Building An Effective Growth & Marketing Team

You've probably heard the overly used term "Growth Hacking" but what does it take takes to really build a growth team focused?

Building a new growth team is hard. You have to figure out the macro organizational issues – how it fits in with marketing teams, product managers, and other functions – as well as the micro, like how to measure the success of these teams.

If you’re building a new growth team model or looking to improve your existing one, you need to make sure your organization has all its ducks in a row before you get started. That means having a clear idea of what defines a successful growth team, what kind of data they need to collect and analyze, how they’re going to report their findings, and so on. ‍

Why Create a Growth Team?

It's long been said that "a team is only as good as its weakest link," and the same can be said for growth teams.

Many of the key levers for driving more user acquisition, retention, and engagement, can sometimes sit outside the toolkit for most great product leaders. There’s a long laundry list of skills that are critical but not often considered core to the product: adtech integrations, signup funnel A/B testing, optimizing notification delivery, testing price points, testing cohort curves, etc. Yes occasionally there are people who know all of it – but they are rare!

Furthermore, no one individual can drive this – instead, you need to bake this into your organizational goals and team focus to deliver the growth initiatives.

What Does a Growth Team Do?

Growth teams are the secret weapon of your company. They’re the ones who work tirelessly to achieve incredible results—and they do it with a smile on their face.

• The primary role of a growth team is to perform growth experiments or tests that find solutions to a company’s problems in a given part of the buyer’s funnel. These experiments provide more findings for the business to achieve product-market fit in the shortest time possible.
• Growth teams always looking to reduce the customer acquisition cost as it's constantly tuning the marketing strategy based on the marketing data collected.
• Growth experiments usually involve changes to processes. They are conducted with a specific, measurable goal in mind, to see if they’ll help achieve that goal. Measurable goals could include increases in conversions, email signups, email opens, retention rates, referral rates, and more. Teams will usually run multiple experiments at once, each directed at its own goal

Although many of these experiments are executed quickly—experiments often vary in length from days to weeks or even months. These long-term experiments can involve A/B testing different versions of landing pages.

What Are the Roles That Are Required in a Growth Team?

Growth Lead

The growth lead is a jack of all trades. They're the T-Shaped Growth Marketer who can run with anything. They're not just a master of one skill—they're a master of all skills.

They're not just good at copywriting, they're also good at coding and data mining. And not just good at coding, but full-stack development as well. They can do UX design and experimentation like nobody's business, too.

Basically, they're a growth engineer on steroids who can do it all—and make it look easy while doing it.

Here is the list of the key deliverables that a growth lead will focus on

• Increased focus on customer needs
• Increased customer loyalty
• Improved customer acquisition
• Ability to identify and capitalize on emerging trends
• Improved data collection and analysis capabilities
• Improved ability to identify, develop and implement new business strategies
• Ability to better measure and track progress towards goals
• Ability to leverage technology and automation to maximize efficiency

Product Developer

The full-stack developer is like the growth head, but with a twist: they're all about delivering potential solutions quickly. Their motto is "develop fast, fix later," and they don’t care about failure as long as they can learn from what doesn’t work and apply their learning in the future.

Here is the list of the key deliverables that a growth lead will focus on

• ‍Build a product that has user-friendly features and different types of landing pages that are designed to meet customer needs
• Designing and implementing user interface prototypes and wireframes
• Working collaboratively with other team members, such as product designers and marketers, to ensure that the product meets the customer's requirements
• Writing clean and maintainable code
• Developing growth product and feature tests to ensure that the product meets the expected standards
• Following the latest industry trends and best practices, and adapting them to the product as needed
• Creating and managing documentation that outlines the product specifications
• Identifying potential problems and providing solutions to resolve them
• Optimizing product performance to meet customer expectations

Customer/User Experience (UX)

A UX designer is a person who thinks like a customer, feels like a customer, and acts like a customer.

They are committed to delivering what the customer wants and optimizing the customer experience. They’re always empathetic to customers’ needs, and they’re behavioural psychology experts.

‍Here is the list of the key deliverables that a growth lead will focus on

• Designing user interfaces for the product or service that are both visually appealing and user-friendly
• Creating and implementing prototypes and wireframes to ensure the product meets the customer's requirements
• Conducting usability tests and gathering feedback from customers to ensure the product is meeting their needs
• Working with the product team to ensure the design is in line with the product's goals
• Optimizing existing features to make sure they are up to the customer's standards
• Developing new features and products based on customer feedback and the latest industry trends
• Creating and maintaining product documentation and specifications.

Data Analyst

The data analyst is a master of deciphering both the hard data and the “why” behind a set of data. They are able to draw actionable insights from that data, which will help the team learn more about customers, experiment success rates, and future experiments. Ideally, they are also a whiz at back-end development, so they can pull data out from anywhere they need to (including databases).

‍‍Here is the list of the key deliverables that a growth lead will focus on

• Analyzing data to identify trends and insights that can be used to improve product performance
• Designing and developing reports to track and monitor key performance metrics
• Creating dashboards to visualize data and track progress
• Developing models and algorithms to predict customer behaviour and identify areas of improvement
• Investigating and troubleshooting data-related issues
• Developing product strategies and processes to ensure data accuracy and integrity
• Work closely with marketing and development teams to ensure that data is being used in the most efficient way possible
• Automating data collection and analysis processes
  

So What’s Next? Operations Are the Key to Getting All of It to Work Together

Creating a growth team is great, but it's not enough. You need to make sure that your team is operating as efficiently as possible in order to get the most out of them. That's why we've put together a list of standards that will help you create an efficient growth team operating procedure.

We’ve compiled a list of templates that your team can use to manage all growth tasks and achieve a high level of efficiency.

Managing Clear Data

Data Taxonomy

If you want to make sure your data is unique and without redundancy, then the best way to do that is with a data taxonomy!

A data taxonomy is a hierarchical structure separating data into specific classes of data based on common characteristics. The taxonomy represents a convenient way to classify data to prove it is unique and without redundancy. This includes both primary and generated data elements.

Download the template here.

UTMs Builder and Tracking Sheet

Using UTM codes with your links make it easy to track what's going on when people click on them. With the UTM builder, you can add campaign tracking codes to your links in seconds. The generated UTM codes work with analytics platforms out of the box, including Google Analytics (GA), Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Heap or Adobe.

Download the template here.

Managing Marketing Contents

Meta Ads Planner

We know you're probably thinking, "Okay, this is great and all, but what if I want to build a campaign on my own?"

Well, we have a tool for that!

Meta Campaign Planner is another great tool on your way to creating an effective online marketing campaign. However, it is only available to advertisers who have used the reach and frequency buying tool. Campaign Planner is a standalone tool for media planners to draft, compare, share and buy media plans across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network.

Download the template here.

CMS Guide Sheet

The content management system, or CMS, has become tremendously popular in recent years. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most important is that it makes it easy for non-technical users to create and manage their own content. This means that anyone can update their website without having to learn HTML or other coding languages.

The way a CMS works is pretty simple: First, you have the content management application (CMA), which allows users to add and manage content on their websites. Then there's a content delivery application (CDA), which formats and delivers the content so that it's ready for visitors to see.

View the guide here.

Growth Experiments Template

Version control is one of the most important parts of any good development process. Growth teams do not want to lose track of changes, especially when it comes to digital assets and changes done on marketing landing pages. This will help the team to discover what elements of the running campaign work and what does not.

Only then, the team can truly carry out CRO (conversion rate optimisation) efforts.

View the template here.

Building an Internal Growth Team Is Really Expensive. Work With Admiral Systems at Half the Price!

Admiral Systems is a digital transformation agency that helps our customers stay center stage in their markets with the latest technology trends. Our team combines years of expertise, industry-leading applied technologies, and a crystal clear vision of where we are headed tomorrow. No matter what challenge your organization faces, we have the right solution — today.

Growth Strategy Services

A successful go-to-market strategy is essential for any business looking to maximize their revenue.

If this resonates with you, let's work together:

• You need better digital marketing performance
• You need a strategy for your growth stack
• You need an outbound marketing strategy to reach your target audience accurately
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Webflow Strategy & Development

Create dynamic experiences that help deliver memorable content, while still maintaining security and privacy.

If this resonates with you, let's work together:

• You need to do design and develop a content management system that is tailored to your business needs.
• You need a team at bay to continuously design and develop new pages on your website.
• You need a design team to create unique experiences for your users that includes wireframing and developing it.
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Architecture Strategy & System Integration

Innovative solutions tailored to each of customer's unique needs will be dedicated to help your customers reach their goals.

If this resonates with you, let's work together:

• You need a new pair of eyes to assess and audit the existing systems in your business and revamp where needed to meet today's business needs.
• You need architecture strategy to develop a clear plan for data collection and event tracking plan for a better visuals of key insights on your customers.
• You need to integrate multiple software tool to automate business processes and maintaining the efficiency of the system regularly.

Using Grants to Help You Subsidise Your Next Digital Marketing Project

If you're new to the concept of growth we'd strongly advice to work closely with subject matter experts, and explore Growth services to help you through this journey.

Here are some of the top grants that could help get your Project subsidised by up to 70 or 80% ( for certain industries ). To help you understand better, our VP of Advanced Services - Dom has taken the time to explain. Watch the overview video below

Our Top Grant Picks

We would highly recommend for you to have a look at the following grants to help you with your business growth:

• EDG Strategic Branding and Marketing Development Grant: To help your company better capture target audiences and markets by differentiating your brand, and your products and services.
• EDG Automation Grant: Allows you to adopt cutting-edge technology and automation which can result in tangible benefits, significant growth and resource efficiency.

If you're keen to explore the grants further, book a call with our lovely team today!

Take our Market Assessment Quiz to See if You Are Growth-Ready!

Admiral Systems has developed a Digital Readiness Assessment Quiz that can help you evaluate your business's readiness for growth. This quiz is designed to provide insights into key areas that are essential for any business looking to expand, such as market positioning, customer segmentation, and competitive analysis.

Not only that, but this quiz is also a great way to share insights with your team and get everyone aligned on your growth strategy.