How do you develop a new growth marketing team?
Or turn your existing team into more “growth focused”?
I’m not a huge fan of the “growth hacker” label at all, but have made peace with its existence and usage (I prefer just “growth marketing”).
Anyway, in the age when a Growth Hacker is seen as the final frontier of marketing, with a serious case of the Hero Complex, “Full-Stack” and “T-Shaped Marketer” is what everyone is aiming for…
What’s often overlooked is that the 1 person “growth hacker” can only do so much alone – there’s a limit to capacity that is, so far, ignored.
What’s far better than a “lone wolf” is an effective growth marketing team (or just call it a “Growth Team.”)
The idea of a Team might seem to make the most sense for a business and not a startup – cash-flow often prohibits you from adding bodies to chairs.
But I’ll maintain that the sooner you can build a team, the better.
Even if you can only afford to have 1 “growth marketer”, there should be a clear team chart (the classic organization chart) that outlines roles and responsibilities.
This is how you position yourself for adding team members without breaking too much stride.
So, having built a few marketing teams, I’ve been thinking more about what a solid Growth Team would look like.
And, inspired by the Unlocking Growth book by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, I sent off a tweet in their general direction:
Perfect Growth Team? 1 person for each category: Strategy, Data, Tech is my vote #growthbook by @SeanEllis & @morganb http://t.co/HkqmbAy1WP
— Samuel J. Woods (@heysamwoods) November 7, 2014
Of course, I didn’t even mention the category of “Creative”, which would include things like Copywriting, Design, UX, Visuals (images, photos, etc) – and all of that needs to be in service of Conversion Rate Optimization.
Important: I know that hacking growth is just as much about crafting your product as well, but this also depends on what you’re doing growth marketing for: an established product that’s open for refinement or straight startup product.
Growth marketing is not limited to the startup world. On the contrary, I’ve lost count of how many CMO’s and VP’s of Marketing I’ve spoken and consulted with that have deployed tactics and strategies pulled from the startup world.
Anyway, below you’ll find a sketch and rough draft of what I think is needed.
A traditional marketing team certainly has this figured out, but to shift focus towards Growth the categories of what needs to be done is changing as well.
To illustrate this, here’s a quick outline of the areas a Growth Team should be covering:
Makes sense?
Some final thoughts for now:
- This makes for a 4 person team, with 1 role per category.
- The Strategy person is also Team Lead, with the responsibilities of decision-making, managing the processes of cycling and collecting growth experiments, drawing up funnels to test, and overview of what’s going on.
- You could pull of a team like this with minimum 2-4 persons, depending on your budget.
- A startup might only be able to afford 1, but should seriously consider starting with 2.
- Enterprise-level? Have a dedicated team for this, working with your CMO.
Anyway, what do you think? Hit me up on Twitter (@heysamwoods) and let’s figure it out.
