Growth Marketing is composed of many skills and all the possible growth marketing skills can be categorized into 3 major skill buckets.
In this article, we will see all the skills we need to develop as growth marketers.
At first glance, you might feel you need to learn everything about the digital ecosystem to become an elite growth marketer.
However, the skill categorization will help us understand while skills to build as your core, which ones you can get a broad understanding of, and how to select the skills to deep dive into.
So let’s understand the 3 growth marketing skillsets:
Skillset 1: CORE growth marketing skills
This is the foundational skillset for growth marketing. It is a growth marketer’s backbone. Without building this skillset, you won’t be able to go a long way on this journey.
Core growth marketing skills
How to identify the core skillset
You’ll be able to apply these skills to each step of the process and soon they will become second nature to you as a growth marketing manager. You must learn all of these to 100% as this is your core skillset.
Growth Marketing Skills in the the core skillset
- Managing the growth marketing process
- Visualizing the growth funnel
- Putting the growth mindset to practice
- Using data to make decisions
- Understanding the user’s journey
- Using OPNs, leverage and piggybacking
- Understanding unconventional channels + unconventional methods
- Identifying and amplifying growth channels
It is interesting to note that most growth marketers don’t spend dedicated time focusing on improving their CORE or fundamental skillset, and assume it’s going to improve just by execution.
While your specific skills will grow just by execution (as you’ll learn in this article further), the fundamental skillset needs to be nurtured by thinking about process improvement, campaign reviews, mind-mapping, etc.
Skillset 2: GENERAL growth marketing skills
The general skillset is a set of growth marketing skills all managers and marketers must develop.
You must be able to utilize all these skills and apply them to all your growth marketing experiments.
General Growth Marketing Skills
How to identify the general skillset
You will that these skills apply to almost every experiment that you do. You cannot pick and choose one of these skills to execute growth marketing experiments.
While they work on an execution level, rather than the core skillset which works throughout the process, they cannot be ignored or omitted for any execution.
You must learn all these skills as you’ll be using them for all your growth experiment execution, no matter which growth metric you’re looking to improve.
Growth Marketing Skills in the General skillset
- Psychology for Growth
- Content for Growth
- Design for Growth
- Technology for Growth
- Analytics for Growth
- CRO & A/B Testing for Growth
Skillset 3: SPECIFIC growth marketing skills
The specific growth marketing skills mostly focus on a specific channel (example: Email automation) or a specific type of growth experiment (example: side-project marketing) or a specific type of approach to growth. (example: viral mechanics).
You must deep dive into a few of these which you find your interest in. But first, you must try a little bit of everything to see what attracts you the most.
As a growth marketer, you must learn the top 20% of all the rest of the skills in this list (and deep dive into a few). I call this lean skill development.
How to identify the specific skillsets
The skills in this set will apply to specific experiments and. Each skill in this set will not apply to everything you do as a growth marketer at a process level or an execution level.
They will, however, be very useful in specific execution cycles or some growth marketing experiments you execute.
Growth Marketing Skills in the Specific skillset
- Email Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- PR
- Paid social
- Organic social
- Paid search
- Competitor Analytics
- Trends Research
- Organic search
- Lead Generation
- Sales Copywriting
- Affiliate Marketing
- Referral Marketing
- Viral Mechanics
- App Marketing
- Blogging
- Sales Funnels
- Marketing Automation
- Landing page Optimization
- Side-Project Marketing
- Ecommerce Marketing
- Front-end Development
- HTML & CSS
- JavaScript
- Databases
- Web Scraping
- Mobile Marketing
- Video Marketing
- UX Design
- Data Visualization
- Outreach
- Branding & Storytelling
- Graphics Design
- Google Analytics
- Ecommerce Analytics
- SaaS Analytics
- Mobile App Analytics
- Data Science
- AI
- Statistics
- …This list is endless
This list is much more dynamic than the others and you can keep developing the skills you enjoy working on just by following the Growth Marketing process.
In fact, the very idea of having an endless list of specific skills is what makes growth marketers unicorns. And that’s also the reason why real full-stack growth marketers do not exist!
For the specific skillset, I recommend you execute various kinds of growth experiments in different industries.
This will help you learn different tools and observe different processes to grow your specific skills.
Important points to note:
1. You must develop the fundamental skill set by spending most of your time improving your process and seeing the entire growth marketing cycle end-to-end.
This is an ongoing task as it involves process improvement and is also the most important skill set.
2. The general skill set should be studied broadly to understand how things work within each skillset as you will be using these skills for all the experiments you do.
As a growth marketing manager, you might be able to hire generalists to execute for you but you’ll still need to understand all these skills to be able to manage them better and to get your own hands dirty whenever you need to.
3. The specific skill set is more dynamic. You will probably have a few of those skills already and you can deep dive into a few of those over time.
Though I don’t like to use the terms T-shared, E-shaped, etc though that’s what those terms mean – when you deep dive into a few of those specific skill-sets, you shape yourself to one of these buzzwords.
So here’s a quick question for you:
Q. Can you rank yourself on each skill set and make a list of the most important 3 skills you need to improve?
The question, of course, is for your own self!
All the best with your growth marketing journey.
