How to Become a Growth Marketer – Guide to Growth Marketing

In this guide, you’re going to learn exactly how to become a growth marketer. It includes a complete blueprint of growth marketing, along with the step-by-step growth marketing process.

This article will cover all it takes to become a growth marketer, and a successful one.

Here are the exact steps and we will cover them all in the video:

Steps to Become a Growth Marketer

Step 1: Understand Growth Marketing

First, you’ll learn and understand what growth marketing means and how it’s different from growth hacking and digital marketing.

You will also see some examples of growth marketing experiments.

Step 2: Build the mindset of a growth marketer

Next, I’ll show you how to build a growth marketing mindset. There are multiple mentalities a growth marketer uses that form the growth marketing mindset.

These mindsets will make you an elite growth marketer.

Get the full ebook on Lean and Agile Marketing here.

Step 3: Learn the growth marketing process

The next step to becoming a growth marketer is to learn the growth marketing process. Once you have a process, you can rely on it to execute and build multiple growth marketing systems that I call “growth marketing machines”.

It’s all about learning the process so you can rely on it for the future to repeat successful growth experiments.

Step 4: Master the growth funnel and metrics

Next, it’s the funnel and the growth metrics in different stages of the funnel. All your growth marketing experiments will focus on specific growth metrics.

We will see the growth funnel together and get a list of metrics we must measure and improve.

Step 4: Develop your growth marketing skillsets

Skills are important next, and all the hacks can be clubbed in this step along with the skills.

I will show you all the skills you need to become a growth marketer. Growth marketing includes 3 different skill-buckets or skillsets and multiple skills within each set.

Finally, we will bring it all together and see how we can build a growth marketing machine.

You will become an elite growth marketer by repeating this blueprint and improving it consistently.

Ready to deep dive into all the steps?

Let’s go through the entire step-by-step blueprint together:

Walkthrough Guide to Become a Growth Marketer

Now that you have the complete blueprint to becoming a growth marketer, I’ll also share with you some takeaways on building the growth marketing mindset so you can get started with these right away:

Build the Right Mindset to Become a Growth Marketer

“It’s all about the mindset”. This is exactly what we’re referring to when people say the right “frame of mind” to do something. Well, to achieve a growth marketing mindset, you must adjust several beliefs, assumptions, and methods you are already wired to and re-think with a new set of frames.

I will cover all the new frames or mental models you need to develop in order to think like a growth marketer and get results for your or other people’s businesses!

You will have to build each model in your daily life if you plan to be a true unicorn growth marketer. I will mention the steps to make it a part of your life below.

Mental Model 1: Always doubt the default

Doubting the default is the first step to be able to think outside of the most common and saturated set of channels and marketing methods.

How to build this mindset:
Start doubting the default way you do anything

Example: Think about “While most startups look for funding, is it really the right path for me? or “Is marriage really the best option for everyone?” or “Do we really need to go to an office to be able to work?”.

Doubt the default but don’t go against it. Make your decisions based on the gut feeling and data after you’ve tested alternative ways of doing things.

Mental Model 2: Everything is an Experiment

It’s good to plan your growth marketing ideas well but don’t get entangled into the brainstorming and frameworks too much because everything is an experiment and you can stop an experiment whenever you think it’s not working.

How to build this mindset:
Start thinking of small things you try as experiments and then apply them to bigger things

Example: Think about “Should I experiment with this new way of eating?” OR “Let’s try this new workout as an experiment today” OR “Let’s cook something new as an experiment today”.

Eventually, you’ll realize all of life is nothing but an experiment and you can try things out you always wanted to.

Mental Model 3: Focus on your north star

You might be a perfectionist or something who gets into fixing every small issue they find. Remember to keep the focus on the most important metric of your experiment rather than trying to improve everything with a single experiment.

How to build this mindset:
Start by really writing down all the metrics that are important to you in all aspects of your life

Example: Think about “What is the most important metric to measure the quality of my friendships?” OR “What is the most important use of my time right now?” OR “What would I work on today if I could only work one day this week?”

This will start making you more focused as you go through life as well as through our growth marketing experiments.

Mental Model 4: Trust the Process

Most growth marketers don’t have a solid process they follow – and I mean even the most experienced ones. I’ve spoken to many of them personally. These are the same marketers who say “growth marketing hacks” are short-lived which is 100% BS and I can tell you that because I focus on growth marketing process integration.

How to build this mindset:
Start by finding systems that have transformed many people or businesses and have proven to work for them

Once you’re sure you have a blueprint, stop thinking about new input or even process improvements (initially) and just stick to the process. This can be applied to your personal life, health goals, and any other activity.

For example, If you’d like to lose weight or gain muscle, you already know the process. You don’t need more information about it. You just need to trust the process and follow the steps and you’ll definitely get the results you want.

This will start making you more “process-oriented” which will help you build and scale growth campaigns with ease.

Mental Model 5: Think Agile & Lean

The lean mindset will give you a systems view of things and eliminate waste while the agile mindset will make you execute in shorter cycles to deliver more value faster. Both of these are complementary mindsets and hence clubbed together as one.

How to build this mindset:

• Look at everything as a system and find opportunities to eliminate waste to build a lean mindset.
• Ideating small implementations to deliver the most value in a shorter time to build an agile mindset.

Below are the questions to ask yourself to help building these mindsets:

Here, it’s worth mentioning 2 bonus mindsets that can help fuel growth. These are more specifically mindsets of growth hackers but as we know, growth marketing is a superset of growth hacking, hence growth marketers must also build these mindsets:

Mental Model 6:
Become a Hunter for unconventional channels

Mental Model 7:
Become a Hunter of unconventional ways to use conventional channels

Mental models 6 & 7 will help you find growth marketing hacks better!

There are a few other frameworks that will help you the right mindset of a growth marketer.

Here are some tips:

Tips to Develop the Mindset of a Growth Marketer and Growth Hacker

#1: Be Wary of the ‘Default’

To become a growth hacker, you must first build a growth mindset. Think beyond the traditional methods, hunt for tools to achieve results faster, discover cheaper alternatives for expensive marketing methods, and train your brain to look for opportunities others have missed. 

#2: Always choose to Experiment

The practice of experimenting is the core of growth hacking. Every hack starts as an experiment first and hence A growth hack is a mature version of a growth experiment.

You might have to run several experiments to find one successful growth hack or growth marketing campaign.

#3: Look Out for Offbeat Channels

The most common channels are usually expensive and saturated. Digital marketers usually follow a single playbook with the same common and popular set of channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

As a growth hacker, you must think beyond the default digital or the traditional offline marketing channels to get better results, with less time and money.

So, think outside the playbook of a digital marketer and make your own channel personas (not just user personas). 

#4: Foster Creativity

One of the characteristics of successful growth hacks is they are very creative and ingenious. Unlike marketing processes, repeating the same growth hacks is not the right strategy for the long-term.

You will get the best results in your most creative growth experiment ideas. If you go through some successful growth experiment case studies, you will find the hackers always thought of creative ways to leverage other’s networks, or to run offbeat campaigns.

#6: Know Your Tribe

What matters the most is to understand your tribe: which is your audience, your market, and your competitors. A lot of growth hacking success can also be achieved from leveraging your competitor’s networks and audiences.

A lot of other growth hacks are based on user psychology.

Hence, it is important to understand and analyse user psychology. Once you know your tribe, you also know what channels they hang out on.

This then lets you come up with creative campaign ideas on those channels. But it all starts with Knowing Your Tribe!

#7: Build Frameworks and Processes

One of the biggest misconceptions about growth marketing and growth hacking is that it is about finding a bunch of shortcuts and cool tricks.

Though these might be a small part of your growth process, the main idea is to build repeatable and scalable processes to achieve growth.

Lot of blogs are written on growth hacking with negative perspectives while the authors do not realise they are talking about the “shortcuts” and “tricks” and not really about the growth hacking process.

In fact, it is sad that most people do not really understand that growth hacking is a scalable process build of multiple frameworks.

Scalable Growth Marketing Approach

Growth Marketing initiatives are most effective when they can be integrated into the process within a startup or business. Your approach as a growth marketer is about how you execute your growth process.

Let’s understand this better by understanding how my growth marketing approach is different from the common growth marketing approach and how you can benefit from this “machine” building approach.

Common Growth Marketing Approach:

1. Design multiple growth marketing experiments
2. Execute the successful “hacks” until they stop working
3. Try to get many small wins and peaks through different small hacks
4. All these wins add up to a successful startup or business

My Growth Marketing Approach:

1. Design multiple growth marketing experiments
2. Execute experiment tests to find scalable experiments that can be integrated in the system
3. Build a workflow to continue execution of these experiments
4. Assign the workflow to a team within the organization or with a set of contractors
5. Scale parts of the workflow using tech so the ongoing effort is the minimum
6. Make the workflow a part of your regular marketing process to continue reaping the benefits – This is where it becomes a Growth Marketing MACHINE.
7. Get the next set of ideas from the idea bank and repeat the process

As you see in this approach, we keep adding to the team and to the process to build a monster growth marketing process within the team.
Just like any good machine, we need to maintain our growth marketing engine.

Here are some tips to maintain your Growth Marketing Machine

1. Decide a fixed frequency to review the CR % to the target metrics of each workflow of the machine
2. Re-calculate workflow budgets to adjust ROI of the machine
3. If the machine is working fine and you see potential to improve, increase the input (resources/budgets) by 20% on a monthly basis and continue to measure results.
4. Like any good machine, results should increase by 20*x% by increasing the input by 20%. If this is true, you have a scalable machine.
5. Always have an experiment pipeline so the machine can keep building up
6. In case any workflow within the machine stops producing results, take a systems view, and review the parts of the workflow to see what can be tweaked. make sure you find the course before re-starting or pausing the workflow.
7. As you might have guessed, in most cases, it’s better if the input needed is simply a piece of code. And in other cases, you might need a small team.

I help startups and companies grow by setting up a growth marketing machine within their marketing process. The workflows of the machine are what we called experiments earlier but they’re now integrated within the system.

This is the best approach to scalable growth!