How to Be a Growth Hacker in 2020, and How to Become One

So you want to be a growth marketer…

or Growth Hacker…

but every position wants 3-5+ years experience…

How do people get this much experience? The developers among you readers are all too familiar with this. Job postings frequently are idealistic wish lists for candidates. Why? Because the companies that need “growth marketing” are more often than not cash-strapped startups, and if they have to train you, that’s expensive.

Who are the experienced growth marketers? Let’s look at some LinkedIns.

This person parlayed a marketing background into a growth marketing position at HubSpot, a SaaS that helps companies with growth marketing via content marketing.

This person used a background at HubSpot to pick up growth positions at various startups ultimately culminating in an executive growth position.

This person actually had a background in chemical engineering, but became a digital marketer and thanks to the stint at Microsoft, a growth marketer.

So, the common thread is growth marketers are digital marketers that are responsible for considerable customer acquisition, usually thanks to being part of a company at the right time.

So if you’re trying to break in, just be candid about your background and aim for entry level marketing positions.

Marketing in 2020 is no different than any other year in the history of marketing. In fact, shutdowns = shut-ins, and that means more hostage eyeballs to view your marketing campaigns. Then again, chances are if you have a marketing degree, you are poorly prepared for 2020 marketing.

As a marketer in the digital age, you are responsible for increasing awareness of a brand, reminding users to return to the brand, and positioning the brand against competition. Additionally, you also must provide the general public some sort of satisfaction, whether in the form of entertainment or helpful information. You are the public relations, investor relations, and government relations. Advertising is the public face of the company, and whether it takes the form of blog posts, tweets, Facebook ads, Youtuber endorsements, Instagram mentions, gilded Reddit posts, or just plain ol’ SEO, you are responsible as a marketer. Every brand in 2020 is a media company, and you’re the director.

A Growth marketer has the added responsibility of ensuring customer acquisition. Unlike a large corporation that can profligately drop entire nations’ GDPs on huge billboards and commercials with the sole intention of reminding us we live under a corporatist hell, startups need to drive customers directly to using their product, or else they die ignominiously. They need their advertising to get customers, or else it’s too expensive to market.

Additionally still, growth marketers may come into a company at a time when they are trying to grow rapidly, or blitzscale.

Blitzscaling is not only marketing, it’s team building, and this book is a great read for its discussion of how a company is like a tribe that grows into a nation. With that mindset, growth marketing becomes almost an anthropological venture, as well as a strictly business one. You are marketing the company to customers as well as employees. Yeh and Hoffman explain more in the book.

Digital marketing is a flooded market, but not with truly creative people. Most digital marketers are all about the numbers, and they don’t even understand the products they’re pushing. So for someone who wishes to become a growth marketer, there is still lots of opportunity to make a big disruption.

You don’t need a marketing degree to be a marketer, and frankly, marketing degrees make marketers lazy because they think they know all there is to know. You want virtually any other degree than a business school-type degree for marketing because marketing in the digital age throws out all the rules of old school marketing. My marketing class didn’t even mention Ogilvy let alone Godin, so obviously the major is antiquated.

Your degree should shape your marketing style. Marketing majors will be boring marketers.

Humanities degrees are incredibly useful for literary storytelling, a key part of content marketing and even oral sales. Communications and religious studies degrees presumably give you a background in persuasion; English and philosophy degrees literary eloquence; History degrees a millenium-long roster of narratives to pull from; Ethnic studies a background on various ethnic groups; Anthropology an understanding of the dynamics of tribalism, a marketing strategy; Classics a long list of rhetoric; Gender Studies a keen understanding of the largest consumer demographic; and the visual degrees: art and design, speak for themselves in marketing, as the visual component of marketing is often the most important. Same goes for film and music degrees.

You’ve heard the term “content creator”. This is a neoliberal term for “artist”, and is a way of paying artists less than they deserve. (Starving artists make good voters. Draw your own conclusions.)

As an artist, philosopher, writer, dancer, musician etc you need to have a portfolio anyway, but you need to tailor it to marketing, and specifically growth marketing. How?

Let me introduce you to Seth Godin. He introduced several new types of marketing we’ll discuss here, first is Purple Cow. Purple Cow marketing involves a stunt, something that is different, that gets people talking (see, word of mouth) about your product, company, you or your team, or just the cow itself. A recent example of this was eye mouth eye. https://fortune.com/2020/06/30/it-is-what-it-is-meme-explained-fundraiser-tech-industry/. This was very successful, and was classic Purple Cow. The Fat Jew has also used this technique.

‘Purple Cow’ is Godin’s term for something that makes people talk. Organic word of mouth marketing should always be the aim.

If you come from a engineering or design background, growth marketing is as much about the product itself as marketing, so concentrate on helping the product hook its users, and make them tell their friends so it goes viral. I highly recommend reading Berger’s Contagious and Eyal’s Hooked for further discussion.

From Nir Eyal’s Hooked

From Jonah Berger’s Contagious

Regardless of the medium, you must bill yourself as a growth marketer. You create art to drive awareness of brands. Your art becomes the brand, and thus brands earn your brand as theirs.

Chances are, you’re an avid user of social media, and likely addicted to consuming the endless scroll found on most platforms. If you look, a lot of social media, at least currently, is used for complaining. Users are producing content, but in the form of complaints, insults, laments, and snark, and not witty either. Comment sections have earned the reputation they have for a reason.

It can be easy to be drawn into wallowing despair with the rest of the internet, especially now, but chin up: your job is to fix their problems by introducing them to the company you work for!

Ok, that sounded very capitalist, but if a doctor recommended you a medication for anxiety, would you question them? In other words, you find customers who don’t know they want to be customers. Social media marketing is much more than witty Wendy’s quips. It’s finding potential customers and establishing relationships, and you don’t want to use the company profile for doing this.

Content marketing targeted toward search inquiries, similar to a Quora answer, is the theme of this book by Marcus Sheridan.

Advertising that is relevant to the targeted consumer is called permission marketing, Again, a product of Godin.

Obviously, if you’re strapped for time, due to working low wage jobs, you’ve got bigger problems, and that’s a discussion for another article.

How do you build a growth marketing portfolio?

You build a marketing portfolio first. It’s only growth marketing when there are hard CAC numbers you can point to. You build a marketing portfolio by creating content marketing something: a fictional brand, yourself. This is where you have your writing, your music, your film, your art. Again, how does your output contribute to brand growth? You are a storyteller. Tell stories.

I would recommend branding yourself as a growth marketer and then looking at open positions, those same positions that require ridiculous years of experience, and approaching the company. Offer your services for free, and if they don’t see any increase in customers, they don’t pay a cent. This is different than the completely unpaid positions on Angel List, where there’s absolutely no upside. You are better off growth hacking your own website (even if it’s a Wix page of your photo) than doing it for someone else.

Again, you are a storyteller. Brand storytelling takes two forms: either you form a narrative around the brand, and place the customer in it; or you do something that goes viral and people create stories around it; Purple cow.

Which types of companies are easiest to growth market?

Most companies don’t need to target the general public, aka, they’re not B2C. B2B companies are far easier to market, and can be grown via cold reach-outs on LinkedIn or Twitter, and subsequent partnerships. Usually this can even be a classic cold call, the same kind you might make to get the job in the first place.

It is thus far easier to build up a resume with B2B marketing and growth experience.

B2C companies require marketing that inform the general public. This is where the permission and Purple Cow marketing come in. Additionally, you can reach out to influencers and journalists to help spread the word. I’ll write about that separately.

I am working on a website that allows you to build up growth marketing portfolios, and use your creative talents for building brands you approve of (instead of your creativity being used by some big corporation). Find me here on LinkedIn and ask me about it. I need help. https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-c-greeley-956975149/