The guidebook to being / building an outstanding growth marketer

What blog post made Virgin Airways a trailblazer of the aviation industry in the ‘80s? What landing page took Slack to 3 million daily active users in just as many years? What Press Release from Uber made them redefine urban transportation globally within a decade?

You guessed it, none. As growth innovates to create new strategies, tactics, channels, a world of marketers comes from behind to perfect them for decades, to the point where competing there will yield marginal results at best.

In an age where capital markets are pouring ever more resources into new-problem solving ventures and production efficiency increases from technological advancements, the paradigm has to shift from traditional marketing to growth. Early stage companies with double digit month over month growth can’t cut it with people who know just how to set up a google search campaign, write a decent blog post, or post relatable content on social media.

While developers are competing amongst themselves towards more efficient problem solving, marketers are ultimately fighting the same 24-hour clock, in a continuously more cut-throat world, as we fight for attention on ever-more fronts versus a zero sum game.

I work for a big data company focused on business data . Looking within our data, as of now in 2023, we keep track of 1.123 billion products. Assuming our coverage is at 60% since we only recently started perfecting product data, that puts the total number of products at 1.873 billion. In other words, right now there are 59 products for every second there is in a year! And the higher this number, the more important growth will get.

So wether your passion is to join the ranks of these Machiavellian, brilliant minds or wether you’re out to hire / build them, I’ve written this article for you, as a window into our little world.

As you read what follows, when you see: marketing / marketer / etc, know that I’m referring to growth.

And if you’re thinking that the following apply to many jobs outside of marketing, you’re right, but that’s mainly because the universe of growth / marketing is so broad. A good product can be marketing. Good customer support, can be marketing. Marketing cannot really be good customer support.

Here goes:

The first two points I will make will be long, as they are the bedrock of what is to follow.

1. Don’t defocus from the actual role of the growth team as a whole.

The best way I can summarise it is as follows:

The role of the growth team is to deploy resources as efficiently as possible in order to bring clients.

To the marketing managers / entrepreneurs out there rolling their eyes at the obviousness of this, I’d invite you to ask your marketing team one by one what their job is. You’d be amazed how many marketers think their job is to: write articles / write copy for ads / publish posts on SM / analyse traffic / get likes / feel free to suggest others from this little experiment. (I’d honestly be curious to hear other interesting answers you get)

This points to a mindset problem, and the main reason why I’m re-iterating the aforementioned obvious statement. As a growth pro, you should be able to answer any: “Why are you doing *marketing strategy?” with a proxy answer to the statement above. I’m writing this article because:

I want to see if this can convert better than the last since this one also provides an example of how we solve the problem / I think it will bring a lot of TOFU (top of funnel) leads given the relevance of the subject right now / The last one I wrote on this subject showed promise, didn’t convert enough and from analytics I could see it’s because we lost people halfway through and I think I’ve fixed that now, etc.

It seems like a minute detail at first but when you’ve got your hands in the marketing mud, it’s very easy to get lost in the rabbit-hole of just blurting out articles because it says “content specialist” on your LinkedIn profile. Your job is not to write articles. Your job is to write articles to bring clients, at the very least.

As “wolf of wall street / frat house” as this advice sounds, in my opinion, this little slippage is responsible for the vast quantities of pointless marketing content we see on the internet today.

In case this doesn’t seem like a bit deal, let me use some Veridion data again to put things into perspective:

We scan 430 million domains (which is safe to assume is the whole internet)

Of those, around 50% don’t work. (Not active, redirects, etc)

Of the remaining 210M, 40% are parked, empty websites, templates, etc.

Of the remaining 130M, over 40% are blogs.

That means around 52M blogs.

Doing an average of our data + Ahrefs , around 90.6% of these have ZERO readers

Taking a (very low) average of 25 pages / blog, and running an average between our data and some Ahrefs data, that’s 39.1M blogs with zero readers.

A blog piece has an average of 1150 words.

So here’s the sinker:

That’s 1125 billion words written for no reason.

Taken at 2.5 hours per blog (also optimistic):

*drumroll please*

People have spent a total tally of 279 thousand years writing blogs for no reason.

To put this into perspective, the current approximate date of appearance of homo sapiens is around 300,000BC.

So, to help guide thinking in this framework, I’ll break down the definition:

The role of the growth team is to deploy resources as efficiently as possible in order to bring clients.

Resources = Time / Money / Creativity (important one) / Community / Network / Existing Users / Traffic / Team know-how / Brand value / etc. (Feel free to suggest others in the comments)

A growth pro will be able to strategically choose which one to deploy when. And strategy at this level is all that matters: Are you a bootstrapped startup? Don’t compete in cash-intensive games against incumbents, you’ll never stand a chance in beating them just with ad campaigns. Deploy creativity more than anything else, but deploy it with a purpose, of course. Are you a huge organisation? Leverage your cash to keep new players from appearing in your landscape.

Efficiently = As marketers, regardless of organisation, we live and die by the sword of the almighty conversion rate. At the end of the day, nothing else matters. And if you don’t keep this in mind in everything you do, you will eventually slip away from your goals.

Clients = While certain job descriptions might state that your job is to bring followers, likes, traffic, etc, you should never forget the real goal, which is never going to change: signed, paying clients. I think the only exception to this might be orgs like Wikipedia. This is important to indoctrinate yourself with because keeping this top of mind will provide another area of performance which is the quality of the likes / followers / traffic you bring in terms of actually converting to clients. There will be no exceptions to this rule. If you’re marketing for employer branding, your end goal is still to grow your organisation to be able to serve more clients.

1. Understand your arena: Learn how to ask the right questions.

Your main area of focus as soon as you join a company / start a new project should be figuring out what are the right questions you should be asking yourself / the people around you in order to master the arena / ring you’re playing in.

I’m using the arena / boxing ring metaphor because I strongly believe it applies:

Understanding your organisation’s moats (and more importantly, the reasons why they exist) will provide an indication as to what the strongest assets within your org are, and in turn, what you could be bragging about in your materials, or leveraging in your products or in PRs.

Understanding your sales cycle will give you an indication of how much in advance you should be preparing to get clients and how much support content you need to provide them with to make sure that they actually close.

Other are more obvious: Market size → Audience sizes you should be speaking to. Pipeline values → How much you can afford to invest in getting those clients, etc.

In my experience, these questions will be regarding: participants to the market, market size, the dynamics of the sales / mkting funnels, timeframes, usage, churn, virality, USPs, moats, shifting trends, LTV, key aspects of the product and definitely others I’ve missed.

Mastering this skill will reveal to you that the above concepts are linked. If you don’t see it at first, the main technique I recommend is taking the time to brute force variations of the question: “Why?” on the things you do know / understand about your organisation until you have what seems like a cyclical picture in your mind on the notions above.

Keep in mind, this “arena” is going to look differently for each individual project. I’m considering making a framework around the relationships between these. Let me know in the comms if that’s something you’d like to see.

Once you understand the ropes, you go into the details of whatever your key area of focus is, keeping the all-holy ?? conversion rates ?? at the top and deriving from those while looking back to the arena you’re in to keep yourself in check.

For ex:

Manager - all the big-picture stats

Content - your conversion rates, virality rates, engagement rates, efficiency, etc.

Performance ads - cost per lead, CTR, CPM

Website (yes, even if you’re a dev, you should be looking at these): conversion rates, usage, traffic

etc.

Pro tip: You should be trying to paint the same picture you’re trying to paint of your own companies for your competitors. Doing this might reveal weaknesses that you can strategically exploit.

Pro tip: Find recurrent time to refresh this info in your head. A pro marketer will know his key figures off by heart even when asked in the dead of night.

This is hard to master, but practice and focus will help over time. The benefit is that this might be the most valuable skill to gain from this profession because when this becomes second nature to you, you drastically reduce your risk in anything from: dominating your niche of expertise, running your own marketing team, building your own company to investing in other ventures.

I will stop enumerating them from now as what follows isn’t in any particular order, rather a brain dump of things I believe are important to being an outstanding growth marketer. Most of them require the above as foundations.

Hope is the death of growth. Assumptions, contingencies and ruthlessness in killing ideas are your saviour – this is a very important operational structure and it boils down from the definition of your role. University will prep you for a few things, it’s highly unlikely it will prep you for this, and this will probably save you the most time: assumptions, validations, assumptions again. You drop the ball in keeping track of these, you lose time and money for your organisation but also from your own progress.

Experimenting with assumptions will turn you into a high performer. And it will also teach you how to:

Ride the edge of the 80/20. Build your knowledge-base of lessons learnt as quickly as possible. Growth has close to infinite horizons. No matter how small your task seems, there is room to provide value, you just have to be creative and hungry enough. This however is a double-edged sword. It means that you can leverage almost any task to stand out but also that you can spend a lot of time for a marginal difference. The above assumption based model should help you avoid this.

Maths is your friend. And one that’s hard to live without when things get difficult. Many marketers go into this profession for the creativity of it, hoping to avoid having to use math. This is a bad mindset to carry. Doing your own math provides limitless advantages (as the rest of this list will also show). Doing your own math can: keep you from getting tricked by other org’s marketing wizardry (not having to believe at face value everything you read online); enable you to make data-driven models to help you zero in on what’s important in your work (what’s part of the 80) and what’s not (the 20) and many, many more.

Assume the internet is one big lie. One of my fav stories as a growth team leader was with one of my current best performers. One of his first tasks was to find a service for upvotes / reviews for a product we were helping grow. He was to do some research and build a shortlist of “suppliers”. Few days later he comes back to me with a list and starts presenting it. His first sentence was: This guy seems good, he seems to have a few projects under his belt and also, he has the best reviews. LONG PAUSE, REALISING THE CATCH 22. He then stares up at me with a confused face of betrayal. Priceless. That was the day from which he will never un-learn this. Thinking on your own two feet will help you save a lot of time in the long run.

Use automation to enhance yourself, not replace yourself. Speaks for itself but the tendency to do this is stronger that it seems. With ChatGPT in the mix now, this was never more true. Use it to get rid of the 20 for yourself, but don’t use that as an excuse to ignore the 80. As powerful as it is, it’s unlikely that even ChatGPT should outperform you on the 80. And if it does, you have other problems to work on.

Product is part of growth now. And if it’s not, you’re leaving money on the table. To maximise the benefits of this, people working on products should apply the growth mindset as well. A great example here is Medium’s “claps” feature – allowing users to engage with content with up to 50 claps per user, Medium enabled readers to express varied emotions towards a piece of content while creating the impression of up to 50x more engagement per piece of content than what that content seemed to have on “traditional” social networks, increasing curiosity to read the content, increasing satisfaction for the creator, increasing the feeling of a large community and in turn, increasing engagement. How many product designers wouldn’t have implemented a simple “like” button thinking that there’s nothing special about their job?

At Veridion, setting aside the core product team (since the core products are enterprise APIs in our case), other products are built by the growth team and what we’re starting to see is developers and designers focusing on the 80/20, building for usage, making feature suggestions, etc. It’s all quite poetic.

Optimisation / time = Glass ceiling. It’s very easy to lose time past a certain point when focusing on optimising the things you do. My advice? Give it your best shot, set a number of attempts for yourself, apply anything else from this list and then, if and only if you believe there is room for more, pass it on to a colleague and don’t linger on it. Fresh eyes might see something you haven’t from within the trenches and your spending more time on it will impede your colleague from truly mastering it while wasting yours.

Become a pro user of your product. A core part of your team’s job is to encourage new users to become pro users as quickly as possible. Mastering this journey yourself will offer key insights into getting your users to do the same.

Theory is important too. Growth opportunities often arise out of the blue, and experience (and even talent) matters but your theoretical knowledge of the subject matter is not to be underestimated. In a weird sense, growth is like poker: over the long run, it’s completely skill based. Having a strong foundation of theoretical knowledge will help you make the correct decision over the wrong one often enough to matter, so keep your theoretical knowledge sharp.

Build technical skills. Soft skills are a great start but it will be hard to scale them. With chatgpt at your disposal, there should be nothing that’s not on the table as long as you know how to leverage it. Remember, when you’re doing something in the same way all your friends are doing it, it’s likely something is wrong from a growth standpoint (since you’re missing an edge). From the hundreds of chatgpt tutorials I’ve seen on the internet, I have yet to see one that teaches people to leverage chatgpt the way we are within Veridion, for example. As a hint, with 2 weeks of coding within the marketing team, we’ve created a content creation funnel that enables us to output a specific piece of content at around 98x cheaper and 1500x faster (while maintaining quality). Influencers will not have the time / skills to discover these and growth pros have zero incentive to release them to the public.

Track your own worth. Hold yourself accountable to your own growth. The beauty of a marketing role is that, as compared to many other positions within an organisation (except sales), it’s not at all difficult to calculate the value you add to your organisation. You’d be amazed how many people don’t do this. I blame it on the culture of stigma around how much money we make. But especially as a growth pro, you should look at money as only a means to an end. The only shame should be in earning less than you’re worth. And for that, you should look at only yourself to blame. Do your best to make a realistic calculation for how much $ you help bring in to the organisation, set targets for yourself to increase it and use the people around you to help you grow it. If you go to your manager with an estimation of how much you’re worth and a solid plan to grow that and you get turned down, you’re working in the wrong company for what you want to achieve.

What to do when you’re burdened with what seems like petty tasks? We’ve all been there, the junior role. Stronger voices within your organisation will push tasks to you that you will perceive as pointless. Force yourself to see them as opportunities to learn. Build a plan to leverage your know-how to escape this position. Pass the mantle on.

Be entrepreneurial, not in the magazine sense, in the true sense. Growth pros are up there with entrepreneurs in terms of how opportunistic they are, how much they analyse markets from high levels and how much they want to squeeze out of the opportunities that present themselves.

Impress at any cost, apologise / make up for it later in smart ways if needed. Your role as a storyteller (and if you don’t think that is your role, you’re wrong, as cliche as it sounds) requires you to know a lot of stories. Colleagues / users / community members, etc will be a priceless resource in this. But there are hurdles: In startups, people are over-worked / busy. In large companies, things move slowly from the overhead given by the sheer size of the company. But you must remember to prioritise your own self. So, fight for what you need. You’re a marketer, I’m sure you’ll find a way to repay the people that helped you. Not doing this will often impede your own progress and while you may think you’re the only one paying for that, so is your organisation. Gotta love opportunity costs :)

Team-player during the day, lone wolf at night. Growth will always, always, always rely on having an edge. Never stop looking for your new edge. Understand how to defend your existing edges. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words how flexible the world of growth is. Anything can be an edge: from designing interactions with products that significantly increase conversion rates to writing killer articles that go viral, to even the capacity to create significantly more content than others through some smart means, any of these can have a drastic effect on the bottom line of a marketing team’s efforts. Not having one of these edges, doing what most marketers do, that is how the road to failure is paved. Why? Because in the world of marketing, stagnation doesn’t exist. It’s growth or decline. And not having an edge will eventually lead to decline.

If you blame your job / manager for you not having an edge, it’s unlikely you’ll ever make it big. Any organisation worth it’s salt will appreciate a profitable strategy or tactic, regardless of how it came up. If your day job keeps you from finding them, you’re not allocating your own responsibilities properly. If you feel your boss is holding you down, find your strategy, back it up with proof or bullet-proof (ha) reasoning and go over his head.

Creating this culture from a managerial standpoint will foster responsibility, which in turn enables a plethora of things, from creativity to reliability.

Train your sense of realism. Learn to be patient with yourself. It’s easy to read an article like this and go into a frenzy. Mastering skills in this job isn’t easy and, wether you like it or not, there are dependancies on other parts of the organisation you work in, regardless of where you work. Sometimes, it will be hard to value your work and you might feel you’re taking a hit because of that. Remember though, you’re a marketer at heart, if all you got out or something was a good story, it’s worth more to you than it is to most people.

Our growth team is expanding. We’re looking for: growth hackers, content marketers, performance ads specialists.

What we do @Veridion:

We’re a big data / ML startup. We ingest the entire contents of the internet and use ML to comprehend that content and turn it into structured data on the business world. In the growth team, we use this data to create content / products to advocate for the usefulness of it in automating business decisions at large scale in order to bring signed, paying clients for our powerful APIs.

If you’d like to be a part of our growth team, DM me.