What does growth marketing mean to you? How does it fit within the rest of the marketing org?

Growth marketing is a full-funnel approach to marketing that focuses on strategies and tactics to drive revenue growth. It goes beyond driving leads. The focus is on driving leads that convert into pipeline and closed-won revenue. It is next-level digital marketing that requires a commitment to continuous experimentation and optimization to drive revenue growth.

A typical growth marketing team comprises digital marketing experts who focus on SEO, website demand gen, paid search, and paid social. In addition to running continuous experiments to optimize their channels, this team is also responsible for identifying and experimenting with new sources of driving quality leads.

The growth marketing team collaborates with field marketing, demand generation COE (Center of Excellence team that runs email marketing and webinars), and sales development teams to drive pipeline growth.

Growth marketing means different things depending on who you ask. To me, growth marketing is focused on rapid experimentation to acquire, activate, engage, and monetize. Oftentimes, traditional marketing organizations will focus on brand marketing, acquisition, content marketing, etc. However, growth marketing follows the thread of the customer journey and does not stop at acquisition.

To be a growth marketer, you need to have analytical rigor and think in patterns, frameworks, habit loops, and growth loops. To do this, you have to collaborate across the organization, including product, customer success, marketing, and sales. As a result, I believe that growth teams should be separate and complementary to marketing teams. However, the two disciplines can and should work together to create a cohesive marketing strategy that achieves both long-term and short-term goals. Why? Growth marketing does not fit into the traditional lens. How you operate is fundamentally different. Your metrics of success differ. You have to be empowered to move quickly and learn from failures just as much as successes. Collaboration also looks different.

The composition of a growth marketing team is also different. Generally speaking, this team will comprise:

• Growth marketer
• Growth designer
• Growth product marketer
• Growth data analyst
• Growth engineer

The reasoning for this is that it enables the team to move faster. Since the mental approach to growth marketing is different, as you are monitoring performance across multiple loops, this setup allows you to not have to think of it as a funnel where you hand off the baton to a different member of the team. Nowadays, customers do not move in a linear funnel fashion. It functions almost as a think tank, if you will, where you can quickly gather data, draw insights, and test again.