With emerging technologies and shifts in customer expectations, marketers and marketing skills are also evolving.
However, the early era of modern marketing gave magazines ads with an artistic touch and some memorable billboards. Besides that, the golden age of TV commercials witnessed colossal budgets spent on flawless campaigns using scriptwriting and cinematic production to attract a mass audience.
In the Internet age, however, an entirely new set of digital skills emerged, such as email marketing, SEO, and community management.
The high availability of data and analytics coupled with increasing customer expectations gave rise to the growing demand for growth marketing.
However, what is growth marketing? Let’s understand it.
Growth marketing
Growth marketing focuses on a combination of skills to boost the company’s key metrics. In broader terms, growth marketers excel at marketing with the help of analytical thinking, creativity and experimentation.
As defined by Chief Product Officer of Sandboxx, Craig Zingerline, their key job is to look at every channel, every source, and even every step of the buyer journey or user acquisition funnel and look for areas to grow.
Following are the essential skills required for the SaaS growth market:
1. Marketing: The primary set of skills required for a SaaS growth marketer is having an in-depth understanding of marketing. It is expected that they should have broad skills in multiple channels and comprehensive specialization in one or two.
2. Data analysis: Growth marketers have innate capabilities of analyzing, interpreting, and actioning data. For example, they can analyze the effectiveness of campaigns, or detect growth or fall trends, thereby decide ways to address them.
3. Quantitative modelling: Quantitative modelling uses previous data to provide future projections.
4. Experimental process: Testing and experimentation are at the core of this data-driven role. There are tests like A/B and multivariate that experiment with different variables like copy, design, and format. And provide data to help decide the optimal approach. However, this data needs to be analyzed scientifically to justify critical decisions.
5. Front-end development: The basic understanding of front-end coding is necessary for moving quickly while running tests and adjusting user experience.
6. Engineering awareness: Understanding the engineering and development process is a plus for growth marketers. It will help plan projects and fulfil technical requirements.
7. Product management: Growth marketers must-have skills that product managers require- knowing the product thoroughly, setting priorities, and collaborating with prime stakeholders to communicate about growth and maintain buy-in.
8. Customer experience (CX): Growth marketers need to acknowledge and coordinate changes to CX. It implies that they need to communicate extensively with different teams and even customers.
Key Takeaways
Growth marketing is a very critical role that surpasses the limits of conventional marketing roles. The main objective of growth marketers is to support businesses in achieving their KPIs, with an increasing focus on user acquisition and retention.
Today, most SaaS companies, in their efforts to attain a competitive edge, are gearing up to build their growth marketing teams. Thus, you should also take your SaaS company ahead towards progress with growth marketing. Focus on essential skill sets required for the SaaS growth market and get a desired competitive edge.
