Growth Marketers use a data-driven approach to adapt new growth strategies and parameters that will scale a business more effectively. While other areas of marketing expertise focus on driving traffic and increasing leads, a growth marketer meets company goals with broader strategies that affect production and flow through the entire marketing funnel. A growth marketer’s required strengths surpass traditional marketing to include experimentation and testing, more complex goal-setting, and data analysis.
As a growth marketer, you’ll dig past the top layers of the marketing funnel to boost conversion and retention rates with creative new solutions, elegantly scaling the company or product’s loyal customer base. Growth marketers analyze data and get creative with it, pinpointing opportunities to improve the marketing game plan and connect better with customers. After testing and experimenting with each new idea, they reintegrate their learnings to streamline the customer’s journey through the marketing funnel to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
7 Growth marketing skills you need & why they matter
Growth marketers must be versatile to feed into the cycle of growth and improvement, boasting a wide range of dependable skills that they can use daily—and showcase on their growth marketing resume.
We can’t cover every skill you’ll need as a growth marketer, but we do want to dive into the most important ones and discuss why they’re paramount. While each growth marketer has some unique areas of expertise that give them a personal touch, the following crucial skills make up the toolbox that every growth marketer needs to draw in and retain their target audience.
1. Data analytics
Data analytics involves collecting customer and product data from various sources, identifying patterns and trends, and taking action to improve the digital customer experience based on those insights. In other words, you must be able to understand data and then base smart decisions on it. This skill is crucial in helping growth marketers avoid wasting time and money on marketing strategies that simply don’t deliver.
Using analytics to assess retention, engagement, activations, and more will help you pinpoint exactly which parts of your current journey go over well with customers—and which ones don’t. This process will propel your entire strategy creation process as a growth marketer, helping you learn how customers feel about the digital experience so that you can guide things in a more favorable direction. Amplitude’s suite of products gives growth marketers invaluable insight concerning customer engagement patterns and key metrics that affect customers’ journeys through the marketing funnel. With Amplitude, you can identify your highest-value customers and learn what keeps them retained long-term. You can then use these insights to craft personalized campaigns and experiences that drive desired behaviors for certain cohorts.
With quality data reports, you can call upon your analytical thinking to develop growth marketing strategies. You can also use these analyses to make sure your interventions work. Using helpful experimentation tools to gather more data on your approach can greatly increase the chance of success for future, iterative efforts.
2. Optimization
After the original creation and development of any new marketing strategy comes the more detailed improvement stage where your optimization skills come into play. Growth marketers must be able to handle search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization (CRO), and marketing campaign optimization. These key facets of growth marketing carry customer engagement past the point of acquisition, creating a much deeper connection.
Optimization skills are crucial: An incredible growth marketer should be able to streamline each marketing growth loop to produce increasingly efficient results. SEO skills will increase customer awareness and acquisition, boosting your conversion rates before you even optimize them. Your marketing campaign optimization will also contribute to better customer engagement. And, of course, your CRO abilities will increase the likelihood of those customers sticking around.
When your optimization skills as a growth marketer are top-tier, you’ll be able to take pride in a marketing map that guides customers to greater satisfaction and better lifetime value. You’ll know you’ve nailed it when you can watch customer traffic picking up momentum with better engagement patterns and more promising metrics. Excellent optimization skills will also produce better data to close the growth loop for another round of scalable improvements.
3. People skills
Growth marketers finesse all kinds of details behind the scenes, but they also need strong people skills to truly succeed in their role. After all, a huge part of growth marketing is understanding the needs and wants of the customer. The ability to communicate and understand other people is key: How could anyone develop an effective marketing plan for a target audience they don’t really know?
Some people feel that data analysis can bridge the gap here, and tools that help you understand customer behavior via statistics will certainly enable you to gauge what your customer engagement currently looks like and then adapt accordingly. However, the true scope of human connection is far too nuanced for you to rely solely on data and neglect your soft skills.
As a growth marketer, you must be able to put yourself in the user’s shoes while you contemplate each strategy to market your company’s next big service or product. What does the customer want? How can you fulfill customers’ needs while still sparking their interest so that they’ll keep coming back for more? Perpetually developing your ability to connect with people will help you improve customer acquisition and retention.
4. Marketing
As a growth marketer, you’ll naturally need a general and well-rounded understanding of marketing since that’s at the heart of your role. Remember: At its core, marketing focuses on getting more people to notice and remember your company. Grabbing people’s attention usually involves tasks like creating and implementing effective social media and advertising campaigns.
Marketing abilities are crucial since they tackle the top layers of the marketing funnel: awareness and acquisition. Growth marketers may delve far beneath the surface, but you still need a strong ability to manage those foundational points for company growth. It’s also important to specialize in a couple of areas since this will lend a human touch to your work and make it more unique. Maybe you’re especially good at relating to people through social media or handling customers’ concerns. Lean into your strengths, and people will remember your brand.
A growth marketer must be able to coordinate powerful marketing campaigns with both the big picture and unique personalization tactics in mind, too. For example: Using customer behavioral data to tailor your marketing to the individual and sending personalized messages via Braze can boost engagement and retention rates. Customers who receive more relevant content are more likely to stay.
5. Basic design
Let’s not forget what a key part design plays in marketing—and especially in the growth marketer’s role. For optimal company growth, your marketing campaigns and webpages must look appealing and be highly accessible to your scalable customer base.
As a GM, you’ll benefit greatly from a basic understanding of web graphics and design, alongside the fundamental HTML/CSS skills required to update a website. Accessibility features such as text size, contrast, and loading speed are also crucial.
This means you also must be comfortable with basic user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. You’ll also need to test things quickly to make sure that any changes you make have had the desired effect. The more efficient you are throughout the testing process, the faster the company’s product will be able to grow.
A growth marketer also needs to participate in the decision-making process surrounding UI/UX and base their decisions on an adept analysis of the user’s pain points—and how to solve them for a better overall experience. If a customer encounters difficulty while using a website, program, or other product, then satisfaction and retention rates will likely drop.
6. Experimentation
Truly great growth marketers don’t just follow the crowd—you’ll never stand out that way. Instead, growth marketers who truly excel in their roles are creative disruptors who confront the status quo with challenging ideas and innovative solutions: And, experimentation is the key to making this work.
Whenever you trailblaze and invent fresh strategies to ease pain points, you’ll have to go through an experimentation stage to make sure they work. Trial and error are essential parts of the process, and you may need to conduct A/B testing or use behavioral analytics to gauge the success of your new methods.
For example, Housecall Pro used Amplitude Experiment to laser in on opportunities for improvement within their web optimization strategies, resulting in more effective web content. A product manager at Jumbo Interactive also used the entire product suite, including Amplitude Experiment, to scale their company’s product and user platform.
Experimentation is key in a growth marketer’s creative process since you need to acquire data-based knowledge of how to allocate your resources:
- Which parts of your strategy are most effective?
- Which ones require a complete overhaul that may break the status quo?
The only way to find out is to try fearlessly.
7. Analytical thinking
Since data and strategies are such core parts of a growth marketer’s role, analytical thinking is crucial for success. You’ll need a strong ability to prioritize projects to meet company goals efficiently, and you’ll have to be organized in your approach.
Growth marketing is no place for garbled information or unclear directions: A stellar growth marketer must find the most important patterns in vast datasets and then translate them into concise, actionable insights. Alongside your analytical thinking, you’ll also need to communicate clear insights to others to ensure each objective’s success.
Growth marketers need a strong ability to analyze new ideas and either validate them quickly or provide efficient and constructive feedback for improvement. A background in skillfully organized data interpretation will help you here as will the ability to prioritize which areas of the marketing strategy need the most immediate attention.
A growth marketer must have the strategic skills required to analyze every part of the marketing process: data collection, interpretation, organization, and integration. Next, your data translation must provide clear action points that you can prioritize and implement in a calculated manner.
4 steps to develop your growth marketing skills
Next, we’ll share a handy acronym that will help you along your journey of integrating all this information and becoming the best growth marketer you can be—WASP: Watch, Ask, Seek, and Practice.
Just like in any other job position, growth marketers have to learn their skills and put in the effort to grow their abilities just as they would grow marketing strategies for their business. You must commit yourself: There’s no button that you can press to become an amazing growth marketer, but working hard and implementing the WASP acronym can help.
1. Watch: Observe growth marketers in action
Since breaking the mold and developing innovative strategies that defy the status quo is one of your key skills as a growth marketer, it’s important to watch what others in your field are already doing. Remember that you have to learn the rules before you can break them in a way that will get the results you want.
Soak up as much information as you can by watching how other growth marketers grow their businesses so that you can build upon those tactics and surpass them. You’re unlikely to get an inside view of other companies’ growth marketing strategies, so scan advertising campaigns with a critical and analytical eye instead.
- Browse their websites. How distinct are the company branding, culture, and tone? How successful is the mission statement? How’s the portfolio?
- Look through other businesses’ social media accounts and take note of their engagement levels. Of course, some influencers and brands hire bots to inflate their stats—so check for authenticity.
- Follow your competitors. This tip might sound backward at first, but you’ll learn a lot about others’ social engagement strategies by watching them unfold for yourself.
- Research revenue reports for competitors’ companies to see how their past growth looks; then, compare that data against their current tactics to gauge how reliable they are.
2. Ask: Question what you don’t understand
Inquisitiveness and curiosity will take you incredibly far when it comes to growth marketing. Take an active interest in what others are doing: Ask other growth marketers (or others who use parallel strategies in similar fields) about their experiences.
Establish friendly connections with more experienced growth marketers when possible to level up your next growth loop. When thinking of questions to ask, consider what will benefit your work most broadly:
- “What was a change you made to your strategy that you wish you’d implemented sooner?” The more of the trial and error stage you can skip, the better.
- “What was the most useful type of data that helped you improve customer retention post-analysis?” Broadly applicable advice like this will help you with many projects, not just one.
- “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s a strategy or plan that you found to be the least effective?” Read the room before asking this one, but if the conversation is friendly enough, you could gain invaluable knowledge of what not to do.
- “What marketing trends have you noticed recently that are especially successful?” Additional perspective on the current marketing climate is always useful.
3. Seek: Look for opportunities to learn
Growth marketers should consistently seek new opportunities to learn—but this doesn’t necessarily mean “going back to school” in the traditional sense or even securing an internship within your field. There are other ways to learn that may be better suited to a wider variety of lifestyles and can help you improve your skills just as well:
- Do some research online and seek out articles that center around topics like SEO, UI/UX design, writing for marketing, and general marketing strategies. You’d be surprised by how much information is easily accessible with a bit of browsing.
- Take advantage of online courses through platforms like Amplitude Academy, Hubspot, and Reforge. This option is great for anyone who wants a more well-rounded approach to learning that includes reading, instructional videos, courses, and trainers.
- Read books about marketing. While growth marketers mainly work with everything digital, book reading is much easier for certain types of learners. And as long as the books are recent and based on timeless human psychology, the information will remain relevant.
- Make use of a North Star workshop. The North Star metric is designed to help you identify the core value that you’re working so hard to deliver to your customers, so learning the details would be highly useful for any growth marketer.
4. Practice: Grow your growth marketing skills by doing
Here’s the step you’ve probably been waiting for: Practice. Anyone who’s already broken into the growth marketing field will likely find that the best way to learn is by doing. Luckily, it’s easy to dive right in with the Amplitude free experience, which can quickly help you find the answers to questions about analytics, cohorts, personalization, and more. In fact, learning via firsthand experience will help you see the previous three steps in action and get a feel for how they apply to the growth marketing field.
Remember to watch other growth marketers while you practice hands-on learning and try out different approaches. What unique takes do they have on the learning prompts? They might even have some supplemental learning recommendations for you.
And, don’t hesitate to ask questions about details like what other growth marketers think of the strategies you’re practicing yourself.
- Do they see any areas where you could improve?
- Would they like your help with their struggles, providing you both with a more enriching learning experience?
Remain open to constructive criticism that you can apply to your personal growth cycle. Remember to stay teachable and always seek out chances to learn more.
Prove your growth marketing skills to your employers & team
No matter how long you’ve been in the growth marketing field, it’s crucial to perform some self-analysis so that you can understand your own value. To land the growth marketer position you want, you’ll have to apply some of those key fundamental marketing skills to yourself. Where have you been the most successful? What are your strongest skills and most impressive accomplishments?
Whether you’re just hoping to get your foot in the door or looking to advance your career after several years of experience as a growth marketer, understanding your strong points will help you communicate your value to recruiters and employers.
How to market your growth marketing skills
While you’re a pro at growth marketing (or well on your way), it might not be immediately clear how to go about marketing yourself to recruiters. After all, there are key differences between marketing a product or service and marketing a person’s skills—but a professional resume template can help by giving you a great opportunity to showcase your unique skills.
1. Choose skills for your growth marketing resume
Ideally, you’ll want to choose five to 10 skills to put on your resume. Since you have limited space on your resume page, you’ll want to list the skills that are most relevant to the GM job description.
A few skills that would look great on your GM resume include digital analytics, Microsoft Excel, SEO, email marketing, A/B testing, paid acquisition (AdWords, Instagram, Facebook), KPI tracking, and Salesforce. Soft skills like communication, collaboration, and cross-functional coordination are also great choices.
2. Exhibit growth marketing skills in your resume and cover letter
Potential employers don’t just want to see a basic list of growth marketing skills—even if some of your skills are particularly impressive—they want to see some demonstration of those abilities. You’ll want to naturally integrate key skills into your growth marketing resume and cover letter to show that you aren’t all talk.
Your wording choices will speak volumes in your cover letter: Work key examples of your skill set into your sentence structure. Instead of writing, “I’m good at collaboration and make the most of digital analytics,” try “Collaborating with my team empowered me to translate data from Amplitude into actionable insights that continue to benefit the product lifecycle.”
Notice how demonstrating your communication abilities has a greater impact than simply telling the recruiter that you have them!
3. Talk about your growth marketing skillset in an interview
After you’ve nailed that ideal resume and cover letter and then the phone rings, it’ll be time to prepare for your growth marketing interview. You’ll want to describe exactly how you applied your skills to get specific results. Use your interpersonal abilities to tell the story of how your skills solved pain points in the past, and boost your credibility with impressive metrics.
Collaboration and communication go a long way with your team
While your individual skills as a growth marketer are essential, you’ll need to demonstrate your value in a cross-functional team setting as well. Growth marketers must coordinate with a variety of groups to tackle the entire marketing funnel, and a balance between confidence and humility is crucial. Having the right attitude while showing your value can make or break your success in any field.
It’s important to realize that you don’t do it all alone and to show that you appreciate your teammates and peers. Demonstrating respect for the people you work with will earn respect in return, too—alongside improving the potential for cooperation and productivity within your growth marketing network.
Take Action & Get Results with Your Growth Marketing Skillset
As an ambitious and results-focused growth marketer, you handle every tier of the marketing funnel, delving beyond customer awareness and acquisition: You take things to the next level by thinking analytically, using data and organizational prowess to create new strategies that continuously improve customer retention and satisfaction rates.
No matter where you are in your growth marketing journey, you’re in a profession that’s constantly changing—it’s called growth marketing for a reason, after all. But honing ideal growth marketing skills like optimization, sociability, experimentation, and marketing fundamentals will make it easier to keep up with industry shifts.
Keep the WASP acronym in mind to help you embrace learning and change:
- Watch
- Ask
- Seek
- Practice
Observe other growth marketers, ask questions, seek to learn, and practice relentlessly to develop your skills. Be bold, be inquisitive, and break the status quo—you won’t achieve success from a fear of failure.
