is right for some organizations but being siloed may affect your overall marketing alignment so communication and transparency are critical to the success of this approach.
- A third option is to operate in a hybrid manner where common skillsets such as design, content creation and writing, and engineering are on functional teams with a separate growth marketer and project manager on a growth team driving the functional teams’ efforts.
As with building out any organization, you’ll want to understand the business needs and the problems the growth team will own. From there you can identify the needed skillsets, and determine how they fit into the organization.
What are some of the common growth marketing roles?
- A Growth Marketer who has a versatile growth marketing mindset
- Growth Project Managers who are responsible for the efficiency of the experimentation process
- A Data Analyst who focuses on drawing insight from experiments and data sets to inform the areas of opportunity
- A Growth Designer who is focused on the user experience in the customer journey and quickly designs the assets and the experiments you are testing
- A Growth content/copywriter who quickly creates and updates copy in the experiments Growth Engineers who focus on technical decisions in implementing the experiments
When developing your growth team remember that not all of these roles need to be filled at once. Identify the key roles and also the talent you have on staff that will be a good fit for this endeavor. Also know the roles don’t necessarily need to be filled by full-time, traditional hires. There are many situations where contractors may get you faster results especially when you want to test the feasibility of your plan or you have a need for surge staffing. Working with contractors may also help you tap into specialized skillsets faster. Once you have a clearer view of exactly what you need longer-term you can move the roles in-house.
An important practice to consider is that the entire team, including the contractors, must be properly onboarded to avoid the pitfall of a new resource not understanding the expectations, the customer, business direction, the brand, and compliance requirements.
Growth Marketing is providing an exciting opportunity for marketers and creative talent alike and if your in-house agency is properly staffed, trained in growth marketing best practices and process and well positioned, it can ride the growth marketing wave to continued success and enhanced relevance.
