5 Steps to Teach Yourself Growth Marketing (Part I)

Without customers there is no business. So how does an owner drive new customers to their startup, or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing.

It’s not a secret that growth marketing is a valuable skillset to possess in the current job market. Taking a look at LinkedIn in October of 2022 for the available jobs with the search phrase “growth marketing”, shows that there are more than 50,000 openings spread across a variety of employers from small startups to 30,000-employee behemoths like Uber

The inevitable next question becomes, how does one learn the skills for growth marketing?  I am here to tell you that the best growth marketing course isn’t an actual course.

As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade and been exposed to countless courses, I can confidently attest that with this subject, doing is the best form of learning. However, I am not saying you need to immediately join a series-A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation, who can then afford to teach you. 

Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps. Sit back, relax, and I hope you will enjoy this series!

Teach yourself growth marketing- Part I: Setting up a landing page

In part one of my five-part series (Teach Yourself Growth Marketing), I will teach you how to set up a landing page that we’ll eventually be driving consumer traffic to. For the entirety of this series, we will use the example of learning growth marketing with a direct-to-consumer (D2C) athletic supplement brand.

Setting up your landing page

If you don’t have a product with a landing page or mobile app ready to go, I’ll show you how to quickly set a landing page up which is the one prerequisite to getting started. 

A landing page is the page people are taken to when they click an online ad you have purchased and it is commonly the homepage of a website. Regardless of how a consumer “lands” on your landing page, its purpose is to then encourage people to convert into a lead or purchase. 

In 2010, I was ecstatic when Apple introduced iWeb, which allowed users to design and publish websites without needing to write a single line of code. It was a very basic platform though and we’ve come a long way since then. Today there are a wide variety of advanced content management system (CMS) editors available, such as LeadPages and Webflow, which empower everyday Internet users to create beautiful websites all on their own. 

The advantages of many of these platforms is that they will guide you through how to use a premade template and editing your first pieces of content (including website title, headlines, etc.). Select the website platform of your preference and let’s get building!

Types of content 

While most of the tactical advice in this first part of the series will be focused on the landing page, it’s still important to cover the other pages on your site. 

There are thousands of brands that have proven out a one-page website, also known as a “squeeze page”, but even they have additional context available in the form of other pages. The key is that these additional pages are often hidden from the landing page so that consumers aren’t distracted. For our D2C athletic supplement brand, a few page ideas are:

• About Us
• Ingredients / Benefits
• Comparisons
• Reviews 

Even when traffic is driven to the landing page, having other resources for consumers to visit is never a bad option. Imagine dropping into a vitamin brand’s landing page and not being able to roam around to learn more? A visitor might still purchase some vitamins but having a comparisons page to show the differences with other brands could help push a consumer more strongly to buy.

To learn more about growth marketing, building out a fully-fledged website is not necessary, nor is it the point of this series. Part one is here to inspire your decisions on the types of pages to build out. 

Designing an effective landing page

Next is the fun part – building out the page where you’ll drive online traffic to. 

This is your first impression to the consumer, which makes it paramount you have designed it well to give your brand the best shot at winning over consumers. There are hundreds of best practices one can consider for a landing page, but I’ve narrowed these down to the most important five: 

• Clear headline
• Engaging hero image
• Strong value propositions
• Social proof
• Call to action

The first couple of seconds when someone lands on your page, they are going to spend it on your headline and hero image. Make sure you don’t speed through crafting this content and be sure to leverage competitors for copy inspiration. If the competitor is large enough, it’s safe to say that they have probably spent many thousands of dollars and countless tests to perfect their headline and hero image. For our D2C athletic supplement brand, we could potentially use the headline: “All of your greens. Just one pill per day.”

Following the headline and hero image, make sure that you have clear value propositions, testimonials from existing clients, and a direct call-to-action. As consumers scroll through a website, their curiosity in your product should grow, while their skepticism should be alleviated by the information you have provided.

Tracking for your landing page

Ensuring there is proper tracking on a landing page will make future decision-making significantly more precise. The gold-standard to website tracking is Google Analytics, which has recently been updated to Google Analytics 4 to help track event-based data from both websites and apps. There are many guides to installing Google Analytics, along with plugins on many CMS platforms, such as Webflow, that make its setup simple and easy.

For additional knowledge, consider installing a tool like HotJar, which gives you insight into where consumers are spending the most time on your website, and where their cursors are moving while they are visiting. We’ll go through the setup of pixels for your first paid acquisition channel and email marketing campaigns later in parts two and three of this series.