What is Growth Marketing?

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^{UK, Sunday, March 5th}

Hello Friend,

Anyway, we all have busy lives and not enough hours in the day. So, I firstly want to say thank you for subscribing and lending me your time.

My aim with this monthly newsletter is to help you become a better marketer, a better thinker, and to share some of the things that have helped me most.

🪴 What is Growth Marketing?

It’s a buzz word that has seen a huge amount of interest over the last few years. Having been popularised in Silicon Valley by the likes of Facebook, Uber, and Google, it’s now hit the mainstream.

Over 50% of new US marketing hires in 2022 featured some reference to growth 😮.

As we’re all facing recession, and businesses are finding it harder than ever to attract and retain customers, growth marketing can be seen as a magic bean. However, like with many fashionable terms, it is often misunderstood.

Let’s set the record straight;

➡️ It looks along the whole customer lifecycle - it is commonly seen as just about getting new customers. However, growth teams actually consider growth holistically, looking at acquisition, retention, and monetisation.

➡️ It’s data driven - it’s all about experimenting and trying out new things to see what works best. It's like being a mad scientist in a lab, mixing and matching different ingredients to create the perfect formula for success.

➡️ It never stops - rather than a “set and leave” approach to campaign planning, growth teams are constantly testing and optimising campaigns to get the best results. It's like a game of darts - you throw your dart, see where it lands, and adjust your aim for the next.

➡️ It fuels, accelerates, and restarts your growth loops - bringing in potential customers, enabling them to move through the growth model with minimal friction, or bringing people back to build habits around your product or service.

➡️ It has a bias for action - growth works in quick sprints. You have an idea and you get out and test it in the real world. It’s not heavily theoretical, and needs you to actually test things in the real world.

There’s a reason that all the unicorn companies over the last 10 years had well established growth teams. Experimentation and growth processes are credited with driving a lot of the scale. It definitely pays for you to understand it.

💡KEY IDEA: if you want to future proof a career in marketing then growth is one of the best areas you can go into. It’s combination of data-led, experimental, and holistic thinking, make it super powerful 🚀.

🔧 But, What Makes A Good Growth Marketer?

Whenever I think about any skill, you need a combination of 3 things - Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset. Growth marketing is no different.

You need a curious mindset.

You need a well defined skillset, with at least 1 area of specialisation.

You need to know how to get the best out of tools.

Then you need a good framework to help you understand how to approach a topic or area. It's why I love the “T Shaped marketer” framework and I use it with my team all the time.

The principle is that you need to have a broad knowledge of marketing fundamentals, which includes things like behavioural psychology and design.

You then need some foundational knowledge with how to put your ideas into action (marketing foundations).

You then go very deep on 1 or 2 topics, which are your specific areas of channel expertise.

💡 KEY IDEA: if you’re serious about developing your growth marketing skillset then use the framework above to score yourself in each of these areas (starting in the top row). You can get a quick view on where you need to develop most.

It can feel like a lot, but don’t worry. I will go into many of these areas in future newsletters and share some useful links as we go.

💁🏻 Useful links

What is growth marketing? [11 mins] - A great video by the team over at Growth Tribe on what it takes to be a growth marketer.

Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis [book] - one of my most gifted books. It’s the best one I’ve read on the principles of growth marketing. Packed with examples from the front line

One final thing…

Thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.

I'll be back on 2nd April.

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