Increase Business Revenue by Hiring a Growth Marketing Consultant

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing focuses on customer relationship building and nurturing loyalty through a data-driven approach. It’s a long-term customer advocacy strategy based on authenticity and engagement that organically creates and grows customer lifetime values.

In the digital age where customers decide very quickly, personalization drives growth. It can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%, raise revenues by 5% to 15%, and increase marketing spend efficiency by 10% to 30%.

First coined in 2015 by Dropbox’s first marketer and now founder and CEO of Growth Hackers Sean Ellis as “growth hacking”, growth marketing is the mature and seasoned version of growth hacking’s foundational practices of testing, experimentation, and expansion.  

Unlike traditional marketing which focuses on brand awareness and customer conversion, growth marketing focuses on fulfilling the promise in the marketplace that a product creates. To fulfill this promise, you need to keep finding out about your customers and their motivations through continuous experimentation and discovery, and using this knowledge to serve those motivations and expand your market.

Sean says, “Experimentation means finding and actually measuring what your customers love. The biggest difference between companies that are growing or not is the ones that are running experiments tend to be growing.”  

Growth marketing focuses on holistic, sustainable, and long-term growth over the entire customer lifecycle, leveraging data and technology to significantly improve marketing results.

Employing a growth marketing strategy provides you with these 3 main benefits:

1. Customer-centric data and results

Growth marketing goes beyond trying to convince customers to make the initial purchase. It emphasizes optimizing for user engagement and retention and delivering value in creative ways that build authentic relationships. It creates experiences that delight customers and keep them coming back for more.

To do this, every hypothesis about the customer, marketing tactic, and marketing channel is rigorously tested and tweaked to see what works and what doesn’t. This approach effectively removes poor decisions based on assumptions, seniority, or the loudest opinion in the team. This enables your business to focus on what drives the best results and strengthen those strategies that do.

By 2005, craft sellers were exasperated with eBay, which they felt was stingy, burdensome, and showed lack of care for sellers. This created an environment ripe for Etsy, and Etsy did not take it for granted. Etsy founders went to every craft fair and artisan flea market to introduce their platform and learn from the sellers what they needed.  

Etsy used this information to improve on their platform then got out of the way of the sellers who they empowered to grow their businesses as they saw fit. Breaking down features, experimenting, split testing, and changing small elements to gauge platform usefulness and user response fueled their phenomenal growth.

Today, Etsy has 4 million sellers and over 40 million active buyers, generating $14 billion in sales in 2021.

2. Higher ROI on marketing spend

With the data-driven nature of growth marketing, marketing dollars are only spent on what works. Funds are not wasted on campaigns and tactics that don’t provide a good marketing return on investment (ROI).  

With growth marketing, it is only after a strategy or channel has shown itself to be profitable on a small, pilot-test scale that more marketing dollars are poured in for a bigger-scale campaign.  

By consistently testing and optimizing strategies and tactics, growth marketing further improves the marketing ROI down the line.

Airbnb grew from a 3-person undertaking a couple hundred bucks a week in 2007 to a $35-billion titan reporting over $1 billion in quarterly revenue today. Airbnb kept testing its idea and iterated until it found its winning formula.  

It focused on finding out what the obstruction to its growth was. At first, it was the low-quality image of the properties, then it was about payments processing. As it solved the initial growth problems and improved on its platform, it kept on growing. It bootstrapped and started small, testing and tweaking and finetuning.  

By the time Airbnb took on $450 million in funding from venture capitalists and other investors, it already had a working product that was earning profits. Airbnb is now worth $100 billion.

3. Fast results

Even if growth marketing focuses on long-term results, it doesn’t take many months to see growth marketing impacts. Through fast testing and reiteration, you can promptly determine which tactics and channels work best for a given audience, and you course-correct accordingly.

Sean Ellis’ Growth Hackers once stalled at 90,000 users. It was testing different growth strategies but goals were not being met, and it did not live up to its name anymore.  It had the courage and humility to recognize and face this fact, though, then it increased its goal to 3 experiments per week.  

Aside from split tests, its experiments included launching new initiatives and new product releases, which resulted to an explosion of ideas that had only to be prioritized according to potential benefit and ease of implementation. Still, they weren’t able to meet their 3-a-week experiments goal, so its think-team met weekly to identify problems and sort through their experiment list as they kept fintetuning their methods.

In the end, Growth Hackers grew its number of users by 62,000 in just 11 weeks. This same number took them 32 weeks to reach during their initial launch.

Getting the expertise your business needs

To employ successful growth marketing for your business, you have 3 options: hire a consultant, hire a full-time employee, or hire a marketing agency. Here are what each option involves:

1. Hire a consultant

A growth marketing consultant performs the end-to-end job of helping you acquire users from the top of your marketing funnel to retain those users over time.  

Growth marketing consulting is freelance, so consultants can be more flexible with their time in catering to your business needs.  

You hire these freelance marketers for their knowledge, expert skills, and influence by the hour or day, which can be directly traced to the results they provide at each phase of the consulting process.  

You don’t have to shoulder payroll or overhead costs like you would if you hired a full-time employee or a marketing agency. If you’re not happy with the consultant’s work, you can usually terminate their services at any time.

Availing of growth marketing consulting services can be expensive but the value they bring justifies the investment.  

Since they service multiple clients, their availability for your business can be limited.  

There’s also the uncertainty as they might not achieve the results you had expected when you hired them if you did not vet them well.

2. Hire a full-time employee

You can also hire a full-time marketing employee focused on growth marketing for your business. They can be more committed to their role and stick around longer than consultants do since they’re hired full-time.  

However, growth marketing requires specialized knowledge, skills, and experience. You might find it difficult to find one to hire full-time, so you’ll end up having a marketing employee that you will train in growth marketing, which requires additional labor costs. You also need to allow for more time to recruit, onboard, mentor, and nurture the employee throughout your growth marketing initiative.

3. Hire a marketing agency

A growth marketing consulting agency is a service provider that assists you with the planning, design, and execution of your growth marketing efforts. You can hire them for a particular phase or project or you can hire them full-service.

With a growth marketing consulting agency, you can turn over all marketing concerns to them so you can focus on running your business. You can work on the big picture of your business without getting bogged down by the details of running a Facebook or Instagram paid advertising campaign.  

You don’t have to concern yourself with hiring new marketing employees and growing your marketing team or department either, as the marketing agency already does the marketing work for you.

While you get access to a variety of experts employed by the growth marketing agency, you’re not able to employ their services full-time as they have other clients to service, too.  

While you don’t have to concern yourself with the minutiae of your marketing campaigns, you also lose control over these campaigns and the direction they go. You’ll have the final say over how the marketing budget will be spent, but the detailed implementation of the marketing strategies will be up to the growth marketing agency.  

A growth marketing consulting agency’s services can be expensive, too, as you help pay for their agency's overhead costs.

Why hire a consultant

Given your 3 options for employing successful growth marketing for your business, hiring a consultant is best because what you need in growth marketing consulting is a specialized data-driven focus on your customers that gets you results fast.

• You don’t want to be derailed by the processes of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and mentoring an employee, nor lose control over your marketing strategies and campaigns, without even knowing if you’re getting the results you want fast.  
• You want the flexibility of hiring or terminating the services of an expert according to whether they meet your expectations.
• You want someone who truly knows growth marketing from experience, with a track record to show for it.

A growth marketing consultant can provide these for you.

How to hire the best growth marketing consultant

How do you overcome the challenges of finding and hiring the best growth marketing consultant, though? How do you find one that’s already been vetted by industry experts themselves, who know better how to identify a good growth marketing consultant? How do you know they’re not charging you exorbitant consultancy fees?

Here are 4 tips:

1. Get into the marketing industry network and ask for referrals: It is best to ask marketing professionals themselves to refer good growth marketing consultants. They know what standards to base their referrals on and they have industry insider knowledge of these consultants’ professional reputations and track records. Make a shortlist of these referrals that you think you’d like to work with.
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2. Find out about their history, portfolio, expertise, and offerings: From your shortlist, research and interview the candidates about their growth marketing background, success stories, failure stories, and offerings. Ask them for data points like percentage increase in web traffic, sales, and other related growth marketing metrics. Ask them about which services they offer and which they don’t, and why. Ask them how they do their work.
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3. Look for authenticity: There is no overnight success in marketing, even in digital marketing. It takes at least 3 to 6 months to see results. Beware of consultants who offer you rosy promises of quicker results in days or weeks, especially since the testing and experimentation phases of growth marketing alone already take a few weeks. Show them your current marketing efforts and ask for their feedback. It can provide you with a better feel for not only their expertise but their authenticity.
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4. Consider their pricing vis-à-vis industry rates: A good growth marketing consultant typically charges between $101 to $200 per hour.
   However, it is advised to use hourly rate-based pricing only if you are hiring them for expert high-level advice.

Since growth marketing requires a lot of discovery and experimentation, the recommended approach is to define a weekly or monthly fee model. This saves you from having to review time logs, affords the expert the needed flexibility, and enables transparency. On average, good growth marketing experts charge $8k to $12k a month.

If you don’t want to have to go through all these, you can also consider hiring a pre-vetted growth marketing consultant you can get matched with within 24 hours. Growth Collective has done the work for you so you can focus on promptly getting to work with your consultant and seeing results for your business sooner.  

You can do this promptly in just 3 steps: define your project and goals, get hand-matched with the Growth Collective’s curated talent, then work flexibly with your consultant.

FAQs

How is growth marketing different?

Growth marketing is different from conventional marketing in that it is a customer-advocacy-based approach that leverages data and technology to attract and retain customers through authentic engagement. Growth marketing focuses on the full marketing funnel to attain growth, while traditional marketing usually works only on the top funnel to attain brand awareness and conversion.

What are growth marketing channels?

Growth marketing channels are the media, platforms, and strategies through which a business acquires new customers and retains them. Growth marketing channels include:

• search engine optimization (SEO)
• search engine marketing (SEM)
• email marketing
• content marketing
• organic social media
• social media advertising
• affiliate marketing
• influencer marketing
• customer referral programs
• retention strategy

How much should you pay a growth marketing consultant?

On average, a good growth marketing consultant is paid $100 to $150 per hour or $8k to $12k a month.

Achieving your business goals with a growth marketing consultant

Attracting new customers and keeping existing ones are keys to business growth. Business growth requires that customers are treated holistically and sustainably, based on authentic experiences and engagement with them.  

Unlike traditional marketing which focuses only on the top areas of the marketing funnel, growth marketing approaches the customer in all the phases of their customer journey throughout the marketing funnel.

Leveraging data and technology, growth marketing constantly finds out about the customer and their motivations and uses this knowledge to serve their needs and motivations better and in a timelier manner.  

Based on a constantly testing, experimenting, tweaking, and expanding foundational process, growth marketing helps your business zero in on the marketing strategies, channels, and tactics that deliver business results faster than conventional marketing does.  

Among the options for employing growth marketing in your business, hiring a growth marketing consultant is most recommended as it helps you focus on your main struggles of getting new customers fast and keeping them over the long haul.  

You don’t have to concern yourself anymore with the administrative details and the additional costs of hiring a full-time employee or hiring a growth marketing agency for it.

Growth Collective helps you by providing pre-vetted growth marketing consultants and marketing tool experts on flexible terms. Hire a growth marketing consultant now.