Here Is What You Should Do Before You Start Your Growth Marketer Carrer

This week I am starting a new course in cxl, luckily enough I was granted a scholarship which allows me to save some money and learning about something I’ve been loving to learn.

Before I start talking about my learnings this week, I am going to talk a little bit about myself and how I got here in the first place.

Since an early age, I wanted to study and learn everything I could, I was always good in school and most of the subjects (except math), however, due to financial problems in my family, with only 19 I went on a mission to find a better life for myself. I emigrated to the Alps in Switzerland, trying to find a more stable life. Once I didn’t finish my studies, I had to work in hospitality as a Bellman, for almost 3 years. After that, I decided to emigrate to Australia and worked there for one more year. Then I went to Spain and worked in a beautiful Island (Palma de Mallorca) for 6 months as a bartender. All this travelling and you must think ‘Wowwww, what a great life this guy has !”, well, not entirely truth, deep inside I was always frustrated because I couldn’t complete my studies, and all I wanted is to learn more, and more.

Surprisingly, I made the right decision to return studying while I was living in Amsterdam in 2019, and the subject that I liked the most was marketing, I was fascinated with it. All the creativity and strategy behind and can be so much fun.

However, my school didn’t provide me material enough to become an expert, that’s when a close friend of mine, recommend me this course, and the scholarship. Here I am, writing a blog weekly so I can keep my scholarship and show my learnings.

This week learning is about growth vs traditional marketing, the main differences between them.

The first difference is about the marketer and where his focus is.

When we are talking about brand traditional marketing, the focus is on the top of the funnel, so awareness and acquisition. In the other hand, growth marketing will focus on the entire funnel.

I have to be honest, that I thought growth marketing was focused on awareness mostly, but when I listen to the rest of the audio I found out why I was wrong because as a growth marketer your job is to drive growth across the business. Which will bring us now the second big difference which is the process of growth is driven by experimentation.

This means that as a growth marketer the way that you will show results across all channels of the funnel is by constantly experimenting with different programs, campaigns, product features …

You will test, test and test, fast and in an efficient way so you can provide a better customer experience in the future, collect important data that you can use to learn and improve so you can continuously improve your funnel. Instead of leaping faith, thinking that you know what your consumer wants, invest everything in that idea, campaign, message and hope for the consumer acceptance. Which can be good, and as a marketer you will be a superstar, or can be the opposite and a total failure, screwing in that way your portfolio.

When setting up an experiment, the marketer can learn what is the response and the behaviour of the customer and even if go back to the drawing board, at least he will have learning for the future campaigns and experiments.

As a piece of advice for a future marketer and myself when starting new projects, we should run experiments and small campaigns along the funnel so we can generate data, learn more about prospects and improve the growth of the business and achieve goals faster.

What I’ve also learned was that the term growth hacking can be compared to the lean startup methodology. It’s basically how you can build a minimum viable product, the simplest basic features, fast and using minimal resources. The same methodology can be applied to growth, how can you build the minimum viable marketing campaign that you can run and test to learn if it’s effective or no.

The next subject taught me what are the three main components to being a successful growth marketer, I have to be honest I really wanted to know this answer because lately I have been applying for some job offers and all the replies are that I don’t have enough experience … So, I was really glad to find out that there are still employers hiring because they can see growth potential and hungry to get better and teaching them is not that hard.

Number one component to become a successful growth marketer is channel level expertise, whether its email marketing, push, Facebook ads …

The next one is analytical capability, in other words being able to extract data and gather insights. Analyze campaign results, interpret it and use it to make better decisions.

And lastly is strategic thinking, project management, it’s being able to come up with good ideas, figuring out how do you choose the right experiments, how do you prioritize tasks, how do you identify big opportunities and find the best way to work with stakeholders.

So, for my future, I will pick one of these components, or two and become really good at it.

But like I mentioned before I have been struggling with initial interviews and first email responses, which brings the question “How can someone be hired as a growth marketer?”.

Luckily enough CXL course also explain it and they say if you are new it’s hard to get some expertise in channels. Once we are not growth marketer yet, it will be difficult to get hands-on it, however, it’s easier to develop strategic and analytical thinking.

We should leverage the expertise we are already good at and then start learning about areas that we don’t have any expertise, by showing that hunger of learning, and acquiring knowledge, the interviewer will be fascinated and most likely will give you a shot.

Most important, show the desire to get better and improve, show your interviewer your homework about the company, that you followed their email campaign and you think a different campaign could bring better results. Getting evolved in these projects, without being asked is a great way to stand out.

Also getting experience with analytics can be easy because most online courses offer to learn with SQL, or Excel and Pivot Tables. Figure it out how you can explore data, get real learnings, understand it better and start pulling out some insights.

If you are thinking about growing your career in growth there are two important things to consider, what do you like and what are you good at? Sounds a little bit cliché, but as life is how it works in growth. From the three skillsets mentioned early, there’s the analytics, the channel-specific, and the strategy management, leadership. Figure it out the ones you like the most, and the ones you are better at. Understand your weaknesses and try to continue developing those skills. Learn from other colleagues who have a similar path than yours, question them, get feedback.

Invest in getting better every single day, invest in learning and challenge yourself. Apply the methodology of growth to yourself.

I truly hope, somehow, this text was important to someone and you make the right decisions. Starting with CXL can be one of them, and so far, I highly recommend it.