A complete guide to being a Head of Growth

Growth hacking is not the same as marketing per se, which means that a Head of Growth has a slightly different role than a CMO or a head of marketing (see CMO guide). In this guide, we’ll explain the differences and also explain the differences between a Head of Growth and a typical growth hacker or growth manager. We’ll then move on to tips that a Head of Growth can use to improve their outcomes.

What is a Head of Growth?

To understand what the position is, we need to know a little bit about what it represents and how it has come to be. The role has become popular in use for startups and scale-ups because it straddles both marketing and growth hacking, yet it is not quite either.

Typically, a Head of Growth will be hired after a business has received significant investment and therefore as it prepares to scale either domestically or globally. The reason that the role is not defined as a CMO or Head of Marketing, is because the person will not only be managing the marketing activities, but they will be doing so with constantly moving targets: The business will be growing rapidly, including the headcount, the budgets to work with and the marketing footprint. This makes a typical CMO ill-equipped for the role. They are likely to be used to managing and optimising major budgets that iterate relatively little through time. Meanwhile, a Head of Growth will be having to make do with much less and rapidly scale a team at the same time.

The difference between a Head of Growth and a Growth Hacker

With the above definition in mind, it’s also worth considering that a Head of Growth will think and operate very differently than a typical growth hacker. The reason being, as the title suggests, they are heading up a team. This would imply that the team has sufficient resources to consider more than one ‘growth hacking’ strategy and instead build an integrated set of growth hacking activities. 

It is these management responsibilities and the ability of the Head of Growth to operate and understand an increasingly complex business that set them apart from a typical growth hacker. To understand this, we need to consider how a growth hacker operates, and particularly how they think compared to a typical marketer.

Distinguishing growth hacking from marketing 

Growth hacking is of course a form of marketing, although the purists may have you believe otherwise. To understand why this is so hotly debated, it is important to understand how marketing works, and how it evolved as a specialist business function. In our guide on marketing’s evolution, we explained that marketing’s function isn’t just covered by the marketing team. The result is that the activities left for the marketing team (e.g. promotion) are often seen as a cost centre for the business.

This is significant because marketers are typically at the behest of other business functions; they need to negotiate, allocate and evaluate budgets before doing so again. If marketing was at the forefront of the business and actually in control of every area of the marketing mix (including price and product), then it wouldn’t be quite the same.

This leads us on to why growth hacking is so different. Businesses that apply a growth philosophy believe that growth is, of course, essential to the success of the business. They therefore integrate this into the way the business operates more seamlessly than a typical business. Furthermore, as the business is growing rapidly, there isn’t the need for the same rigid formal structures that most global businesses adopt.

For the purists, growth hacking also requires very little broader knowledge of marketing. Instead, hackers must quickly zero in on a strategy that is likely to result in rapid growth. For them, broader knowledge of marketing and marketing strategy is often seen as counterproductive. This is because the business is in its early stages and, with so many things undefined, it can be seen as a waste of time to over-engineer the marketing/growth strategy.

True growth hackers simply consider the problem at hand and the best route to growth. They’re not interested in telling a coherent story and keeping on brand in multiple channels. They’re far more interested in selecting one route that may be tricky to nail perfectly, but may lead to viral success. Of course, viral growth is extremely rare. In most cases, it is the result of major investment. This is shown clearly in our analysis of 100 famous businesses.

It is also the case that the majority of growth hackers will believe that fast growth can only be achieved by using digital marketing activities and viral hacks. Not only are these activities cheaper to deliver, but they are also quicker to deliver. This is an important consideration, as the typical growth hacker will be unlikely to be known for using a full range of marketing activities, and particularly offline activities.

And this leads us on to the limitations associated with growth hacking. It is simply not the case that every business can be growth hacked through digital marketing. Many growth hacks have become commoditised and there aren’t many secrets left. Furthermore, many of the more successful startups in recent years used growth hacks that weren’t digitally enabled. With so many startups performing the same approaches online, it can be beneficial to try something a little different. This is shown in detail in our additional analysis and video on the growth hacks used by the fast-growing businesses mentioned above.

Growth hacking has also often been associated with questionable ethical practices. There are many startups that have become notorious questionable approaches, or playing fast and loose with the data that they are able to access in their terms and conditions. Now you may believe that the ends justify the means, but at the same time, if the startup is not too careful then this lack of authenticity may start to affect the startup’s reputation.

Marrying marketing and growth hacking

So far, we’ve explained a very clear difference between marketing and growth hacking, so now it’s worth considering how a Head of Growth marries both disciplines. Typically, a Head of Growth will need to have a broader conceptual knowledge of marketing, whilst being able to apply growth hacking techniques in each channel.

You may have anecdotally noticed a clear trend in the way that startups scale. When startups gain investment, they usually follow a well trodden route of testing a set of strategies, which the Head of Growth will be responsible for. They will usually niche down the target market to a particular customer profile and build a set of complementary marketing/growth techniques that work together to influence them. This is likely to include strategies such as SEO, content marketing, email, online advertising as well as offline advertising that is location-based (perhaps tube advertising) amongst other techniques.

A typical CMO would struggle to implement this as they are unlikely to have a precedent from which to develop, evolve and improve these activities. By contrast, a growth hacker would typically only work in one area such as SEO or online advertising at a time. Furthermore, the Head of Growth will also have to identify, define and interview the right people for the team in each role, building a rewarding culture in the process. Just thinking in this way, you can get to see the challenges and excitement associated with being a Head of Growth.

The puzzling paradox of growth hacking and data

And this leads us perfectly on to a puzzling paradox that exists within the growth hacking arena. As we’ve explained, a growth hacker will typically try to find the quickest route to growth. With this in mind, it is only logical that to do this most effectively, they will need data. And not just a little data. They will need a lot of data. And good data. This means clear data that captures and explains a clear behavioural pattern and subsequently points to a quickest route at success.

If you are following the thread then you may already know where this is going. Yep, you’ve guessed it. The one thing that most startups critically lack is data. They have just started up and so they have very very little to go on. They may try to optimise a website’s layout based on a handful of clicks, A/B test an advertising campaign with a tiny budget or analyse email subscriptions with an email list of just a few hundred people. 

This is a major challenge and concern for most startups, especially as data skills are now associated so closely with growth hacking. The problem is that growth hackers without any broader market knowledge of how people behave may well end up spending forever trying to solve something that is unsolvable. For example, the perfect design of a website may not not be possible to test with 100 people who accidentally clicked on an ad or found the company as part of startup research.

By contrast, many global businesses have datasets that are incredibly rich. Let’s consider an example of a supermarket that is deciding whether to launch an ‘own brand’ product following the growth of a branded one. They will know how often the branded one is bought, by which type of people, and what it is bought with. This information is of course worth immense value and it’s at their fingertips. Within weeks their data team can analyse all this information and decide upon a strategy.

Perhaps you think this example isn’t growth hacking, and that may be because the term has become synonymous with startup culture. But in this example, all the growth hacking elements are at play. Clear insight leads to defined action, which results in fast growth. If you apply this to every area of a supermarket, you realise quickly why they can grow so quickly and are pivotal to the way we all live.

Overcoming the data paradox

Of course, this supermarket example not only shows how big businesses can be very very good at growth hacking, but can also be used to explain how startups can overcome the data paradox. This is because startups can find, access or buy data from other data providers to gain a head-start and be able to compete more effectively with existing players.

Taking the example above, imagine if the opposite was to be the case. A startup may decide to launch a premium version of a product commonly found in supermarkets. In a typical approach, they might decide to launch their own site and use the data from it to optimise, then optimise with a slowly growing amount of visitors. Alternatively, they could build a relationship with a supermarket and use its data to understand customer intentions implicitly. In the second case, especially if they gained a trial in supermarkets, they could gain data from thousands, if not millions of customers, assessing those that bought their product and those that didn’t. They could build up personas by clustering attributes and so on.

This doesn’t just apply to food either. It applies to every business type. If the growth hacker just restricts himself to channels that provide limited data, then results will understandably be limited until the point at which the data gained is large enough to be statistically significant. By contrast, if the growth hacker is prepared to think laterally, they can build insights from actionable data across the board. It could be consumer data, financial spending data and so on. This guides not only the subsequent growth strategy but also opens up all the available marketing channels and removes the reliance on channels that collect data in real-time. 

This final point is so valuable in today’s world. This is because most, if not all, startups are expected to be good at digital marketing strategies. This makes it extremely difficult to stand out or find (by some divine inspiration) a growth hack that is not in use by all the other competitors. By contrast, having access to broader data pools requires greater knowledge and understanding or growth hacking. And by extension, fewer competitors will follow this path. This again is a feature that differentiates a Head of Growth from a growth hacker or a CMO. They will be able to build a clear customer picture from scratch, and use it to precisely identify every opportunity to subsequently hack growth.

Knowledge of human behaviour is key

As we’ve seen throughout this guide the role of a Head of Growth is to understand human behaviour as clearly as possible by building a clear picture of the customer. Working from scratch and bringing data together from multiple sources, they can then use it to develop clear and actionable insights. It is not the data that is key but the insights that can be drawn from it. They must then build a team capable of applying these insights coherently across a range of marketing/growth activities.

You may be interested in the associated videos, guides and blogs mentioned throughout (all free). Alternatively, you may be interested in our investigative research, or the process we use to improve marketing effectiveness in any business. For anything else, we offer a complementary analyst call below.