A few years ago the hottest marketing term was “digital strategy”. This was 2019, and digital marketing had become popular so, many professionals and fakes went about claiming to be digital marketers and experts at digital strategy. Oh well, the pandemic came with a new term called “digital transformation” forcing these people to prove if they were worth their salt, and when we needed them the most they vanished.
As expected of course, since trends have always been known for herd activity with very few actually doing the work, last year was quite interesting because I saw more than one popular term from the weird to the wonderful; magnetic marketing, performance marketing, relationship marketing, network marketing, growth marketing, in no particular order.
While I thought magnetic marketing is from the pits, I really liked “growth marketing” so I took a look at it— and secured a paid internship too. It’s been six months now.
You may be wondering why I did that. You see, as more and more tech companies sprung up, it became clear that everyone is growing fast and as as result their marketing efforts should do same too. This then created a demand for marketing professionals who understood brands, products, advertising, sales and how to scale—ideas, campaigns. concepts and ultimately do work that impacts the company’s bottom line.
Long story short: if you wanted to build meaningful brands or products, you will be tested on all these fronts.
Now for the core of the matter: as a growth marketer - or an aspiring one - you should understand that as far as companies are concerned, whether they sell financial, physical or digital products, they will in one way or the other need marketing professionals who understand the concept of growth in terms of an increase in:
number of users
volume (of user activity, transactions, time spent with the product, etc) and
revenue
These three pillars are the guides to “growth” of any kind, for any marketer. Any other metric or objective will be secondary and will function as a subset of the above.
Another way to look at growth marketing is to ask the key stakeholders of where you work, questions like “what does growth mean to you?”. Though the answer they will give will most likely fall under the three above, it is important to be clear on what growth means to the brand & product on the surface, and what growth means to them on a deeper level because those answers will serve as a guide to doing actual growth marketing that isn’t just based on the title.
Finally it is important to note that as someone in growth, you will fail a lot. This is also because you will be moving at crazy fast speeds and performing so many experiments almost all at once. But don’t think about it too much. You’ll be fine.
Cheers!