Michael Robin

As a self-proclaimed “Growth Marketer”, I’m currently on a mission to find my next exciting opportunity to drive revenue goals with marketing efforts and it has been a challenge to communicate my value beyond what my resume details.

With 10 years of variable experience under my belt, imagine how one can find it difficult to articulate the intersection of what they’ve actually accomplished as a growth marketer and I think I’ve figured out why.

What is a Growth Marketer?

This term gets tossed around often and gets confused with growth hacker. A growth marketer is not a growth hacker.

A growth marketer is a blurry role that’s quite hard to define– but it describes the way I learned marketing. The data-driven, experimental practitioner who finds and repeats ways to engage, acquire and retain users of your product or buyers of your service.

We’re the mad scientists of marketing working on hypothesis after hypothesis; testing, analyzing, reporting, refining, and implementing what’s best for organizational growth.

So why do growth marketers and growth hackers get confused? Well, here’s the deal:

Growth marketers use growth hacking techniques to test different channels and strategies rapidly, optimizing incrementally to determine how to best use their marketing investment. It sounds similar, but it isn’t.

In contrast, growth hackers are motivated to use a range of experiments to increase their user base at the lowest costs possible. Sam Ellis wasn’t looking for a marketer when he coined this term, he was looking to grow an installed base to outpace the competition.

Hopefully, we all understand the difference now? No… ok… Keep reading.

Growth marketing is a continuous role, applying testing, experimentation, and expansion principles to campaigns throughout the customer journey. We will also implement A/B testing and multivariate testing to develop experiments around what content is seen and when by different user segments, and use the results to develop highly optimized strategies for each identified user segment, going down to the individual level.

A growth marketer doesn’t just focus on growing a larger user base; we build a highly engaged audience to help reduce churn and increase each user’s lifetime value. We as growth marketers should be working with sales to look at each stage of the funnel generating improved rates of customer retention and satisfaction. In addition, to building net new names, we focus on customer relationship building and fostering loyalty as a long-term strategy where authenticity creates advocacy to organically grow customer lifetime values.

A Great Growth Marketer is a Unicorn

According to an infographic shared by Larry Kim, I am a Unicorn marketer, and many if not all of the skills on the chart are necessary to be a growth marketer.

Analytics, Content Strategy, Mobile, E-commerce, Creativity, Resourcefulness, Adaptability, Collaboration, and Leadership. All the necessary skills needed to be an influential Growth Marketing experimenter.

By definition, in business terms, being a unicorn is particularly rare. After all, I have always felt that I was unique, so I’ll take the compliment.

As recently as 2021, Forbes published that there’s an increased demand for the growth marketer which has changed the requirements and skills needed by CEOs and CMOS.

What does Growth Marketing in action look like?

1. Create a free tool: Metasauce
   • At Rocksauce, we understood that it was frustrating for our clients to get us their device details when testing applications, so we developed a tool to get us that information faster. When you address your target audience’s pain points and offer them something they need, their interest will naturally pique in your direction.
     
     We ended up increasing customer retention by 20% after deploying this tool and reported elevated levels of satisfaction.
   • As for the bottom line, while I cannot speak to exact numbers I am happy to report that Rocksauce was acquired in 2019 and saw several happy exits with some of the companies we developed products for.
     
2. Create a community around your brand: Trend of the Month Club & TrendBox
   • At Ebco, we worked on building a community of innovation professionals delivering trend boxes and specific trends of the month in an exclusive club that delivered value to corporations we selected as part of this group.
     
     With this project, we were able to increase revenue projections by 65% over our estimated goals in the 4 quarters that I was part of the organization managing this and other growth campaigns.
     
3. Create hyper-personalized e-mail campaigns: EDGE 2022 Conference
   • In our second annual user conference, we were able to personalize not only the names of the attendees that registered but suggested sessions that they should attend based on insights we gathered from their customer service advocates. Personalizing campaigns to create more meaningful communication with your customers—from onboarding and welcome emails to feature announcements and feedback emails can impact retention drastically.
     
     We improved our attendance ratio by 15% from the prior year and exceeded our registration goal by over 15%, hypothetically due to the personalization of these campaigns.
     
4. Run re-engagement campaigns: Finastra Universe 2021
   • Let’s be honest, 2020 was challenging. So in 2021 when launching the first virtual Finastra Universe, the Marketing Organization, myself included, teamed up and together came up with a plan to launch Finastra TV to re-engage with our users, and customers and accelerate the pipeline. It was an all-around success!
     
     While I cannot publicly share metrics, but I can share that they presented Finastra TV as a cumulative platform for their thought leadership from this campaign in 2021.

Now that I’ve elaborated on who I am, I can comfortably and affectionately be referred to as a marketing unicorn. I can confidently say that I am the type of person that equips organizations with the tools of modern marketing needed to engage today’s always-on customers. At the same time, I am not afraid of the marketing methods of days past. Different channels work for different audiences.

Remember that growth marketing unicorns are the extremely rare breed of marketers who are pretty much good at experimenting, iterating, testing, and implementing. We’re full-stack, digital natives with the perfect blend of creative genius, technical know-how, and marketing fundamentals.

And if you want to grow and don’t have a seat for a Growth Marketer on your team then you should re-think your strategy.

They’re the essential part of the team that holds everything else together.