Marketing in 2023 is vastly different from how we knew it even 5 years ago. Commerce has continued to shift from offline to online: Platforms like Facebook have seen their targeting capabilities erode. Our digital attention has fragmented from primarily Google/Facebook to new channels like TikTok, Amazon, and Reddit. All these events have led to the rise of growth marketing.

Online definitions of growth marketing will say it’s the process of using experimentation and data to drive rapid, sustainable growth. That it involves the constant experimentation and optimization of the entire marketing funnel, utilizing digital channels and tactics.

But at its core, growth marketing is a movement toward measurement; toward a culture of marketers who thrive on being measured and being accountable for results.

Why Should You Learn Growth Marketing?

In our current economic climate, the mantra is efficiency. So now is a great time to be in the business of measuring the business impact of your work, designing experiments to prove ROI, and investing in automation. If you’re the marketer who excels here, you will continue to be indispensable. 

Here are other reasons why you should consider becoming a growth marketer:

1. Impactful Work: As a growth marketer, you’ll be responsible for driving growth and revenue for a company. If you’re passionate about helping businesses succeed, this could be the perfect career for you: Not only can it be incredibly fulfilling, but if you do well, no one will be able to question what you bring to the table.
    
2. High earning potential: Overall, growth marketing tends to pay much more than marketing in general. Growth marketing is also more well-known within tech, so growth marketing skills can be a bridge to a career in tech. A marketing manager in the USA earns $73K on average, while a growth marketer makes $110K. That’s a difference of $37K.
   
3. Be more in demand: Growth marketing requires hard skills that are highly fungible. Marketing is out in front of the trend toward measuring impact, but other departments like product management and customer support aren’t far behind: The skills you learn around experiment design, measurement, and automation can easily be applied across many disciplines. In fact, I increasingly see situations where the marketing team adopts a marketing automation tool like Hubspot and later becomes a center of excellence for automation within the company. Eventually, the marketing ops team helps other teams adopt automation as well. If you have the right skills, you could be just as influential. 
   
4. It’s a fast-paced and creative role: For many businesses, growth marketing is the nexus of innovation within the company. At Facebook, the Growth Team was known for leading most of Facebook’s most important initiatives. It’s a cross-functional role that often gets more exposure to other teams, more high-profile projects, exposure to execs, and more resources. At Codecademy, it was our growth team that drove the single project that resulted in doubling our revenue. 

So How Can You Convince Your Company to Pay for Your Growth Marketing Training?

On-demand video-based courses are cheap (sometimes even free), but tend to have low completion rates. Cohort-based marketing training programs and certifications are more expensive and more effective, but it’s rare to find a course that focuses specifically on growth marketing.

The good news is that this is exactly what Skill Upgrade offers: A well-paced, practical course that gives you the skills you’ll need to be a successful growth marketer. You’ll learn from industry leaders with decades of experience driving growth for top tech giants and tier 1 startups alike, and who can give you the hands-on experience and career advice necessary to thrive in today’s ever-changing marketing landscape. Not only will it help your career, but it’ll also greatly benefit your company.

You can start by having a verbal conversation with your boss or your HR manager. Mention that you’re thinking of enrolling in a growth marketing program, explain how it can benefit your team or company, and casually ask if there is a budget for employee development. This will help you gauge how they’ll respond when you formalize your request for training.

3 Steps to Get Your Employer to Pay for Your Training

If you get an encouraging response, formalize your request via email and make a compelling case for yourself. Here’s how you can do so:

1. Do your Research: First, you need to make a case for how growth marketing can help your business. Look for data and case studies that show the effectiveness of growth marketing, ideally from your competitors or from companies that are in the same growth stage as yours. 
   
   For example, perhaps your company doesn’t do much landing page experimentation on their paid traffic. Show them this case study from Unbounce about a dive shop in Sydney that used landing pages to get an average conversion rate of 35%—almost 7x the median conversion rate for the travel industry.  It’s a great demonstration of how small improvements through experimentation can compound, resulting in dramatic improvements to CAC. Alternatively, perhaps your company leans heavily on junior sales reps. You can demonstrate how marketing automation could help fewer salespeople accomplish the same results. 

2. Show the value of this program: After you’ve convinced your company that growth marketing is absolutely necessary, it’s time to make a case for this specific program. There are three things that set this program apart.
   • Access to Tier 1 instructors who have led teams at Spotify, Notion, SoFi, Codecademy, and more
   • Hands-on projects: Unlike programs like Reforge which are more conceptual, this program lets you get your hands dirty with growth marketing tools like Unbounce, Facebook Ads Manager, and Hubspot.
   • Small Group Cohort: There’s a huge difference between the lean-back experience of watching videos with 200 other students vs. the lean-forward experience of a cohort of just 15 students and one instructor meeting twice a week. 
     
3. Make the Budget Ask: Many companies have a Training and Development budget—and most of the time, you just have to ask for it. If it’s an individual budget for each person, it may be as easy as sending your manager a link and getting a credit card number.
   
   If it’s a team budget, you may have to make a case for why you’re the right person for your manager to invest in. If this is the case, highlight your marketing achievements, your commitment to your job and your company, and your willingness to take on new challenges and roles.
   
   And don’t be afraid of getting shot down! When my direct reports have come to me and asked for training, even if I ultimately had to say no, it signaled to me which of my team was hungry to learn and hungry to have a greater impact at work. Those are the people I put up for promotion, give special projects to, and try to hire again and again. 

Future-Proof Your Company With Growth Marketing

Investing in growth marketing is one of the wisest decisions a company can make: it helps build capacity for measurement, experimentation, and efficiency, which are only becoming more valuable with time. Growth marketing fosters a culture of measuring results, cutting what doesn’t work, and doubling down on what does. This gives an organization a competitive advantage.

Remember, if your managers are anything like me, even if your funding ask gets shot down, your interest in learning skills that benefit the company will be recognized and appreciated.