A true growth marketer has these 8 skills.
Sean Ellis, former head of growth at Dropbox, once said: “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
It’s true — but how do you find a person who not only cares about growth, but can engineer it from scratch? You look for key, omni-channel skills that they can use whether they’re lifting activation rates or tackling a churn problem.
Here are some of the top skills every growth marketer should have:
- Data analysis: Growth marketers know how to glean actionable insights from data, and combine those insights into cohesive growth strategies. They can think critically about data, use it for strategic decision-making, and clearly communicate their findings across an organization.
- Quantitative modeling: Not only can growth marketers analyze data, but they can look at historical numbers, like organic traffic volume over time, and build a model that forecasts future growth.
- Cross-channel strategy: Growth marketing managers know how to use multiple channels — including organic and paid social, PPC advertising, email marketing and more — to drive quality traffic to landing pages, case studies and other key pieces of content. Their goal here is typically to drive more traffic into the top of the funnel, convert visitors into subscribers, move them down a marketing funnel, and increase the lifetime value of existing customers.
- Channel and website conversion rate optimization (CRO): Growth marketers are experts in the entire customer journey, and can identify specific hurdles within it that cause customers to lose interest. With this knowledge, they’re able to test different tactics, sometimes called “growth hacks,” or run specific marketing campaigns to lift conversion rates throughout your funnel, until it runs like a well-oiled machine.
- Customer segmentation: Successful growth marketers are experts in customer segmentation and personalization. They can help your business optimize the user experience throughout your funnel, with automations based on behavior and psychographic data points.
- Testing: Growth marketers treat marketing like a science — and that means they use the scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis, test it, review their results and determine next steps. This is A/B testing, taken to the expert level.
- Martech selection: Growth marketers are curious, engaged, and always looking for new tools that could level up their data analytics and testing functionality. They will have opinions on your CRM, ESP, e-commerce platform and more. And that’s a good thing.
- Channel resource management: Ultimately, growth marketers are experts in managing budgets across channels to hit lofty goals. They keep track of metrics including return on ad spend (ROAS), customer acquisition costs (CAC) and average customer lifetime value (LTV).