Performance, Digital or Growth Marketing — Breaking the myths

There has been a surge lately with organizations looking to hire for above mentioned roles. However, there are stark differences with each one of them and the HRs and even hiring managers seem to completely misunderstand the exact role they are hiring for.

While the open position mentions “Growth Marketing”, questions and JD speaks about Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc. Similarly, for positions mentioning “Digital Marketing”, discussions happen around SEO, CLM etc. So I thought to help our HR community as well as folks who are confused as to which end of the spectrum they fall in, by explaining each of the three roles.

To begin with, consider this Venn diagram

As visible, Performance Marketing is a sub-set of Digital Marketing which in turn is a sub-set of Growth Marketing. Somewhere overlapping Digital Marketing and a sub-set of Growth Marketing, lies Product Marketing. Let’s dig deeper into each —

Performance Marketing — all things paid. You are a performance marketer if —

1. You are well versed with platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Affiliate marketing and all other paid channels
2. You are aware of multiple conversion events and how to optimize your campaigns towards them
3. Primary metric for you is CAC and it should be in the ratio of 1:3(minimum) to LTV
4. Your everyday tools are — Analytics(GA, CleverTap, Adobe Analytics etc), Attribution(Appsflyer, Singular, Branch etc) apart from your Ad dashboards
5. Most asked question to you will be “How to drive scale at lower CAC?”

Digital Marketing — all things digital. You are a digital marketer if —

1. You have knowledge of both paid and organic marketing
2. You are a professional with hands on experience in setting up and driving SEO strategies, social media marketing along with performance marketing
3. Your day to day strategy focuses on using performance marketing to drive organic growth
4. You have knowledge of running brand campaigns to increase awareness on platforms like Youtube, FB, Google Display, Discovery, DV360 among others like partnerships on CPD model with various publishers
5. Your everyday tools apart from the ones mentioned in Performance Marketing are — Google Search Console, SEO tools(ahref, semrush etc), social listening tools(brandwatch, sprout social etc)
6. Most asked question to you will be “What will be your media mix to drive digital acquisition?”

Growth Marketing — all things that drive business growth. Growth marketing is the super set of performance and digital marketing but also includes product marketing as well.

Source: https://yellcreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Funnel-Comparison-1536x1003.jpg

You are a growth marketer if —

1. You are the custodian of business growth in terms of revenue.
2. You manage the complete CLM — awareness, acquisition, engagement, transaction and retention.
3. While awareness and acquisition is largely covered by digital marketing, you need to be familiar with aspects of Product Marketing to drive engagement, transaction and retention.
4. You look at the complete user funnel to understand the drop-offs and design your engagement campaigns to improve down the funnel performance
5. You work closely with UI/UX and tech teams to improve user experience and increase time spent on your platform. For example, why are users dropping off the payment page? Why is there a difference between clicks and users landing on your page?
6. You also work closely with data teams to target each cohort with customized and personalized messaging.
7. Most of your time is spent on automating campaigns backed with manual analysis
8. Your everyday tools — Data visualization tools with custom reports(Tableau, Power BI etc), User visual insight tools(Smartlook, hotjar, clarity etc) apart from those mentioned above.
9. Most asked question to you will be “What has been your biggest growth and what kind of campaigns led to it?”

I hope the briefs above would help both budding marketing professionals along with hiring teams in correctly aligning for the role they are preparing/hiring for. Helps all of us to build a strong digital ecosystem with relevant candidate in relevant position/role.

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Cheers!