What does a Growth Marketer actually do? Aren’t all marketers supposed to help you grow? And why is it sometimes called Demand Generation? Doesn’t everyone want to generate demand?
To illuminate the often poorly lit world of marketing roles and responsibilities, we spoke to 4 different growth marketers and asked them a few questions:
- What is growth marketing?
- What’s a day in the life of an early-stage growth marketer?
- Why should someone hire a growth marketer?
The results will, hopefully, give you a little clarity.
What does a growth marketer do?
One of the trickiest things about growth marketing is that you can't really fit it into a neat little box.
Being a growth marketer is a lot like building a plane while flying it. We need to think about the long-term, sustainable growth of the business, while also quickly testing tactics to hit short-term goals. It's a constant balance between creating systems that will drive future growth and experimenting in the moment to see what works.
A general rule of thumb is that only 3-5% of your target market is ready to buy at any given moment. This means growth marketers need to do more than just focus on immediate conversion; we need to build brand affinity that compounds over time. This requires both strategic thinking and tactical execution, with an eye on what will make a lasting impact.
If you're at a seed-stage startup, the growth marketer's role looks completely different from someone working at a Series C company. It also varies hugely depending on who your customers are, how they consume information, and how they make their buying decisions.
For a seed-stage company, here's how I would define it:
- They help set clear revenue goals for the company.
- They build out the programs to actually hit those goals.
- They constantly evaluate what's working and what isn't.
At this stage, growth marketing is all about experimentation and building momentum. Seed-stage growth marketers often wear many hats: one day, they're running scrappy paid campaigns to generate leads, and the next, they're setting up email sequences to nurture those leads or writing website copy to improve CVR. There's a relentless focus on finding a repeatable, scalable way to generate interest, and it's all about getting traction quickly with limited resources.
A good growth marketer touches every part of the customer journey. Sometimes that's direct—like building out ad campaigns or creating content. But often it's more subtle, like working with an engineering team to build growth loops right into the product itself. Regardless, the role is laser-focused on real business impact.
And perhaps the biggest challenge—and joy—of growth marketing is that it's never "done." There's always a new experiment to run, a new insight to uncover, and another piece of the puzzle to solve. It's this constant evolution that makes growth marketing so dynamic and rewarding.
A growth marketer is the evolution of traditional marketing, focusing on generating and owning pipeline goals. Growth marketers take a product-like approach to growing a business, combining technical skills and experimentation frameworks with creative thinking to drive revenue growth. The role spans multiple channels (paid, SEO, automated outbound, etc.), but what makes it unique is the approach—using weekly sprints, data-driven frameworks, and rapid testing to find scalable growth channels. Success is measured directly through pipeline impact and revenue growth.
John Marbach, Growth Marketer Extraordinaire
As a growth marketer, your first assignment is to understand exactly what’s happening at each stage of the marketing funnel, from anonymous visitors to new users—all the way through to new paying and churned customers. This involves instrumenting the product with analytics tracking events that can guide data-driven experiments rather than solely relying on intuition or customer feedback.
The next, ongoing task is to develop a set of ideas—interventions—that can potentially grow the conversion rates of each of the funnel steps. You stack rank each of these ideas by their effort-reward ratio to identify the best overall opportunity, and then adjust your roadmap of priorities as needed. Ideas relating to new messaging, or lightweight visual website/app changes, plus pricing and packaging changes are the most commonly selected initiatives because they can be implemented quickly. Speed—and the rate of learning from the growth process—is of utmost importance to a growth marketer.
Because growth marketers are expected to deliver results quickly, and their work surface commands a wide scope—from analyzing to ideating and on to executing changes—I believe they must embrace operating autonomously from start to finish. That means finding comfort by digging into the raw data with SQL, writing a persuasive message from scratch, or committing trivial code changes here and there when the job calls for it.
Looking to get into growth marketing? I recommend developing deep channel expertise in one or two areas of digital marketing, such as email marketing, paid ads, push notifications, SEO, social, or events—so that you have a rich range of practical experience to draw from.
Simply put, a growth marketer is responsible for identifying opportunities to add new marketing channels and optimize existing ones, with the goal of increasing the efficiency of the marketing funnel and the volume of traffic coming through it.
The growth opportunities be identified at any point of the funnel including:
- Awareness — increasing the number of people in your desired audience efficiently
- Demand generation — increasing the number of new users or leads for your product
- Product adoption — increasing the number of leads that start using and paying for your product
- Cross-sell & upsell — increasing the average revenue each user pays your business
- Retention — increasing the amount of time a customer uses your product which increases their lifetime value to your business
- Referral and virality — creating a flywheel where existing users help recruit new users
A growth marketer is responsible for first understanding the economics of your business, your target person, and the pain or value you can solve for them. Then, a growth marketer will identify the best areas to run experiments and launch new marketing programs to try to add volume to your marketing funnel and make it more efficient.
Increasing any step of the funnel by 10% while keeping the rest of the funnel constant results in a 10% lift for the business. In each of these funnel stages, there are a variety of channels and tactics to drive the desired outcome.
However, the best growth marketers are able to adapt standard tactics, reject standard tactics, and go beyond them to invent new approaches specific to their audience, persona, business model, and the current market.
What’s a day in the life of an early-stage growth marketing?
Mike Perez, YeshID
Day to day, my role involves a mix of activities that support both the long-term vision and the immediate needs of the business. Here are some examples:
- Sitting in on internal engineering demos: I spend time learning more about our product and where it's headed. Understanding the product allows me to create more targeted messaging and align marketing efforts with future product features.
- Joining discovery calls: I join calls with prospective customers to uncover their pain points and understand underlying trends or motifs. This helps me develop campaigns that speak directly to our customers' needs and challenges.
- Building campaigns: I create LinkedIn and Reddit campaigns to reach our audience where they are. Whether it's targeting potential customers with relevant ads or building out content that will drive engagement, I'm always thinking about how to reach and resonate with our audience.
- Writing website copy: I write and iterate on website copy to ensure our messaging is clear, compelling, and aligned with our target audience. The website is often the first touchpoint, so it's critical that it communicates value quickly and effectively.
- Analyzing data and making adjustments: I analyze website traffic patterns using tools like PostHog, then make adjustments to improve the visitor experience. Whether it's tweaking copy, changing calls to action, or improving page navigation, I'm constantly looking for ways to make our website more valuable to visitors.
Austin Hughes, Unify
An early growth marketer's day revolves around five key areas:
- Pipeline & metrics: Analyzing pipeline dashboards, reviewing campaign performance, and updating experiment results
- Launching experiments: Launching new growth experiments across channels, from automated outbound plays to paid campaigns
- Developing content: Building out website content, writing social posts, and other forms of content distribution
- Product collaboration: Working with the product team on new features based on competitive landscape and refining our ICP
- Talking to customers: Joining sales calls, talking to current customers, and translating takeaways into growth experiments + refining your ICP
Alex Roed, Hightouch
Early-stage growth marketing can be hectic because there are so many things you can be doing. An approach I’ve seen be successful is starting by casting a wide net. Try a lot of things across the funnel and then see where there is any small sign of improvements or positive feedback.
“Trying a lot of things” can be vague. Specifically, a few examples of where to start:
- Solving paid ad funnels: Launching Google ads, YouTube ads, Reddit ads, Meta ads, etc. This starts with keyword or audience targeting based on your hypothesis for your ICP, then moves to building the creative and messaging, setting up the campaigns and bid strategy, and iterating daily. The focus should be on achieving leads at whatever you deem an affordable cost per lead and then trying to scale that campaign.
- Focusing on things that don’t scale: Talking to as many partners and media companies as possible to get guest posts on their sites and measure traffic, sending gifts or messages using the CEO’s LinkedIn profile to set up sales meetings, creating a reputable persona in key Reddit and Slack groups, or working to incentivize five customers to recommend you to five of their connections.
- Growing organic channels: Finding ways to efficiently create quality content that can drive SEO growth and social media engagement.
- Optimizing your product funnel: Working with the product team to remove steps, test messaging during your onboarding flow, add incentives or trigger reminder emails to maximize activated users.
- Engaging influencers: Sourcing a few influencers in your space with quality audiences to run test promotions with and testing different messages across those audiences.
Once you see something that seems promising, dive deep into it and try to scale and optimize it as much as you can. Promising can be defined differently for different activities. It could be a reasonable cost per lead, it could be a DM saying someone enjoyed your content or a 10% lift in product activation.
Then, when you start seeing diminishing returns, move back to casting a wide net and repeat for the positive signal.
Why should a technical founder hire their first growth marketer?
Mike Perez, YeshID
Founders at early-stage companies should hire a growth marketer because they are a force multiplier.
Unlike product marketers or performance marketers, who often have KPIs that don't necessarily tie directly to revenue, a growth marketer is focused on driving growth that leads to tangible business outcomes.
For a technical founder, having a growth marketer on board means they can stay focused on building the best product possible, while the growth marketer figures out how to connect that product with the right audience. Ultimately, hiring a growth marketer means bringing in someone whose entire role is dedicated to finding scalable, repeatable growth strategies. This not only helps generate revenue in the short term but also builds the foundation for sustainable growth in the long term.
Austin Hughes, Unify
You need a growth marketer when you've built something users love but can't predictably acquire more customers. While word-of-mouth is working, you need systematic ways to scale beyond it. In today's market, having the best product isn't enough—you need to reach customers before your competitors or other solutions do. Growth marketers turn customer acquisition into a science, using modern tools to accelerate your growth and build repeatable pipeline systems while you focus on product. A good growth marketing hire can be the most important hire you make in the first 25 employees of your company.
Alex Roed, Hightouch
They shouldn’t unless:
- You have a product early adopters love, and you want to start scaling and optimizing the acquisition and flywheel for the product. If you hire a growth marketer before this, they will likely try many things that won’t work because they don’t have a strong value proposition to drive to. Donald Knuth, a famous computer scientist, famously said, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
- The caveat is if you find someone very scrappy and product-focused. A person like this can actually help identify the messages and audiences in the market and their pain points based on how they respond to different marketing. This can give you great feedback on the direction you need to take your product to find PMF or make your product stickier.