What to look for when hiring a growth marketing agency

If you search for “growth marketing” roles on LinkedIn these days, it’s likely you’ll get over 15,000 results. Contrast that with just a few years ago, when LinkedIn would have yielded a significantly lower number for the same role.

The rapid expansion of the growth marketing industry has created a significant problem for startups looking to hire: There is a massive undersupply of good growth marketers.

After all, every startup, whether it’s trying to find product-market fit or an efficient way to deploy recent funding, is ultimately searching for a growth marketer.

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Growth marketer archetypes

Before diving into how hiring a growth marketing agency can help your startup, it’s important to understand the type of marketers you’ll find there.

There are three main criteria that will help you find the best fit:

• Stage
• Focus
• Vertical

When assessing the skills of a growth marketer purely based on their experience, examining the stage of the companies they’ve worked at, their previous growth focus areas and verticals all become key.

Stage

As a startup founder, your growth team needs someone who has already experienced scaling a company from the ground up. This knowledge shows that your growth marketer is scrappy and knows how to go from zero to one.

Conversely, if you’re a Series E company, you will probably want someone who has experience squeezing out additional incremental volume from ongoing efforts.

Focus

It’s crucial to understand which growth channels and mediums a growth marketer has worked with. You don’t want a LinkedIn expert if you’re a B2C startup looking to acquire users on Facebook and TikTok.

That said, it’s rare to find someone that has only focused on one channel, and I’d recommend working with someone that has shown the ability to scale up numerous channels.

At an early-stage startup, a generalist growth marketer will prove much more useful than a marketer who has only focused on one or two paid channels. The same applies to mediums (i.e., lifecycle, content, paid), and you should make sure to hire someone who has experience in more than one area.

Vertical

Growth agencies should be segmented by their area of focus — B2C or B2B — and this aspect should be an absolute dividing line when deciding who to select.

Speaking from experience, I have seen growth marketing strategies vary widely between B2B and B2C startups. Everything else in the vertical bucket can be classified as “nice-to-have,” such as having someone help your startup that’s in the same space but otherwise not essential to your startup’s needs.

The beauty of growth marketing is that you’ll find experts in many disciplines and strategies. Above is an example of three growth marketers that all vary in their focus and company stage.

The “pre-seed” growth marketer could be well versed in multiple growth channels/mediums, while the “Uber” growth marketer could be an expert at advanced Google search acquisition strategies.

Hiring a growth marketing agency

Now that you know the kinds of growth marketers who work at agencies, does it make sense to hire a growth marketing agency?

I’ve worked with various agencies to help supplement growth efforts while at Postmates, Uber and Coinbase. I’ve seen different types of agreements, structures and expertise areas, but the most important one to consider is the fee structure.

Below are the most common fee structures:

• Fixed monthly fee
• Percentage of media spend
• Hourly rate

If you’re a startup just getting off the ground, you probably won’t be offered a percentage of media spend deal, as it won’t make sense for the growth agency. This means that monthly payments will either be based on a hourly rate or at a fixed rate.

The advantage of working with an agency is that they’ll typically bring rigorous analyses and multiple experts to your account. They’ll also be able to quickly expand as your needs grow from one channel or medium to the next.

With those advantages come a few downsides, though, the most prominent one being you won’t have someone 100% dedicated to your startup. Growth marketers at agencies are usually working with multiple startups and juggling many different channels, KPIs and goals. This is different from having a dedicated growth marketer on your team or a consultant who may be dedicated to your business.

It’s imperative to ask and specify in your contract what dedicated help you’ll receive from them during this engagement. Here are a few additional questions that you may want to considering asking:

• What does your account audit (if any) entail?
• What is the 30-, 60- and 90-day plan to help us out?
• Can you share details on the marketer(s) we’ll be working with?
• How do you measure performance given the current state of privacy and data degradation?

Other ways to get growth marketing help

If a growth marketing agency doesn’t sound appealing, you could try courses on Reforge, working with a growth consultant or even having regular 1:1 advisory calls with growth experts. There isn’t a silver bullet for ensuring your startup gets the timely growth help it needs and hiring a growth marketing agency is merely one of many options.

Regardless of the choice you finally make, always ask yourself which growth marketer you trust with scaling your business, whether they are from a growth marketing agency or not.