Building The Growth Marketing Team Of Your Dreams

Various workers sitting inside at a casual office setting

A growth marketing team requires a diverse pool of skills. They come from different aspects of an organization.  Even when you have all the right skills, forming a team can be a daunting task. Here’s a look at the skill needed and the primary ways to build your growth marketing team.

SKILLS

The approach to creating your winning growth team starts with, quite simply, an inventory of the skills needed. These skills are often shared by many people across a number of departments. The key is to understand the importance of these skills for the long term success of your growth marketing efforts.

Product Management Know How: 
This individual has to have a comprehensive understanding of key elements of the product experience, the essential product metrics, and a basic understanding of technologies like tag management and API’s to integrate the product experience into marketing channels.

Familiarity with Data Science: 
This team member has to know the basic concepts around data science and statistics to ensure that recommendations and testing are based on sound principles.

Development of Creative:
Every team needs a designer to create templates for emails, push notifications etc, and coding the templates with the right variables.

Expertise in Marketing Channels: 
A guru of marketing channels is essential for a growth marketing team. They have to know the mechanics and metrics for each of the marketing channels being used in the marketing strategy.

TEAMS:

With these different cross-functional skill set needed at one table, organizing such a team is a big challenge. Do we have the budget for it? Can we find the talent in-house rather than hire? Should it be organized under marketing or product? Who do they report back to? Should there be a stand alone team? Every business has varying requirements and depending on the stage the business is in and how mature their many organizations are, there can be multiple ways of structuring a growth marketing team. Here are some of the most popular options in organizing your team.

Marketing Oriented Growth Team:
Mature organizations with significant expertise and infrastructure for multiple marketing channels often choose to staff the growth team under the digital marketing organization. The strength of this model is the strong alignment with marketing and brand messages, but the challenges are around staffing the team with the right data science and product skills.

Product Oriented Growth Team:
Startups and product centric companies often choose to build a growth team within their product (or merchandising) teams. The biggest advantage in this model is the strong product knowledge delivering a personalized experience. The key thing to watch for in this setup is to ensure that the team is delivering brand experience while keeping true to their brand design and look.

Integrated Growth Team:
Reporting to the CEO – e.g. Facebook. Led by a versatile leader who has both the product, data, and marketing skills, this team brings together all the various growth skills into one integrated team. This is potentially the strongest model for driving growth, provided you can find that rare leading who can manage such a multi-function integrated team.

Distributed Growth Team:
In this structure, the growth team consists of members from different functional teams like data science, marketing and product, who come together around projects. This configuration is not a good long-term option, but might help you get off the ground with a few early wins in growth marketing.

Once you have the people with the right skills, it’s time to lay out the plan to bring everything together. From my experience, a growth team will evolve over time. The beauty of the growth marketer mentality is around striving for excellence based on results. Not only does this apply to campaigns, it also builds a center of excellence within an organization that drives results and change.