Growth Hacking is a term that applies to the growth of any product or service. It’s not just an approach for entrepreneurs to scale quickly, but also for large enterprises to gain traction in the market. There’s a variety of roles that go into growth hacking and often growth marketing firms, like Peak Energies, employee a staff of people who handle various responsibilities. With 16 years experience in storytelling, a Johns Hopkins Certified Data Scientist, as one of the first content marketers, and an accomplished product manager, I execute the jobs that need to get done as an expert in each of the domains necessary to scale products.
Here’s the nine core talent experts you’ll need to start scaling now:
Product Manager: So much of the marketing comes from the product. Engineering can’t hand over a product to Marketing that’s buggy or else when it launches it will fail because it can’t scale. Having a product manager on the Engineering team who can communicate between the two departments is key to product development integrations from the UI/UX, business development, and technology needs. Testing a product before launching it will make sure all possible bugs are reported. The best growth hackers will never cut corners on testing.
Project Manager: Keeping your pipeline full is a full-time job. You’ll need someone to be in charge of your timelines, plans, and deadlines. The project manager should communicate to all departments to make sure everything runs smoothly. This person will hold staff accountable to their goals by setting and holding regular meetings where the leadership can come together to solve problems in order to move forward according to plan.
Campaign Strategist: The campaign strategist’s goal is to look at the marketing campaigns and make decisions based on priority of brand messaging and cost. This person will optimize costs for ad spending and supervise copy to make sure it’s written for SEO. Based on the sites you run your campaigns, this person should come up with your black-list and white-list of sites in order to tell you where and where not to invest.
Marketing Representative: This person is executing the job defined by the Campaign Strategist by implementing the strategies outlined for them to follow. She will launch the marketing campaigns and track results creating metric reports along the way. She will hire other marketing reps and manage these employees to ensure they are doing their job well with optimizing the content.
Social Media Manager: This role involves messaging vetting to test the impact prior to releasing any campaigns. This person will post, interact and engage with people on various social platforms to not only promote your product, but provide data driven insights to key leadership. This person should be smart, responsible, and quick on their feet. This is a high pressure role as 140 characters can kill a career.
Content Strategist: This person will work with your Campaign Strategist and your Social Media Manager to create the content for your inbound marketing. It’s not just about creating compelling content, but about knowing who your customers are, what they are talking about, and how the product they are selling meets the needs of the customer. It’s about using the data the brand collects to make decisions about solving customers problems, appealing to their desires, and communicating a message about the product in that context. This person will make various types of creative content targeted to different audiences at different stages of the sales funnel.
Data Scientist: Measuring the data before the creative is released in a campaign is everything to the success of a products growth. It’s not so much about collecting data as it is doing something actionable with it through insights. Knowing the proper statistical procedures to do so is critical to proper interpretation of your data. The Data Scientist will make sure that you discover the root causes to any correlation, properly segment your customer base, and follow the scientific process for continuous testing and optimization to fuel your ongoing growth.
Web Designer: This is a job for one part designer who can assist marketing creative, but also someone with experience in UI/UX who does more than draw pretty pictures. This person can read and write basic code, will update your website, and design the website keeping up to date with implementations for improvements directed by the Data Scientist. This person will work with the content strategist about not just the site, but landing pages, email marketing, and other marketing demands. Getting noticed and looking good are drivers for growth.
Copywriter: This person works closely with the Content Strategist, but her role is much more about vocabulary and optimization than creative. What used to be called SEO is now being called Content Marketing and while it sprinkles lightly over all jobs needed for Growth Hacking, the copywriter is the person who is the root of the domain. She writes the sales driven copy that is optimized through data provided by the Data Scientist relating to customers, sales prospects, and leads with the goal of moving people through the sales funnel. This person will write copy for emails, the web site, ads, and overall marketing. When attention spans are short, a great copywriter knows how to captures someone’s attention.
Hiring for growth marketing means finding specific talent to fill these nine roles that are necessary to move the needle forward. You can’t grow effectively without all the parts and it is rare to find one person who can wear all these hats, let alone get all these jobs done. If you can’t get all nine of these employees to staff your growth marketing team then you may end up making a fatal mistake that could result in total product failure and inevitable termination. That is why most companies outsource their growth marketing and why you shouldn’t do it in-house.