Growing revenue and raising profits is one of the core objectives of most companies. It is the responsibility of every area or department of the organisation to dispense their functions, to contribute to the pursuit of this goal.
In recent years, start-ups have embraced a new need, The Growth Manager. They are alternatively known as Growth Hackers, Growth Product Management, or Head of Growth. Their main function is to help businesses rethink their strategies and help in formulating tactics and novel approaches to drive business growth and deliver breakthrough results.
Growth Managers looks for opportunities for growth and identifying a company’s future scope. They fill in identified opportunity gaps by implementing systematic growth plans instead of band-aid solutions or shortcuts. A growth manager sets goals and leads efforts to achieve these goals.
While it safe to say that every company aims to grow, not every company devotes time and resources in building a solid foundation with a growth manager. If you put in a bit of time and study the development of a few thriving companies, you will realise that many of them have skilled growth managers associated with their substantial success. Some even have a complete growth team.
Long-Term Success
Growth means little if it cannot be sustained in the long-term. The acquisition of customers can bring hordes of individuals to try your product or service as new users. But they won’t contribute to growing your company if you cannot retain them.
Sustainable growth can be achieved through strategies that involves the entire customer lifecycle, namely: awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral. Growth Managers are responsible for building the ground for this holistic strategy that leads to long-term growth.
What does a Growth Manager Do?
A couple of decades back, having a business on the internet is much simpler. A lot of companies back then were growing rapidly and having investors literally throwing money at them from every corner.
However, fast growth also brought with it problems, bad business judgements, decisions, and weak foundations. Not even big companies were shielded and brought about a lot of dot com failures.
Rather than be fuelled by hype and publicity, growth managers looked at data and results. They slaved over and looked for ways to rise, some aggressively. Rather than hope that the playing field would level out, growth managers are out there making it happen.
In essence, Growth Managers set achievable goals for the company and then set about making them happen. They do this by employing data collection tools to determine what’s happening in your niche.
Though their roles may vary between organisations, their main responsibility is to identify opportunities for growth and be engineers to fill these gaps. A Growth Manager is expected to devise strategies to increase business revenues and minimise expenditures.
How are Growth Managers Key to Driving Growth?
First off, let’s break the myth that Growth Managers are capable of incredible feats that are mysteries to mere mortals. What sets them apart is their singular focus on growth, and the subsequent resources and time that they can spend on this pursuit.
An example and one of the earliest large-scale adopters of growth-focused staff was Pinterest, whose team was able to manage increasing their new user activation by 20%, main simply by improving their website flow.
How To Know You Need a Growth Manager
1. You are a start-up with no marketing experience.
Any established business will tell you, especially in today’s digitally driven world, that marketing isn’t something that is recommended to be learned on the job. However, that’s what a lot of founders had to do out of necessity.
This poses a lot of problems along the road, and many ended up being cash-strapped and tries in vain to maximise returns on early paid social campaigns.
With minimal marketing skills, they needed to figure out fast what benchmarks to use to measure success. Did they need to be patient? Try and test out new channels? What about customer experience? Scrap everything and begin anew?
If you’re struggling to answer these questions, and then some, a Growth Manager can probably help you out.
2. You have good website traffic, but you find growth has stalled.
You might have driven good conversions at the start, and suddenly, isn’t anymore. No need to hit the panic button just yet.
Growth Managers may be able to help you in various ways.
- Figure out why or if you’re saturated on your channel. Your Growth Manager can answer questions like: “is there more that needs to be done here? Are we not exploring the channels thoroughly enough? Is it a spend problem? A product or service problem? Or is it a conversion problem?”
- Find new channels to get you back on track. You might have set budgets for platforms you are interested in; growth managers can stand up new channels and prove out their ROI (or their lack thereof).
If you are thinking about testing new marketing channels, never DIY it. Like doing renovations to your house, it’s not advisable doing it yourself, you’ll hire an expert contractor.
3. You have a new product or service to launch but have no idea how to build a marketing strategy.
You can’t expect people to magically run to your product or service. For each product or service launch, you’d really need a good growth manager to figure out how to find product-service-market fit, and how to scale it.
This now holds true even for major brands. Bic for example made it huge with their pens and lighters, but they totally tanked with Bic Perfume. You haven’t heard of it? Our point exactly.
4. You have a market fit, but your team is stretched too thin.
If you are a start-up and people are actively seeking you out and telling their friends and family about you, congratulations! That’s a major milestone. But you probably still need a growth manager.
Finding a product-market fit can put a major strain, even with big marketing teams. You’d need to ramp up ad spend in a major, yet efficient way – but there are only so many hours in a day.
A growth manager will think of testing other channels and figure out where else you can acquire customers profitably. They can oversee the transition from early-stage growth to multichannel, more mature optimisation and growth.
5. Your ad spend is through the roof, yet you’re not getting substantial ROI.
Investing in a lot of paid ads yet not getting ROI can be a real bummer. You might think and ask why you’re not growing even though you already have brand awareness. Are you focusing more on impressions?
Obviously, conversion rates count more than impressions. A million people may have seen your ad, but how many people went to your site? How many people clicked? How many people converted because of that ad?
A growth manager will slash your ad budget in half and update your ad structure and targeting methods. Don’t be surprised if it completely flips your return on ad spend. With fresh eyes, a growth manager looking at your marketing campaigns can identify ways how you’re chasing vanity metrics, even the most subtle ones.
Can You Outsource a Growth Manager?
You most certainly can! An outsourced growth manager can be the perfect solution, especially for small businesses who want to jumpstart their growth but can’t afford a full-time marketing resource yet. Growth managers can provide a wealth of executive and experience. They will be able to boost your marketing funnel performance.
By working with an outsourced growth manager, you would be able to develop or enhance your scope of services to include precisely what your company requires and to modify them as they arise or needs to change. Depending on your company’s needs, you can engage growth managers or specialists, or even both.
If you would like to learn more about how a Growth Manager or how a Growth Strategy can help facilitate growth for your business, find out what we can do for you at The Growth Manager. Let us be your guide by signing up today, for free.
