I was recently browsing my LinkedIn feed and had the audacity to ask an accomplished growth marketer (probably the most coveted title a marketer could have these days) a simple question.

The question was:

What are the skills in marketing that I should have in order to become a good growth marketer?

And Aaryn Kobayashi from Kahuna was kind enough to respond. Three areas stood out in my mind – lead generation, reporting & analytics, and project management.

Growth marketing is just a fancy term for data-driven marketing that is focused on results. A lot of startups and small companies out there have very small marketing teams that are often spread too thin. What we could all use is a way to automate key processes in marketing to have more time to focus on the results.

I’m going to show you some incredible tools that would automate those three key areas of marketing and will help you grow your business faster.

Let’s dive in.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is so much more complicated in 2017 than it was even a few years ago. There are so many marketing channels that are available, and so many different types of advertising, that it could make your head spin.

One marketing channel stands out as the most efficient channel for organic traffic and lead generation, and that’s chatbots.

Chatbots get way more traction than email marketing. According to Neil Patel, chatbots get him a whopping 88% open rate and a 56% click rate.

The reason chatbots are more effective is 3-fold:

1. Chat messages are way shorter and more engaging
2. Chat messages are more informal, and we are wired to open them
3. It’s easy to blast all you chat subscribers with an email.

If you are wondering how to make that happen, check out my how-to guide on chatbots.

I would recommend using Chatful or Manychat to create your chatbot marketing machine. Now that you have an awesome way to get leads you need to analyze your engagement.

That’s when reporting and analytics come in.

Reporting & analytics

Everyone knows about web analytics, how to see how many clicks, visitors, and sales you get. That we know how to do. Social media analytics is quickly gaining ground as well. Marketers measure the engagement of various social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) in order to choose the most efficient ones to use.

However, it’s often difficult to predict social media’s ROI because a lot of posts drive awareness and traffic to the website but not necessarily through direct clicks on the content.

For example, a visitor might see a few ads on social media and then decide to google the company. Then they go on the website and buy the product. That customer bought because of your social media campaign! But you won’t have any way of knowing that.

This is where Sendible comes in.

Sendible is a social media management platform (like Buffer and HootSuite), but it has some added features for businesses.

One of the coolest features these guys have is the ability to quantify cross-channel impact with Google Analytics. This feature enables you to track the effectiveness of your social media and email campaigns by combining it with data from Google Analytics.

It translates social into website visits, page views and geographical impact.

Ok, so you have the lead flow and you have all this data about your business, how do you keep your team organized?

Let me show you.

Project management

It’s really important to have every on task and firing on all cylinders, but it can be tricky with all the various areas of your marketing strategy. Your team might be doing social ads, posting on social media, SEO, guest blogging, executing influencer campaigns, and you need to organize it all.

There are a bunch of tools out there like Slack and Basecamp, or Skype if you need something just for basic communication. I just discovered a really neat tool that is super affordable. It’s called Nuvro and it allows me to do several things:

• Manage docs in one place
• See the weekly calendar with assigned tasks to team members
• Share notes, to-do lists and host team discussions
• View team member performance to distribute workload efficiently

The best part is that this tool is only $25 for a team of 10 people. That’s an incredible deal.

You get all the functionality and you can quickly get organized with all the marketing awesomeness you got going on.

Recap

Growth marketing is about results. If you automate key parts of your business and organize your team around that automation, you will win every single time.

Build a chatbot to automate and significantly boost your organic lead generation efforts. You will also now have a powerful vehicle with which to provide a unique customer experience to your audience, and significantly boost your brand.

Combine social and web analytics in order to calculate your true social ROI. Use Sendible to be able to track how your social media campaigns are affecting your sales and site engagement in real time.

Streamline project management, tasks and work calendars using Nuvro. It’s super affordable and gets the job done.

Do you have other tools that you’ve used? Or are there any other areas of growth marketing that you wanted to be on the list? Let me know in the comments.