As tech companies go all-in on growth, growth marketers are emerging as a critical component of winning growth models. But most people couldn't even tell you what growth marketing is, much less how to execute it well.
In this post, we'll share our definition of growth marketing, including how it powers the growth model and relates to other growth and marketing domains.
Mark Fiske is an Operating Partner at H.I.G. Capital, a Private Equity firm with $37 Billion in assets under management. Previously, he served as VP of Marketing for Credit Karma, VP of Global Marketing for Ancestry, and Director of Marketing for the Gap family of brands. From startups to the Fortune 500, Mark has scaled marketing teams across acquisition, lifecycle, monetization, brand, and UX.
Brittany Bingham is the VP of Marketing at Guru, a collaborative knowledge management solution where answers find you--everywhere, every time. Previously, Brittany worked as VP of Marketing & Growth at RaiseMe and as Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) where she oversaw acquisition, conversion, engagement, and retention.
Additional insights provided by:
Adam Fishman EIR @ Reforge Former CPO @ Imperfect Foods, VP of Product & Growth @ Patreon, Head of Growth @ Lyft
Gina Gotthilf Co-founder and COO at Latitud Former VP of Marketing and Growth @ Duolingo
Anne Lewandowski Group Strategy Lead, Growth @ Reforge Former Product Manager @ Apartment List, Course Hero
Fareed Mosavat VP of Programs and Partners @ Reforge Former Director of Product, Lifecycle @ Slack, Growth and Product @ Instacart
Natalie Rothfels OIR @ Reforge Former Product Manager @ Quizlet, Khan Academy
Scott Tousley OIR @ Reforge, Head of Startup Growth @ Hubspot Former Growth Marketing Manager @ Hubspot
Adam Grenier EIR @ Reforge, VP Marketing, Performance and Lifecycle @ MasterClass
Stephanie Kwok EIR @ Reforge Former VP of Strategy & Operations and VP of Customer Marketing @ FanDuel
Joanna Lord CMO @ Reforge Former CMO @ Skyscanner, ClassPass
Sachin Rekhi Founder & CEO @ Notejoy Former Head of Product, Sales Solutions @ LinkedIn
Andrew Silard SVP, Consumer Marketing @ Grove Collaborative Former VP of Email Channel and Head of Education Media @ QuinStreet
Erika Warren EIR @ Reforge Former VP of Product & Strategy @ Wyzant, Product Manager @ Grubhub
Growth marketing is on the rise.
Growth marketing is one of the trendiest terms in tech these days. Global interest in the term has increased steadily over the past decade, and in 2021, "growth marketing" was the top trend in the B2B Marketing Trend Tracker, beating out other popular terms like personalization, marketing automation, and martech stack. In recent years, we've received a ton of questions from Reforge members on what growth marketing is, and how to do it well.
What Is Great Growth Marketing?
It's widely accepted that you need great growth marketing to win. But most people couldn't tell you what great growth marketing is.
Tech companies are rushing to hire growth marketers similar to how they scrambled to build growth teams a decade ago. They know the function is critical for success, but can't find a clear way to define the function's scope, especially against other growth and marketing domains. In the absence of a clear definition, we've observed two common pitfalls:
Some companies will set up growth marketing roles with an overly narrow scope.
Many companies signal that they just want the paid advertising part of performance marketers. They will call a role growth marketing, but when you read the job description and see how the roles are set up, it's almost always tied to "data-driven paid media" and maybe SEO. - Adam Grenier (EIR @ Reforge)
Others leverage the trendiness of "growth marketing" to recruit for the same marketing roles they've always had.
I think growth marketing has become a trending term used by some companies as a recruiting tactic. If I see "growth marketing" used in a title, it's a flag to read the job description extra carefully. - Erika Warren (EIR @ Reforge)
Some of the more cynical takes I see on growth marketing are that it's just old-school direct response marketing repackaged for the internet. - Adam Fishman (EIR @ Reforge)
Growth Marketing Is a Key Component of Growth Teams
Growth marketing has always been a key component of growth teams. But as growth teams move towards greater specialization, defining growth marketing has become more important than ever before.
Companies have gotten a lot smarter about growth as distribution has gotten more competitive and the evolution of channels and tactics has accelerated. More and more companies have their own growth teams and growth strategies, so winning at growth requires you to not only have the best approach, but also to deploy it rapidly.
Centralizing cross-functional resources into one growth team was a common approach used in the early 2010s. As winning at growth becomes more competitive and as companies mature and scale their teams, we're seeing growth teams evolve into two key models:
Decentralization: While having a centralized growth team united people around a common goal, it wasn't necessarily the most efficient way to work. Blurred lines between teammates resulted in duplicative work and gaps and didn't take full advantage of each team member's area of expertise.
We had to start by breaking down the silos between teams and think about growth holistically. But now, that war is won, and we've found that there are disciplines within growth that require greater attention. We're starting to see these unified growth teams break up again to support that specialization. — Fareed Mosavat (VP of Programs and Partners @ Reforge)
Pod structures: Many teams use working groups that resemble growth teams, but members report into their functional teams. This enables them to hone their skills by leveraging functional resources and knowledge.
For example, Credit Karma started out with one growth team, but as the business scaled, they moved into a matrix-pod structure. For example, the credit card growth marketer would sit with the credit cards team, but report into marketing.
The break up of growth teams creates a need for titles to describe the functional experts that focus on growth. We've already written about the emergence of Growth PMs in "The Growing Specialization of Product Management" but now, we're seeing something similar happen with marketing.
The need for growth marketing is high, but consensus on what it means is low. This creates problems for you as a marketer.
Misaligned expectations: When growth marketers join a company, they could find themselves in a variety of situations. For example, they could find themselves in charge of just paid acquisition, just owned channels, or all of them. They might also encounter a very close relationship with product, or sit far removed from the product and its features. As a marketer, it can be unclear what the difference is between these roles vs. others in the marketing and growth ecosystems. In the absence of an industry-wide definition, it can be hard to hire for these roles, and even harder for someone to do it well. This can lead to frustration if the growth marketing team believes it should own a zone that actually falls outside of its scope.
Cross-functional complexity: Even worse, a poorly defined growth marketing team cannot deliver what it should to the growth model. Companies that can't clearly define what each growth-related function (marketing, product, sales, eng, design) is doing risk "losing the plot" of their growth story through holes (is anyone doing this work?) or redundancies (are we running duplicative campaigns from two different corners of the team?).
Growth teams often fail by not giving growth marketers the resources and tools they need to have an impact. For example, is a growth team without engineering resources truly equipped to have an impact? Similarly, a growth team without a properly scoped growth marketing component will fail to be the unlock that the company wants it to be. — Mark Fiske (Operating Partner @ H.I.G. Capital)
How Is Growth Marketing Different?
It’s useful for us to ask ourselves how growth marketing differs from other growth functions and marketing domains.
💡Growth marketing uses triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring new and existing customers into the product to experience its value.
Growth marketers need to bring a specialized skillset to the table to do this work:
Strong understanding of existing and emerging channels, including where and how to show up. Growth marketers accomplish their mission through a toolkit of levers that define the who (audience), what (creative, messaging), where (channels), how (call to action, destination within the product), and why (metrics tied to the growth model) of target audience communication. They understand how decisions made in channels flow to backend product economics, and the diminishing returns and impact of media at a granular level.
What separates growth marketing from product and other growth functions is that it typically controls most of the channels and the language designed to elicit an immediate response. — Adam Fishman (EIR @ Reforge)
What is the right message, for the right audience, delivered using the right channel-level format, that connects the most users to the product in an enduring way? — Andrew Silard (SVP, Consumer Marketing @ Grove Collaborative)
Strategic lens that ties to business outcomes. Growth marketing teams typically have direct accountability for key business results like revenue, user growth, and ROI. Even more so than other marketing and product domains that focus on specific moments in the customer journey, growth marketers must develop a strategy for driving the business' most important customer and user metrics throughout the customer lifecycle.
Data-driven mindset. Growth marketers must use a wealth of customer and user data available from channels, the product itself, research, and 3rd parties to inform their approach.
Cross-functional collaboration with growth partners. With dedicated product and engineering support, growth marketers are typically the most technologically-enabled marketers on your team. A strong ongoing partnership with product, engineering, and design is critical to their success.
Growth marketing can't optimize new channels to scale on their own. A common failure mode is not pairing growth marketing & growth product teams to jointly achieve product-channel fit in new channels. Once there is a strong fit, then growth marketing can optimize & scale the channels. — Andrew Silard (SVP, Consumer Marketing @ Grove Collaborative)
In order to understand what growth marketing looks like for your product, you need to know your growth model.
The definition of growth marketing will vary slightly from company to company, because the role that growth marketing plays will vary based on the company's growth model drivers. However, growth marketing's core mission and how it contributes to growth relative to other domains should be common across businesses. — Brittany Bingham (VP of Marketing @ Guru)
Let's walk through what this would look like for the growth models of two different products: Slack and Medium.
Slack drives growth using a viral growth loop: a new user signs up, they use Slack by creating messages, and then they invite coworkers to collaborate with them, attracting more new users to their Slack team.
Different products have different types of growth loops, but the steps and motion are similar. Each growth function controls different levers that make the growth loop work:
Product defines the core actions that you want the user to take to realize the product's value. In this example, they would have identified creating a team, inviting team members, and signing up as key moments that drive user growth, and defined features like the "add people" search tool that encourage those actions in the product.
Design and engineering translate the loop into a product experience that makes moving from one step to another easy. For Slack, this means developing the user interface in the Slack desktop app, including the placement and appearance of the "add people" button and layout of the search tool itself.
Growth marketing powers the loops, bringing in new or resurrected users and ensuring users stay engaged on the loops over time. They might do this by bringing new users into the "New User Signup" step through ads on paid social.
Let's look at another example: Medium. A new user signs up, a certain percentage write or create a post, Medium packages it to be indexed by Google, people find that content, they sign up for the Medium platform, and the loop repeats over and over again. We call this a User-Generated Content (UGC) loop.
Here, the growth functions would also bring distinct levers to the table to drive growth:
Product would define the key actions needed by users in-product to drive the loop - namely, user signup and writing a post. They would then design features that encourage that behavior, like a streamlined user signup form. Because Google indexing is a core component of the habit loop for Medium, product would likely also own SEO, which directly enables people to find the content and sign up.
This is different from a company like ClassPass, where the core value in the growth model comes from booking experiences. For a company where content and indexing is used tangentially to bring customers into the product, that work would likely be owned by growth marketing.
Design and engineering translate those product requirements into the actual in-product experience, like the account home page layout.
Growth marketing still focuses on powering the loop. For example, they might launch an email campaign to guide users on how to write a compelling first post.
The relationship between growth marketing and growth product is one that can easily lead to toe-stepping and frustration in the absence of clearly defined scopes. The best growth marketing teams get clear on this delineation early, then build a strong partnership with product counterparts on top of that foundation.
One of the shifts is that in software, your product does a lot of the "growth work" for you, so you need to understand how your marketing initiatives connect with those product levers. It's an ecosystem where if you change one thing, the rest changes. — Brian Balfour (CEO @ Reforge)
Growth Marketing Fuels, Accelerates, and Restarts
When done well, growth marketing fuels, accelerates, and restarts the loops in your growth model.
Fuel: Bring potential users or customers into the model. For example, this can look like acquiring new users through Facebook or TV ads
Accelerate: Enable people to move through the growth model with minimal friction. An example of this would be SMS reminders or push notifications that encourage users to take a desired action within an app
Restart: Bring people back into the loop to build or restart a habit. We can think about an email with an offer or call to action that directly links into the product as a restart mechanism.
Growth Marketing Is One of Three Key Marketing Domains
Growth marketing is one of three key marketing domains that enhances the core product offering in the eyes of the consumer. Each domain focuses on enhancing the offering in different ways and for different customers.
Let's break down how growth marketing differs from brand marketing and product marketing.
The different marketing domains focus on different target audiences with varying degrees of proximity to the product. We can think about these degrees of proximity as the sets of concentric circles on a target:
Brand marketing focuses on reaching the outermost circles of customers and pulling them towards the center. These are audiences that are less familiar with your product and sometimes, your category. Brand marketing strategies increase awareness and intent that enables customers to be captured by growth marketing.
Growth marketing focuses on bringing customers from the middle circles into the bullseye (acquisition) and keeping them there (retention).
Product marketing focuses on ensuring that existing users (who live in the bullseye of the target) understand your products and their features, especially as you bring new ones to market. Product marketers also need to keep an ear to the ground to anticipate how the needs of the user base might change as new users are acquired.
One of the core responsibilities of product marketing is translating new and existing features into benefits and value propositions in a messaging/positioning framework. This messaging should benefit both existing and new users. — Sachin Rekhi (Founder and CEO @ Notejoy)
Let's consider a hypothetical example of what each marketing team would do at Airbnb:
Brand marketing: The brand team would own the vision for how Airbnb should resonate with potential customers, as well as the levers to achieve that vision: visual identity (logo, design, aesthetic), distribution (touchpoints and channels to be used for brand positioning), and governance (brand guidelines and management).
Growth marketing: The growth marketing team might put an Instagram ad in front of potential customers reminding them of an upcoming holiday weekend, and link them directly to a landing page with suggested homes in the product.
Product marketing: Let's imagine that the product team has recently designed the flexible destination feature for low intent guests within the user base, but only 10% of that target is currently aware of the feature. Product marketing might be involved in defining the target segment, positioning the feature, and findings ways to increase target user awareness.
While this is where marketing domains differ by definition, in reality there is often confusion between domains that muddies execution. Using customer and user proximity to product as a guiding principle will help you delineate growth marketing's role for your specific company and growth model.
Defining Growth Marketing Is the First Step
Defining growth marketing is an important first step. But it takes a lot more than a definition to execute great growth marketing.
Even when you have growth marketing defined, there's a ton of complexity around how to actually execute growth marketing well in practice. Our Growth Marketing Deep Dive program, launching in Spring 2022, will provide you with a toolkit of frameworks and templates to enable you to solve some of the key challenges growth marketers face. Stay tuned for more information on program content and launch dates.