where to learn marketing/growth for entry-mid level ppl out here
thought i would make a seperate post. this is taken from another discussion. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions. ----- First of all, you have to decide what you wanna do: Growth Marketing - acquisition Growth Marketing - user journey (activation, engagement, retention) Brand marketing Product marketing management Personally, I fall into the 2nd category. 80% of my time, I'm working on retention/activation and just about 20% on an acquisition. My personal go-to list. Courses: Reforge - my favorite one. the best investment i have ever made. CXL academy Data camp (SQL/Data/Analytics) Books: Traction - overview of major acquisition channels Lean analytics - great 101 book to learn about metrics Trust me, I'm laying - it' about PR, but the same approach works for every single thing in the entire life. Start from smaller and go for a bigger fish after you've some credibility Blitzscaling - why some companies managed to get to $1B within a few years, while other needs 10+ years to hit the same valuation From Zero to One - just as a general approach on how to think about creating products. During my career, there was always a trade-off between quick wins and long-term sustainable growth, and you have to find the right balance. Intercom On Growth - actually, I'd say that all books from Intercom are great, so go for it. Crossing the chasm - was mentioned here multiple times. Blogs: Reforge Brian Balfour Andrew Chen Technical blogs of Netflix/Zalando/Lyft Growthhackers - but just for some very tactical ideas People to follow on Linkedin Elena Verna - to me she's one of the best practical thinkers Andrew Chen Casey Winters Mayur Gupta Matt Kerbel So, for my personal purpose, I've created a map of my skills. And the only one way to get these skills - is to practice them. For instance, if you want to be great at Facebook Ads, what things you need to know? 1) How to set up FB pixel and analytics via GTM. Ideally, you'll use GTM to track server-responses 2) Then you need to have $1k as a budget 3) Then $5k 4) $25k etc Every single time I take 1-3 free projects to fill the gap. So if I need to learn how to scale FB ads from $50k to $250k, I'll work for free within a few months. It's impossible to get there if you cannot prove that you had a successful experience working with $10-20k. First clint - free, second - 50% of hourly price, 3rd - 75-100%. Try to avoid people-of-one-case. From my personal POV, Neil Patel is one of these guys. He's awesome, but he's awesome for a small business owner who's trying to get his shopify store up and running. And obviously, he isn't that awesome for you if you wanna work at a fast-growing tech startup. What to do next? Select 5-10 companies you love Check their requirements (even tho they might not have open positions, you can find outdated links on Linkedin) Create a list of skills you need Break it down to specific steps Find free projects (try to mail startups who got accepted to YC, 500, Techstars and co). PS. Advertising is just one tiny part of marketing. Later on (prob after you become a mid-level dude), you will definitely get back to classic and history like Kotler, Ogilvy, Cialdini. For the beginning of my career, I found them far away from practical things you have to do on a daily basis. All the success story of dif companies are quite hard to fully understand at the beginning as well. PPS. Some keywords you might wanna google: Go-to-market strategy, persona, JTBD, traction, scale, PMF, retention, engagement, onboarding. https://brianbalfour.com/essays/customer-acquisition https://buffer.com/resources/t-shaped-marketer #growth #marketing
Brian Balfour
ResourcesWow this is amazing OP. Are you in B2B? Ecomm? Which industry?
Was in b2b for the long time, but 2 years ago switched to b2c only, since you can have a bigger impact on the entire user journey, rather than being a support/lead dude for sales folks. B2C product gives me more abilities to run tests. At the end of day, testing is how you learn new stuff as a growth manager
Do you suggest learning sql for mid lvl marketers in growth? I see a lot of sql requirements for top tech companies. My friend at Faang who's a marketing manager says you don't really need it.
OP - this is awesome. Super helpful, I’m about a year and a half into growth - acquisition and covering a little of territory into retention. As a junior associate, how would you recommend handling and balancing the learnings for both? And here’s the big elephant in the room: what’re the industry averages for salary growth one can expect within the first several years of being in the field?
Oh man, dunno tbh. I came from acquisition space , but I didn’t really like it. Like scaling Facebook ads? I found it boring a bit. On top of that, I’m one of those dumbass who thinks that all of these things will be automated soon. A good example here is Netflix, Lyft and Zalando. They already automated a lot of paid ads stuff. GetYourGuide did a great job in seo automation, so... Speaking of salary, i dunno as well since i came here from Europe as a senior dude. So far i saw around 90-110k for mid folks. Senior IC at FB gets around 140k. I got 140+ in LA. It’s just a base salary. Stocks, bonuses and stuff will bring you to 180-200k. Spotify pays around 180-195k base for senior manager position. Hope it helps!
Just thought tho that for a junior assoc. it might be a cool idea to learn all the channels to the point where you can test it for a new product and check if it’s scalable at all (for this particular company) and master one of them to the level where you can personally scale it. Since it’s sorta a skill that can give you a side gig along the way. Read Traction book, Intercom on Growth and 4 essays “how to build $100M company” by Brian Balfour. It will give you a cool overview
@OP How was your experience at Reforge? Which part of their program impressed you? I was recently accepted to their latest batch but haven’t pulled the trigger. Taking a look at the syllabus, some of the stuff seems like industry standard practices that most FAANG/unicorn growth teams already figured out.
I guess it’s because you’re from Netflix where you guys have an amazing data&growth culture already. Working in a few $1-$2B companies I’d say that it’s not an industry standard yet. I was a part of Retention cohort and now I’m thinking that I was so excited about it just because pretty much all of my entire life I was working at smaller startups and learned things here and there. So to me Reforge was kinda a legit way to prove that I’m doing things right, you know. But still have to admit that I love the community there and learned A LOT from other folks. To me it looks like the only one place where people are talking about some real shit instead of all those mommy-growth-hackers who’re trying to figure out what is the right color for a button on 17th screen of signup lol.
And hey, if you’re mid+ in your career and working at a company like Netflix, then it might not be the case 😅
@cheesplate rereading your post ( I copied notes and came back after a year as I haven’t done anything meaningful in this area). Great post! How did you switch from B2B to B2C? Did those learning /applying projects help you with the transition? We’re those side gigs ? How did you find them?
This is awesome. Thanks a lot for posting.