How to Hire a Growth Marketing Team

The number of new companies started in 2020 topped 4.4 million, a 26.9 percent increase from 2019. It’s the most significant company increase of the past decade. It’s the largest increase of the past decade. In short, there’s more competition than ever.

So how do you stay competitive? Many businesses are looking at their marketing teams to give them an edge, but not in the usual way. You need a new marketing approach centered around growth. Instead of vanity metrics like impressions, you need a marketing team to build brand awareness, generate leads, and convert them to paying customers.

You need a growth marketing team.

You may have already come to this conclusion yourself. If so, you may have questions:

• What roles are in a growth marketing team?
• What skill sets should I hire for?
• What tools or platforms will I need to invest in for the growth marketing team?

In this article, we’ll answer each of those questions to help you better understand how to hire a growth marketing time.

Growth Marketing Team Roles

Growth marketing teams and traditional marketing teams are quite different. There are six primary criteria that separate growth marketing and traditional marketing teams we’ve discussed before:

Let’s look at some of the most common roles found in growth marketing teams. If you’re considering building a team internally, the following are essential roles you need to fill. 

However, keep in mind that there’s not just the expense of hiring these roles at play. The team also needs licenses and accounts for company-wide communication and project management tools. Individual roles may also require specialized tools and software, such as keyword research tools or design software. Many SaaS and tech companies prefer to partner with an outsourced growth team that’s ready to start working today because of these expenses.

Growth Marketer

Growth marketers build and implement strategies, campaigns, and tactics to help meet a customer’s particular goals. Growth marketers may gravitate to certain tactics based on past success, but they don’t subscribe to a singular “best” method. Their focus is on driving growth for the client, and they consider all the tools available to them when building a strategy to achieve the established goals for a client.

Because of this, growth marketers are well-versed ina number of digital tactics such as content marketing, content repurposing and distribution, email marketing, and inbound marketing. Finally, growth marketers combine their writing and analytical abilities to write, distribute, measure, and optimize campaign content assets.

Developers

The largest benefit developers bring to growth teams other than their coding and development skills is how they approach problem-solving and critical thinking. They use the growth-driven design methodology — a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process — as a basis for defining optimization experiments, running those experiments, and deciding what actions should be taken to continuously improve the website. 

Developers on growth teams use this approach to mitigate risk. The use of audience data to drive continuous improvements to a website over time ensures the improvements align with the needs of both the client and their customers.

Designer

Growth designers have many skills, including but not limited to:

• Running customer development and develop in-depth customer understanding
• Thinking through a system and visualizing the experience
• Identifying problems in the system
• Designing solutions to the issues they identify

Designers on a growth team operate from a growth-driven design mindset. They use their knowledge and skillset to ensure users have a smooth, intuitive web experience. Designers use their creative problem solving, knowledge of design systems, and user interface design skills to enhance marketing tactics and acquisition channel performance.

Marketing Ops

Marketing operations consists of all the processes that happen behind the scenes for growth marketing teams. The person in this role must be organized, process-focused, love operational planning, and able to spot potential risks and waste and act to prevent them.

Some responsibilities include:

• Hire talent 
• Prove marketing value to stakeholders
• Train employees 
• Develop career paths
• Plan campaigns 
• Track projects 
• Enforce deadlines 
• Communicate metrics with upper management
• Create processes 
• Manage workflow 

Marketing ops’ goal is ensuring everyone on the team has the tools, information, and capacity to be successful. As the operational overseer, they can shift resources and assign team members to help deliver maximum value to clients and ensure progress doesn’t stall on certain projects. Marketing ops is also key to building and distributing best practices across the team. 

A Better Alternative: An Outsourced Growth Marketing Team

There are several benefits to partnering with an outsourced growth marketing team like Lean Labs instead of building your own. 

1. Cost. With an outsourced growth marketing team, you pay for the services provided and the value delivered. You don’t have to worry about salaries, benefits, equity, equipment, or software costs.
2. Time. Hiring a team takes an extraordinary amount of time. You have to write descriptions, get them posted, sift through resumes, conduct interviews, and finalize offers. Then you have to onboard your team members once they are hired. Outsourced growth teams are ready to go right now.
3. Professionalism. Outsourced growth marketing teams have standards and processes for client communication, project management, and value delivery.

If you’re an innovative SaaS or tech brand looking to achieve high growth, Lean Labs may be the right fit. To get a taste of how we approach growth marketing, download our Growth Marketing Kit. It includes a number of beneficial tutorials and bonus resources you can implement at your company immediately.