There are have been a lot of talks about that already, but I have been ask this question quite a few times while meeting people in person. So I want to bring my modest contribution.
With no doubt, the growth hacker and the modern digital marketer overlap, a lot… They both are very tech savvy people and they both have for objectives to drive more growth (well at least it should be).
Yes, the growth hacker and the digital marketer have to be able to create, maintain and optimize SEO, email, social media, or PPC campaigns. They both have to be able to design, build, and maintain strong social media presence. Both need to track their ROI and KPIs. Identifying new trends and insights to optimize performance, think of and create new growth strategies, testing and experimentations, funnel and UX optimization, all those also fall under both the scope of the growth hacker and the digital marketer (and to be fully honest I won’t have think about including them without some research I did previous writing this… Hats down to the digital marketers who read me, I am sorry). And we could keep going and find even more in common.
So why does so many startups (but also much bigger companies) are looking to hire growth hackers and not digital marketers?
According to my friend Clara Buchanan this is the profile of a growth hacker, which is even different of the profile of the “original” growth hackers, like Sean Ellis or Andrew Chen.
As she said in her article, the original growth hackers were indeed non technical startup cofounders who took on them to grow by all mean.
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What makes a growth hacker so special is what this folk is made of. I actually get these insights from Morgan Brown story on Snapchat (just follow him, his snaps are great => @morganb180).
Growth hacking is more than testing, implementing, and optimizing growth strategies, it’s a mindset (that, I quoted before watching his story 😎). Growth hackers have this really special mindset and ways to think about growth, which they can translate into a process around which they can do whatever the hell they want. But in the end it’s all directed toward growth, no matter what. And it works!
The growth process is made of ups and downs, successes and failures, and it can be hard to keep going no matter what’s going on. Real growth hackers will keep going, always push until they can find the one thing that will work. They are scrappy, resilient, analytical, creative, and they hustle. These qualities go beyond learning new techniques and perfecting them. It’s almost like you just born a growth hacker 😳.
So to wrap it all, startups if are looking for growth hackers instead of digital marketers, it’s because the growth hacker will be more capable of adapting to their fast pace of life and find solutions to their problems. The roles of a growth hacker within a startup can be diverse from a situation to another (within big companies it will be a little bit more homogenous), but his mindset will enable him to be obsessed with driving growth, no matter what.
My final words: Digital marketers and growth hackers, I think, can perfectly cohabit inside the same company, actually I think that digital marketers are perfect to transmit the ownership of a channel started and optimized by growth hackers before, so they can maintain and nurture it as much as possible.
