How to Hire and Train Growth Marketers

If you read my last 2 articles on LinkedIn, you know I am focused on what I call the 4.0 era of marketing, the Growth Era. So, since the eras are different, who we hire and how we train them needs to be different as well.

Growth marketing is intrinsically multi-function and multi-channel, so look for a person that has spent a some years in a few different channels instead of one who spent all their time in one channel. Favor expertise over experts. Seasoned experts often try to avoid the execution part.

PAID, EARNED, AND OWNED EXPERIENCE

Candidates should have earned, owned, and paid marketing experience. Examples of earned are SEO, PR, and content marketing; examples of owned are web site, email, marketing automation, and product messaging, and paid examples are paid search, paid social, and display. That is already 10 areas and shows why people need wider access to the functions.

DATA-DRIVEN AND EXPERIMENT-OBSESSED

Growth marketers should be more than data-driven, they should be data- and experiment-obsessed. Education-wise, this could mean you favor candidates who have a BS over a BA, but more importantly, have they been running experiments and do they understand statistics well enough to interpret whether experiment results are statistically significant?

LIFELONG LEARNERS

They should be knowledge-obsessed and lifelong learners. The best signal for this trait is how many non-fiction books they read voluntarily this year and what did they take away from them. Many candidates say they read blogs and feeds about related topics, but books have better structure and depth and show more investment and commitment. Better than college degrees are recent practical, professional certifications for analytics, email, SEO, SQL, CRM, testing tools, and paid channels.

DOWN-FUNNEL FOCUS

The best growth marketers talk about revenue, activation, and retention impact. Traditional marketers usually focus on brand, awareness, or marketing qualified leads and usually have an awkward relationship with sales because inevitably Sales says "the leads are no good." The best KPIs for a growth marketer are revenue, retention lift, and growth rate. Retention lift is the amount of trackable incremental lift caused by customers engaged in particular growth programs.

SYSTEMS FOCUS

Growth marketers know their way around the marketing stack and figure out how to use the systems they need with little reliance on more head count or other teams. They understand how to integrate systems together with APIs, or they figure it out quickly. A growth marketer can pull data, set up experiments, set up email campaigns, and interpret the results. Have the candidates walk you through the systems they know to assess their capability. For example, most people who list Salesforce as a skill are probably not able to create a dashboard.

ONBOARDING

Onboarding growth marketers requires a lot of self-education and skills verification. Start with the marketing automation, add customer relationship management (CRM) and reporting, like Tableau, site analytics, content management system (CMS), search engine optimization SEO platforms, like BrightEdge, project management tools, like Jira and Asana, webinar platforms, like On24, Zoom, and Webex, and survey tools, like Survey Monkey and Typeform. It's important to let the growth marketer take the time, 1 to 2 months depending on experience, to onboard and ramp before getting them busy with projects. These skills will give them the capability and confidence to tackle high-impact projects.

GOALS AND PLANS

As a growth leader, understand your materiality threshold and what amount of impact matters to the company's overall growth plans. Pick a few high-impact projects and go hard at those and leave the nice-to-haves in a separate bucket for after the former are delivered. Review the goals and plans weekly in the growth staff meeting. Run an experiments meeting to build the experiments backlog. Experiments are the lifeblood of growth.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Growth marketers should prefer objectivity, transparency, and accountability. Keep the team leaning forward by learning from mistakes and focusing on what you can test next to make or accelerate progress.

This 8-point framework will help you get the right people on your growth marketing team and position them to help you drive success.