Have you read the post, How to be a growth marketing manager in 2022? It’s a detailed article on how you can kickstart your career as a growth marketer and get the best of it.
It gets even more interesting in this article where I spoke with Olumide Adaramoye, a Growth Marketer and Product Analyst, on the same subject.
Before moving into his current role, Adaramoye started as a social media and digital marketing manager. The major pivot came when he had the chance to intern and understudy a senior growth professional for about three months and got a wider insight into what growth is. While working with the growth team at a leading B2B fintech in Nigeria, he also leads GrowthHackers Africa (a growth community) and consults for early stage startups on performance marketing and product analytics
For this edition of On These Corporate Streets, we get a sneak peek into Growth Management. Adaramoye runs us through major highlights of his job, how to be a recruiter’s favorite, and how much growth marketers earn across all levels.
I. What Growth Marketing is all about
The actual word for this is Growth Hacking, named so by Sean Ellis. But over the years it has taken different shapes based on people’s preferences. Some call it growth management and some call it growth marketing, but it all means the same thing. The concept is basically all about running a series of experimental approaches backed with data to improve key metrics for a business or product.
II. How Growth Marketers Work
A typical workday for any growth manager would often start with a stand-up meeting. But for me, prior to that, I would have gone through the experiments I ran the previous day and see what progress I’ve made and what the metrics are saying. I also want to come up with different ideas to scale the experiments. I listen to one or two podcasts that stimulate my thinking about what I’m running.
Stand-ups typically for startups are a lot of daily itineraries, but it should actually be a review of results from experiments run by everyone on the team, as well as identifying major blockers to some of the measures put in place. This is typically what a Growth Manager should handle in the early hours of a workday, and it gives you a concept of what you need to prioritize and execute for the day or the week.
During the day, I would also check in on every member of the team to for progress updates on what was discussed earlier, rather than wait till the next day. I would also have weekly meetings with the management team, giving reports on progress from every team member and company goals. Asides from the managerial duties, there are also deliverables that are expected of me as a growth manager, and they are always in collaboration with every other team member, depending on what the project at hand is.
III. What employers of Growth Marketers are looking for
If an employer is looking to get a growth manager, what they’d be looking out for is your track record of driving growth, no matter the role you’ve occupied. Either as a social media manager, performance marketer, salesperson, or whatever, what was the significant growth you brought to the company? And that is why I advise those looking to get employed as a growth manager to always position their CVs from a growth perspective. Regardless of what you did, show the significant growth results you brought and how you saved costs.
Employers will also be looking out for your analytics skills. As a growth manager, any employer wants to be sure that you understand and can analyze data.
Then, they’d also be looking out for your channel-specific skills. What marketing channels are you good at? Based on their growth roadmaps, each company has different channels that would work for them. For instance, if you’re coming in as a growth manager to a web3 company, they won’t be fancied by your performance marketing or paid ad skills because those marketing channels don’t drive growth for web3 products. They’d rather be looking at your community management skills or content marketing skills. If you’re going into a B2B business, they’d be looking for guys skilled in sales, content marketing, and perhaps influencer marketing depending on the stage the company is at.
Furthermore, employers could also be looking at your ability to work cross-functionally/work across multiple teams, and how you can communicate effectively with every member of your team.
IV. Pros and Cons
One of the things I like about the job is the fact that we can experiment —we tinker with multiple things. Growth puts you in that dynamic state where you are trying to experiment across multiple things and see which combination works best, and you can learn while you are at it.
On the flip side, the reward of a growth manager is in heaven (Lol). When the company is doing well, everyone is doing well. But when the company is not doing well, they would come from the growth manager. The reward, I guess, is in knowing that you have contributed to the company’s growth, and not necessarily what other people will tell you because you won’t always get the recognition.
V. How much Growth Marketers earn
This is quite tricky, but basically, for a growth intern in a good startup, the range is between 80k to 150k, depending on your negotiation skills. For a growth associate, it’s between 200k to 300k or 350k. Then, a marketing manager role, you can demand 400, 500, or 600k. But you can also earn as high as 900k in larger companies, and that means you are responsible for more stuff. A growth lead position conveniently starts from 700k, and a bigger company could pay about 1m or 1.5. But it all depends on your negotiation skills and the state of the company.
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There’s more to explore On These Corporate Streets!
Do you find your job or career path interesting or challenging? I would like to stop by your junction and spend a day with you. Send me a mail @ Ayodeji Falaye and walk me through what it means to be in your industry.