Whether you’ve just secured some VC funding or finally achieved product-market fit, you’ll need to build a growth marketing team to really drive your startup’s next phase of growth.
While walking to my Postmates office in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood one day, I learned that our company had raised a $300 million Series E round. Our growth marketing team changed dramatically after the infusion because we suddenly had a war chest to fuel our growth marketing efforts. I had the good fortune to be a part of a rapidly growing team that was eventually acquired and absorbed by Uber.
Today, I’ll share what I learned from that experience about assembling a strong growth marketing team. I’ve already covered how to hire your first growth marketer in a previous column. If you already have a growth marketer and want to build a team, this information is for you. will show you how to do so successfully.
Growth pillars and who to hire
It is important to understand the core growth pillars that you can hire for, as there are quite a few that make up a full team:
- Paid acquisition.
- Lifecycle.
- Organic/SEO.
- Affiliate.
- Out-of-home.
- Influencer.
As startups grow, so do their marketing budgets and the rigor of testing required. All that begs for more defined team structures.
It can be difficult to determine which pillar to hire for next, but the decision ultimately depends on where the next big opportunity for your growth efforts is. If you already have a few paid acquisition channels running, such as Google, Facebook, or Snapchat, that have shown promising results and could benefit from optimization and scaling efforts, you have your answer.
And if you don’t have any lifecycle marketing in place but believe it will help boost your conversion rates, you’ll know what you need to hire for. Following the Series E round at Postmates, our team determined that having dedicated channel managers for our most promising channels: Snapchat, Facebook, and Google would be beneficial. We quickly hired specialists to assist us in ramping up testing and acquisition for each channel.
This is not to say that a skilled growth marketer couldn’t have managed all of those channels simultaneously, but there’s only so much one person can do. In my experience, having one growth marketer manage more than three paid acquisition channels or two growth pillars is inefficient. It is quite common for one to do so.
