How to Hire a Growth Marketer

Introduction

Growth marketing is a hot topic right now, but it’s not as simple as hiring someone who knows a few marketing tactics and how to work with data. The key to finding the right person for your team is understanding what makes that individual tick, which requires you to define why you’re hiring, and who will be involved in the selection process.

When you’re ready to hire a growth marketer, it can be tempting to simply open up a new full time role and begin the recruitment process. However, this can end up being an expensive alternative to a more sustainable and strategic hiring solution, such as partnering with a contract or freelance growth marketing expert. Working with a specialist directly in a more independent, cost-effective arrangement can offer your business opportunities for exponential growth and agility—which is key in the current dynamic business environment. 

Below, we’re digging into the key steps to hiring your growth marketer, and will be showing you the benefits you can enjoy from working with contract specialists and freelance growth marketers.

1. Define why you need to hire a growth marketer

Before you go hiring a growth marketer, it’s important that you understand what exactly you’re hiring them to do. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of new hires and shiny tools—we all do it! But before jumping into adding more people or processes, it’s best to make sure that whatever you’re doing is making your business better by setting goals for yourself.

The first step when defining why you’re hiring a growth marketer is defining the problem that needs to be solved. Great questions to ask would include: 

• What are your biggest barriers?
• Is your problem based on low conversion rates? Low sales? Lack of website traffic? Or is it something else? 
• Could it be due to a lack of social presence? 
• Do you have a content strategy? Is it well defined?  

During this step, you should also be thinking about how long it might take to see results once you begin working to solve your challenges. Could it be a month? Three months? Six months? More? And, how much money do you think you’ll need to allocate over that time to solve the challenges?

Taking the time to define your needs is vital if you want to successfully hire a growth marketer. It allows them to work far more effectively and can give your business additional agility and opportunity for increased revenue down the line.

2. Understand Growth Marketing

Hiring a great growth marketer for your company is difficult, if you take the same approach as other companies and thus compete for the same talent. That means you’ll end up paying more, or worse yet, settling on a less experienced candidate. 

Hiring for a full-time, W2 growth marketer position is really tough, and can be higher in risk and much more expensive in the long run. 

Growth marketing is all about running experiments to see what tactics will work for your business and your target customer. Often, the skillset required to achieve initial growth is very different from the skillset required to scale up growth. For these reasons, it often makes more sense for companies to hire a growth marketer on a contract basis for a period of time to solve their most pressing growth challenges. This enables you to hire the very best specialist for the particular challenges you need to overcome in the short term. 

Then, once those challenges have been overcome, you’lll face a new set of growth challenges (e.g. scaling up a channel, or testing entirely different and new channels). Since you didn’t tie yourself down to one particular full time growth marketer, you’re now able to go out and find the very best growth marketing specialist for these new challenges. 

But, before we go any further, let’s make sure we understand what precisely a growth marketer does. A growth marketer… 

• Uses experimental design to get key data points that will help to refine your strategy around launches and initiatives
• Studies various user segments and develops strategies around needs and expectations 
• Collaborates with both marketing and sales to create structure and framework for incoming prospects 
• Increase revenue by strategizing new ideas to amplify brand presence and perception, often collaborating with the internal marketing department 
• Completes comprehensive reporting to keep you in the loop about key events and findings in your business

Want to learn more about what a growth marketer does? Take a look at our recent post, What is a Growth Marketer?

3. Consider who you want to hire.

After you define your problem and dig into what growth marketing is all about, you’ll need to consider who you want to hire. 

Different growth marketers have different skill sets, so this step helps you to ensure that that the person you’re hiring can do what you need them to do. For example: While some growth marketers are experts at very early stage growth experiments, testing new channels or refining value propositions, others excel at specific digital marketing channels, measurement and analytics, or even onsite optimization techniques like conversion rate optimization. 

Questions to ask yourself in this step would include: 

• Do I need someone with a particular background? 
• What are the most pressing growth challenges we face today, and what type of skills and experience will most likely help us address those challenges?
• Do I require a growth marketer who has experience working with the same type of product that I’m selling? (e.g. SaaS, consumer, etc.)
• Do I require a growth marketer who has experience marketing to the same type of customer I’m targeting? (e.g. B2B, enterprise, etc.)
• What’s my budget for this position?

Growth marketing compensation varies widely depending on location and company size, but generally speaking, growth marketers earn salaries between $60K-$150K per year—and that doesn’t include perks like health insurance or a 401k plan. Make sure that whatever salary offer makes sense long-term for your budget before making an offer.

And remember, there is more than one way to hire a growth marketer: you absolutely do not have to hire a full time employee. Marketplaces like GrowthMatch make it incredibly simple to hire a growth marketer who has the exact skills and experience you need, and you can hire them on a contract, freelance or fractional basis. This makes it super easy to solve your most pressing growth challenges, and then frees you up to find a different growth marketer to help you solve your future (different!) growth challenges. 

YOU CAN STOP HERE if you’re going to consider hiring a contract or freelance growth marketer! There’s no need to write a job post or recruit candidates at all. You can simply submit a few details about what you need, and GrowthMatch will automatically match you to the top 2-3 pre-vetted growth marketers who match your need. Presto!

4. Write a killer job post.

A great job post is clear, concise and detailed. It should be tailored to the role and candidate. It should also be tailored to the company you’re hiring for—in this case, your growth marketing agency! 

You want a candidate that’s going to fill in all of their strengths as well as their weaknesses into your business model and make it work better than ever before. Those kinds of candidates will be more empowered to apply when the post speaks to their goals, is well written, and gives them insight into your unique and authentic business culture. 

Finally, keep in mind that the industry you operate in can affect your hiring process—so it’s important to know what’s going on in the wider world around you.

5. Attract candidates

Post your job description on online job boards. Most high-quality job boards will require you to pay to post your job, which can cost many hundreds of dollars. 

Reminder: you can skip the expense of posting your job if you instead hire a contract growth marketer on GrowthMatch 🙂

6. Narrow down your pool of candidates.

You should only hire the best people for your company. This means you’ll need to spend some time narrowing down your pool of applicants to find those who will be most likely to succeed in their roles at your organization, integrating well into your team culture. 

The process will look different for every organization. However it should generally involve multiple rounds; including initial screening, multiple interviews, assessments (if appropriate), which will result in the final hire. 

Reminder: you can skip the massive amount of time you and your team will spend interviewing candidates, if you instead hire a contract Growth Marketer on GrowthMatch 🙂

7. Get feedback from their peers and previous managers.

Throughout the hiring process, you can also require letters of reference or summative feedback from their peers and previous managers.

References, testimonials, and case studies from their previous employers are all valuable tools that can help to inform your final hiring decision. The people you’ll be speaking too will be able to tell you what the candidate’s strengths are, where they struggled or succeeded in the past roles they held, and how well they collaborated with other team members. They can also provide valuable insight about what can help your candidate to succeed in this specific role. 

Reminder: you’ll spend far less time vetting candidates if you hire from the pre-vetted talent pool on GrowthMatch 🙂

8. Study their work style

Once you make your hiring decision, you can take a few extra steps during the probationary period to help you to maximize the experience for both parties. One of these steps includes reviewing how they work in the context of the company and within their role.  

You’ll want to see what their “style” is, how they work together with current team members, and how they align themselves with your organizations’ culture, goals, and mission. While there will be an inevitable adjustment period, you can usually tell quickly how well your hire will adapt and flow with the rest of the team.

9. Evaluate their ability to manage data and metrics.

It’s important to t’s important to evaluate your growth marketer’s ability to manage data and metrics—whether they’re in the hiring process or if they’re working through their probationary period. 

In the interview process, you can do this by asking them to explain how they use data to drive their work. This will give you insight into how well they know how to set goals, measure progress toward those goals, and determine whether or not their efforts are achieving results. Throughout the probationary period, you can continue to conduct regular reviews of their work and determine if you’re seeing accurate data and subsequent results.

10. Assess how well they communicate with customers and peers.

Communication looks different for everyone. It’s one of the most important parts of business culture and job success, and should be a skill that your growth marketer has mastered. In order to determine how well a marketer is communicating with customers and peers, you should assess the following:

• Look at the marketer’s social media accounts. Do they have a professional presence on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? Do they interact with their audience and answer questions when asked? Something this simple can give you insight into who your new hire is, and their general alignment within their space. 
• Check their blog. Is it updated regularly, and does it have high-quality content that’s useful for your audience? Are there too many ads or external links on the page (i.e., are they trying to make money off of someone else’s site)? Does the blog appear well maintained?
• If you opt for a contract or freelance growth marketer for your growth marketing role, you can also use this as a tool to determine how advanced they are in their career. You can also read up on the posts to ensure that they are staying up to date on relevant strategies and trends in your industry. 
• Ask for references from past employers or co-workers who can vouch specifically for their communication skills.This will help you gauge whether they’ll be able to communicate effectively with your team members and executive leadership.
• Generally, freelancers will have case studies and visible results from clients that they can point to, or highlight specific instances of work-related communication with. In contrast, when you’re recruiting a traditional full-time position, you may not have the same clarity and transparency during the interview process. This can lead to a riskier hire experience, and could minimize some of the benefits and “responsibility for response” that you’d see from a singular freelancer.  
• The world of freelancing is extremely competitive, especially in the marketing space. Chances are, your contract hire will understand that communication is key to a healthy vendor/client relationship.

And last: go ahead and hire a growth marketer!

In the end, hiring the right growth marketer can result in growth and new opportunities for your company. That’s why it’s so important to refine your hiring process and choose high-performing candidates at every step. We hope we’ve provided some clarity around how to hire the right growth marketer for your company with this how-to hire guide. 

Remember: Your process will never be “perfect.” Continuing to iterate and develop your process to appeal to present-day hires is key to remaining competitive in today’s job market.

If you’d like quick access to the top 2-3 growth marketers who match the skills and experience you need, simply tap the “Hire a Specialist” button on GrowthMatch, submit a few details, and we’ll get you matched right away!key