The 5 Qualities Every Great Growth Marketer Must Have
What is a Growth Marketer and What are His/Her Essential Qualities?
A growth marketer is primarily responsible for driving the growth of a company by being in charge of the marketing strategy. The essential qualities of a successful growth marketer are creativity and innovation. They are responsible for the creation and distribution of content, advertising, and other types of marketing.
Growth marketers need to have a deep understanding of how people interact with their brand on social media and how to create new content that is both engaging and informative. They need to be able to come up with new ways to grow their company's customer base and keep the company ahead of other competitors in the industry. They also need to be able to understand what type of content will resonate with their audience.
1. Craftsmanship
Content is a key component of the growth marketer’s job. It is the fuel that drives their marketing efforts. They use content to drive traffic, build awareness, and increase customer engagement.
Crafting compelling content requires skills in creative writing, storytelling, and understanding your audience. It can be difficult to do all these things well at once. A good growth marketer understands what makes people tick and knows how to make their target audience feel something when they stumble upon the brand’s content.
A growth marketer also needs to be able to tell a story in an interesting way that keeps readers engaged with every word and artwork until they finish. To break this down to its basics, growth marketers are storytellers. The best content marketers know that it takes more than just slapping up some words on a page to make compelling content. They recognize the importance of storytelling, emotional connection, and personalization.
2. Passion
A growth marketer must have the passion for the process and the profession. Having that passion in this profession comes at a hefty price of acquiring some technical skills.
A growth marketer’s “passion skills” include but are not limited to content marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, SEO optimization and conversion optimization. These are all very important in today's digital world and will only continue to grow in importance as we move forward into the future.
All these skills target one main objective: understanding the customer's needs and desires. Creating content that will answer their questions, solve their problems and meet their needs. It is important for the growth marketer to be able to spot a unique problem in the market that is not being addressed and develop content with a solution that can help solve it. A growth marketer should also be adept at figuring out what challenges are present in this industry and how they can create solutions for those as well. I was in half a second to exchange this second quality for “empathy”. If you think about it, a growth marketer must be truthfully empathetic with the target audience to authentically want to solve their problems and fill the gap, only then can their content really have true value.
Additionally, a growth marketer must be able to create content that answers the question, "Why should I care?" The growth marketer style is a softer approach to marketing where customers are encouraged to share and talk about their experiences. This style doesn't require the use of hard selling tactics but rather offers a more complimentary approach.
Growth marketers will create content that inspires conversation with customers and offer helpful insights.
3. Entrepreneurial Spirit
Growth Marketers need to be innovative and creative in order to come up with new growth hacking strategies. They also need to be able to think about how they can reach their target audience and how they can get them interested in their product or service. They have to have a sense of urgency and persistence, as well as the ability to work under pressure.
These qualities, even if claimed, are non-existent in anyone who does not posses an entrepreneurial drive. It is not a skill you can grow or nourish, you either have it or you don’t. That is why some growth marketers grow fast and climb up the ladder much quicker than their peers.
Entrepreneurial spirit can be defined as a fine line between an attitude of “can do” and “let’s try it”, where both are equally essential. Entrepreneurial spirit is the ability to start new projects and try them out without worrying about failure. It also means having the will to keep going when things get tough and not giving up easily.
The growth marketer needs to be able to think outside the box and take risks in order to come up with innovative strategies for their company. They need to be genuinely agile -not in the nonesensical overused meaning of the word- and be able to think on their feet, act fast, and adjust as needed during a project or campaign. Growth marketers are always on the lookout for new opportunities in order to grow their business or client base by acquiring new customers through unorthodox and unique methods of content and strategy.
Now you tell me truly, how many sincere people do you know talk the talk and walk the walk?
4. Good Eye
A growth marketer’s job is to generate a steady flow of leads and customers. This is not an easy task because they need to have. A growth marketer must have a good eye for designing ads and funnels that convert users into customers. Without the ability to design these important pieces, it is difficult for marketers to get their message across and make any sales.
Lead generation is a growth marketer’s job key objective, worry, and grand prize. The goal is to make your marketing process as frictionless as possible for people who want to buy, download, click, view, signup, register, or even vote -depending what your objective is.
The marketing funnel is arguably the only compass directing a growth marketer. It is an octopus of information, content, and data. Developing, navigating, reading, and acting on a marketing funnel is how a growth marketer starts and ends each day, and these days it is harder than ever.
The marketing funnel’s primary objective, ironically, is growth! No longer are marketers able to force their products and services upon potential customers. The evolving customer journey of today necessitates a comprehensive, end-to-end strategy that focuses not only on the bottom of the funnel but the entire funnel, but that’s a topic for another day.
So with this coexisting world of tech and marketing evolution, and with the constant flow of information and exposure of consumers to a variety of products, brands, and services, consumers' decision-making processes are constantly shifting. Growth marketers are in for a daily new challenge to try and develop new strategies to better comprehend the customer journey and decision-making process.
5. Numbers
A growth hacker is a person who can use analytics and data to identify the most efficient way to grow a business. A data driven strategy is a strategy on a course with a map. A growth marketer must analyze all of their data points for insights on what’s working and what isn’t, to be able to make adjustments accordingly.
Growth marketers must be familiar with many tools and software. “33% of elite marketers say having the right technologies for data collection and analysis is the most useful in understanding customers,” according to a report done by Econsultancy & IBM. They might tools like A/B testing or conversion rate optimization to help improve a website's performance. Though it is not expected of growth marketers to have engineering magic or coding skills, they are in fact expected to acquire excellent tech comprehension level in several fields: productivity, automations, marketing analytics, planning tools, social media adverting platforms, display advertising, content marketing, and email marketing tools to name a few.
For sure these skills are acquired over time. Frankly they cannot be taught as they evolve drastically month-on-month and year-on-year. Tools that were once a must-have have now become obsolete, due to technological advancement, market and consumer requirements, new content and social platforms emerging, and trends evolving.
Bringing It Home
Being a growth marketer is not an easy job. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication. But it is also very exciting and interesting being one. Growth marketers are the most important ingredient for any company, unbiasedly. They are responsible for the success of a company's marketing efforts and they have to be able to adapt to new changes in the market quickly. They are the ones who work tirelessly to get to know and understand their audiences who evolve with their habits and trends day after day and whenever a new medium pops up.
Growth marketer is such a challenging profession, but also so rewarding, exciting, and satisfying in this day and age.