MIA #02: How to Find & Hire a Growth Marketer (+ Template)
A practical guide to finding and hiring growth generalists, channel specialists, and ensuring acquisition channels are delivering performance.
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You're likely familiar with the buzzwords "growth," "growth marketing," and "growth hacking." I believe there are five types of people in growth and marketing:
Accidental Growth Hackers: Hacked growth by chance, and now proudly dons the "growth hacker" label.
Misidentified Marketers: Engages in traditional marketing practices but identifies themselves as growth marketers.
Unaware Growth Marketers: Practicing growth marketing but don't realize they qualify as growth marketers.
The Original Growth Marketers (OGs): Actively practicing and understands growth principles.
The Uninitiated: Has no idea what any of these terms mean or why they matter.
Do you see yourself in one of these groups? Let me know in the comments!
Why is it difficult to hire a Growth Marketer?
I think there are three major reasons why this is the case.
1. Misalignment in Role Definition:
Founders and hiring managers often confuse growth marketing with traditional marketing or product management. This confusion can lead to role misalignment, where companies hire someone with a traditional marketing background who might focus more on brand and creative campaigns rather than data-driven growth experiments. This mismatch can result in ineffective strategies that fail to drive growth.
2. Unclear Expectations:
More often than not, companies lack a clear growth strategy or fail to communicate their growth objectives effectively. This can lead to growth marketers working on initiatives that do not align with the company’s overall goals, resulting in wasted resources and missed opportunities.
3. Poor Understanding by Stakeholders:
Stakeholders typically expect immediate results from growth experiments, not realizing that growth marketing involves iterative testing and optimization. This unrealistic expectation creates friction and pressure on growth marketers, leading to suboptimal performance and frustration.
If you’re trying to hire a growth marketer, here’s what you need to do (and for Growth Marketers, this is what you need to know and model after).
👉🏽 We interview global Marketing & Growth practitioners in this newsletter. You can find your next Growth Marketer to work with.
First, Hire a Growth Generalist.
Your first growth hire should be a T-shaped Growth Marketer that has a combination of broad skills and deep channel expertise.
Skills don’t always fit neatly into a T shape. In some cases, the T might resemble an M or a π with multiple vertical stems of different lengths.
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A T-shaped marketer's abilities can be categorized into three main components:
Base Knowledge
Marketing Foundation
Channel Expertise
Base Knowledge
This forms the horizontal line of the "T" and represents a broad understanding of non-marketing-specific areas that are valuable in any job:
Behavioral Psychology
Branding, Positioning & Storytelling
Research
Data & Analytics
Statistics
Programming
Product Design & UX Principles
Marketing Foundation
This builds upon the base knowledge and focuses on core marketing channels and tactics. Here, a T-shaped marketer should have a solid understanding of:
Copywriting
Funnel marketing
Customer Experience
Strategy
Conversion Rate Optimization
A/B Testing
Statistics & Excel
HTML & CSS
Photoshop & Wireframing
Channel Expertise
This forms the vertical line of the "T" and represents in-depth knowledge in one or two specific marketing channels. Here, the T-shaped marketer becomes an expert in a particular area, like:
Product Marketing
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Public Relations
Community
Lifecycle Marketing
SEO
Performance Marketing
App Store Optimization
Organic Social
The growth marketer’s primary job will be to:
Set a cadence of regular growth experiments.
Create systems and design processes.
Propose growth experiments and define growth priorities.
Build experiments, oversee their implementation, and productize learnings.
Oversee funnel optimization to identify and remove conversion bottlenecks.
Ensure acquisition channel experts are delivering performance.
Job Titles:
Growth Marketing Manager
Growth Product Manager
Growth Hacker
Here’s a Google Form Template that I have used to screen and hire Growth Marketing candidates. You can also access our full resources and template library here. Feel free to share it!
Second, Hire a Growth Specialist.
Growth specialists are channel experts who can execute and optimize acquisition channels to their full potential.
The specialist will be responsible for fully owning the success of their channel.
Job Titles:
Paid Ads Specialist
Lifecycle Marketing Manager
Product Marketing Manager
Performance Marketing Manager
SEO Specialist
Content Marketing Manager
Social Media Manager
Community Manager
Third, Deploy Design, Engineering & Data Skill sets.
Ensure that the growth team has dedicated resources from Design, Engineering, and Data to support and amplify their efforts. These skill sets are crucial for the seamless execution of growth initiatives and can significantly enhance the team's overall impact.
Remember, a growth team is cross-functional, encompassing skills in product, engineering, marketing, sales, and data to execute your growth strategy.
In our next issue, we take a deep dive into how to structure your growth team, establish a growth process, and execute a growth motion to ensure long-term success.
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TL: DR
Get a PDF summary of this article here.
There are 5 types of people in growth and marketing: Accidental Growth Hackers, Misidentified Marketers, Unaware Growth Marketers, Original Growth Marketers (OGs), and The Uninitiated.
Hiring a Growth Marketer can be difficult due to misalignment in role definition, unclear expectations, and poor understanding by stakeholders.
First, hire a T-shaped Growth Generalist with a mix of broad skills and deep channel expertise.
Second, hire Growth Specialists who are channel experts to optimize specific channels.
Third, ensure you have Design, Engineering, and Data skillsets to support your growth team.
Was this helpful? Hit that ❤️ and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Want to see more of this content? Restack this post (if you're on Substack) and share it with your friends!
You might find these interesting:
Growth vs. Marketing vs. Product — The distinct roles of growth, marketing, and product teams and how they intersect to drive business success.
How to Setup a Growth Team for Maximum Impact — How to structure and manage a growth team, focusing on prioritizing impactful opportunities over mere activity.
Growth Teams — How to build and scale growth teams at different stages of team size, from small to large.
Growth at Dropbox — How Dropbox structures its growth team.
How to Hire Your First Marketer — Finding the first marketing hire with the skills and attributes necessary to drive early-stage growth in a startup.
How to Become a T-Shaped Marketer — What marketing career growth looks like at Buffer.
Hiring within our network:
Head of Marketing at Doist
Paid Social Specialist at Public Nectar
Product Marketing Manager at Smile ID
Founding Growth Hacker at GitStart
Growth Manager at Carry1st
Chief Marketing Officer at Monkey Tilt
Product & Partner Recommendations:
James Praise — I partner with founders and marketing teams of Product-Led startups to drive long-term growth using SEO, Performance Marketing, Product Marketing, and Lifecycle Marketing, from acquisition to retention to revenue.
Clay — Clay combines 50+ data providers, real-time scraping, AI, and outbound workflows, so you can send automated, 1-1 personalized campaigns (and book more meetings than your sales team).
Testimonial — Testimonial makes it easy to collect text and video testimonials from your customers in minutes, with no need for a developer or website hosting.
TextCortex — TextCortex is a ChatGPT alternative with real-time web browsing and knowledge collaboration features. You can connect multiple data sources, customize the style, and work with your own data.
Synthesia — Synthesia is the #1 AI Video Creation Platform that enables you to create professional videos without mics, cameras, actors, or studios.
AISEO — AISEO is a writing assistant which specializes in generating undetectable AI content at blazing speed.
Riverside — Riverside makes it easy to record remote podcasts and video interviews that look and sound like they were recorded in a million-dollar studio.
Hypotenuse AI — Hypotenuse AI writing generator helps you generate SEO-optimized articles, product descriptions, and more in your brand voice.
Fathom Analytics — Fathom is a better alternative to Google Analytics—it's lightning-fast, more accurate, and fully aligned with the GDPR and the ePrivacy directive.
Koala — Koala is an AI content creation tool that uses GPT-4 to produce high-quality, SEO-optimized articles in minutes by combining SERP analysis with real-time data.
Zebracat — Zebracat is an AI platform that turns text prompts into marketing videos that combine AI visuals, custom footage, and engaging audio.
Rytr — Rytr is a CHATGPT alternative that helps you create high-quality content that sounds like you, not a robot.
Memberstack — Memberstack empowers Webflow developers to add secure user accounts and payments in a fraction of the time.
Reform — Reform is the fastest way to create shareable and embeddable forms that look great, are awesome to fill out, and integrate with the rest of your work.
If you want to collaborate or feature your product in this newsletter, shoot me an email.
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