What happens when the growth marketing team moves out from under marketing and brands and into product? And what does a cross-functional growth team look like?
Tune into the podcast to hear our guest Tamar Kassof, Director of User Acquisition at Varo Banking, tell us how the shift impacted her company's growth goals and more about Tamar’s out of the box marketing strategies. Or, read the edited highlights below.
Shifting structures
4:11 Melissa - “How have you gone about designing your team structure?”
4:16 Tamar - “The UA team used to be under marketing along with the brand team. In Q3 of last year, we shifted to sit under product. We built out a cross-functional growth team that includes the UA team, the engagement team, UX design, data analytics, growth product managers, and growth engineers. This way all of our dedicated resources are within our own team. This change really improved our overall efficiency.”
“A lot of times the product itself will get the highest priority, which totally makes sense. That also has its pitfalls if you can’t get anything else prioritized. For example, let’s talk about tracking, which is one of the most important things for successful user acquisition. Sometimes setting up or fixing an SDK pixel will not be the highest priority for engineering.”
“By building a cross-functional growth team that is focused just on growth, we always are able to prioritize our growth projects now. Also, this change really made more people accountable for the company growth goals instead of just the UA team.”
Closing the feedback loop
8:45 Melissa - “Is there a feedback loop between what you guys notice on the UA side? How are users responding to different creatives or different messages that feed back into product?
9:03 Tamar - “We do have an internal research team that does a lot of interviews and research with our users: what they like, what they dislike, what they’re looking for, why they came to Vero, what’s the most important thing to them. We do a lot of learnings from that and then I work very closely with that team to build creatives and concepts for ads so that we really hit our users where it makes the most sense for them.”
The evolution of growth teams
9:44 Melissa - “Have you seen the structure or focus of growth teams change over the course of your career?”
9:50 Tamar - “A lot of growth teams used to be more in brand or marketing and I’m definitely seeing them grow and shift into product and be more centric. I do think that growth teams are getting more and more focused from the companies.”
Data-driven creatives
10:38 Tamar - “We have an amazing internal design team that works cross-functionally with the whole company. They provide services to all the teams. In addition, we also work with an external agency when our internal team doesn’t have the capacity. UA definitely requires a lot of design support so it’s great to always have a back up for our internal team.”
11:16 Melissa - “How do you balance that analytical data-driven side and the creative conceptual driven side of marketing?”
11:29 Tamar - “At the end of the day, numbers will really tell the true story. You need to look at the actual performance in order to determine if creative is working or not. We are always open to testing new creatives and concepts but we look at the numbers to decide if they’re basically successful or not.”
Growth marketing trends in 2020
15:36 Tamar - “We have been lucky to not have such a negative impact from COVID-19 as other companies suffered from. Overall, most fintech companies are seeing a similar trend to ours. When COVID hit, a lot of companies really pulled back their advertising budgets so we did see a significant drop in costs in the beginning. I think now we are seeing a more stable situation.”
“Overall, I’m really seeing that UGC content and UGC ads are a very big trend that really started in late 2019 but is growing in 2020 ... We do have a lot of UGC content. We work with some of our customers and a lot of people really like to share their experience so it’s really great to see that.”
Marketing out of the box
16:51 Tamar - “I think Vero’s marketing growth strategy is really out of the box. We’re really open to doing tests and we learn from every test that we do. The mentality at the company for trying new things and experimenting is very refreshing and that’s one of the main factors that really makes us successful.”
