Not a day goes by that a new product or service does not enter the market. Each of them offers a variety of solutions to their customers, and all of them are built on unique ideas. However, no matter how striking the idea you find or the innovations your product brings to the market, today, maintaining sustainable growth has become the most valuable driver of achieving success in doing business, more importantly- for the startups.
In today's world where company structures, sectoral needs, customer demands, and even communication rules or channels change at the speed of light, it is also inevitable for marketing solutions to evolve in order to offer sustainable success. At this point, it is significant for business holders to recognize and differentiate the changing and developing marketing activities and team structures in order to adopt the growth-driven way of doing business by determining the right targets and strategies.
Marketing activities mainly focus on acquiring customers and creating awareness or loyalty by organizing advertising, content and media buying activities across online and offline channels. These metrics are standing at the top areas of the funnel we use in traditional marketing. And the KPIs delivered are generally SOV, sign-ups, downloads, leads, etc.
Growth marketing, on the other hand, looks at the funnel and the entire marketing process from a more holistic point of view. In order to ensure growth with its activities and to make this growth sustainable, it tailors each stage of the funnel and focuses on managing it correctly to create balance and support the boost in all other areas at the same time. It works to improve KPIs such as daily active users (DAU), leads, conversion rates, signups, LTV, etc.
In short, with growth marketing, a much more agile, product- and sales-oriented, data-driven, and measurable perspective has been gained in the world of traditional marketing. At the same time, close contact with the product development and sales teams revealed a much more integrated way of doing business and communicating.
Now let’s dig some more about growth teams, which actually make growth marketing happen.
A growth team is not just any marketing team responsible for customer acquisition, as we just mentioned. A growth team develops and expands the number of customers and, therefore, the value of products or services that have just entered the market or are in operation, through data-driven experiments. And it does this with an end-to-end and immersive marketing approach that starts from the lead nurturing to the retention and growth stage.
A growth team is like a compact pocket knife. A good growth team can provide you with:
The key point here is that the growth team should be able to implement an effective growth marketing strategy for the product because sometimes achieving uncontrolled rapid growth can lead to more challenging situations.
In order to do growth marketing, it is necessary to see how the product is working in the market. The reason for this is to achieve product/market fit. Products or services that have achieved product/market fit have high retention rates with low churn.
Once the product teams have created the core product, you can build or outsource your growth team so that the teams can ensure the core product is experienced by the users. What brought success to the startup giants like Facebook, Airbnb and Uber was the ability to recognise a strong link between marketing and product development.
So if the growth team you are working with has a deep understanding of your product or service, believes that it is suitable for growth, and can read the market well, it can build an effective growth funnel to bring you together with your real users with the right targeting and ensure sustainable growth by making a match for sustainable communication.
Of course, every market and company has its own internal dynamics. Therefore, the role of the growth team may vary depending on the industry and company it works in. But there are some very important and indispensable general benefits that growth teams provide, regardless of the industry.
To succeed in an ever-changing world, you need to be in a regular mode of experimentation, and to keep it that way you need to create constant momentum. Sustainable momentum is essential for sustainable growth. Growth teams are constantly experimenting, giving your business momentum that keeps you ahead of the competition.
Every business has a different metric that it focuses on. This could be the number of rides made for Uber, or getting new accounts on Facebook. Growth teams keep all communication activities and even teams and departments in this focus, ensuring everyone is on the job enough to contribute to the project.
Marketing teams will work for weeks to produce a single project that will trigger awareness. And the engineers who bring your product to life have the ability to only take care of the technical issues. On the other hand, growth teams act as a magnificent invisible bridge between your engineers, marketers, and product teams, enabling all teams to work in perfect synergy and add value to each other.
The growth team focuses not only on growth rates but also on discovering the growth tactics that achieve those highest growth rates because the important thing is to achieve successful results, but also to ensure that the result is sustainable. These high-performing tactics mean increased revenue for your business in the long run.
First of all, you need to decide whether you want to work with an in-house team or an agency. Although it may seem much less costly to set up an in-house team at the first stage, keep in mind that you may have very different needs in the later stages depending on your growth focus and speed.
The structures of the growth teams are more or less the same whether they are an agency or an in-house. Before we get to know the structures of growth teams, let's take a quick look at the differences between an in-house team and a growth marketing agency to help you make better decisions.
| Aspect | In-House Growth Team vs. Growth Marketing Agency | |
| Product, brand & company culture | Ability to work closely with other in-house teams such as product managers, sales team | Potential for broader market expertise as it works with different companies |
| An inside and deep understanding of the product, brand, company culture and competitors | Ability to look at the market with an impartial and fresh vision | |
| Skills | A more limited set of skills | Extensive skillsets for each growth area |
| Creativity | Loss of creativity over time due to working with a single brand - Marketing Myopia | High creativity with the fresh mindset of working with different accounts |
| The ability to look at the competition and the brand from different perspectives due to knowing the brand closely | The ability to look at the competition and the brand from a wider perspective due to the experience in different markets | |
| Focus & Control | Full focus and control | A sharper focus on sales and the customer |
| Loss of focus with the greater cross-departmental workload | Loss of focus due to working with different clients and projects | |
| Costs |
Low cost-effectiveness |
High cost-effectiveness |
| Salaries, expenses, need for facilities, equipment & training |
Pays for self software, equipment & training |
|
The roles in the growth team may differ within themselves, depending on the in-house or agency structure. We can summarize all the roles that can be in the growth team as follows:
Growth Manager: Has overall responsibility for driving growth in KPIs and project management. Guides nurture and set the agenda for the team to accelerate growth experiments.
Content Manager: Makes the textual design to be used in the entire user experience process. They play a role in creating the growth strategy and also become the voice of the product being marketed.
Performance Manager: The Performance Marketing Manager is responsible for the management of digital accounts and the use of paid social channels. They focus on the campaigns and their outputs and drive the commercial performance.
Marketing Specialist: Makes associations about which channels and which growth tools would be more appropriate to use, and nurtures the team.
Product Manager: Directs product attributes required for growth. Brings together different departments such as marketing, engineering and design.
Engineer: Plays an important role in feature development. Works to run coding and experiments efficiently.
Data Analyst: Makes discoveries about user journeys, experiences, and behaviours by analyzing insights.
Designer: Designs experiences for users and provides insights to the team to shape those experiences. Identifies the triggers that will drive the user's interaction.
As the person who knows your business and your product closely for controlled growth and success, you will determine how you will shape your growth team. Whatever decision you make, don't underestimate the value that growth marketing and its teams can add to your business, and act now.
