Growth Marketer Onboarding: Our Ultimate Guide to a Successful Job Start

There's no denying that growth marketing is one of the hottest skills in demand today. 

Hiring your new growth marketer takes you one step closer to acquiring and retaining customers through data-driven marketing strategies. 

Now it's time to onboard your new growth marketer, an essential step in building a high-performing team and driving results for your organization.

In this ultimate guide, we'll show you how to create a customized onboarding experience that sets your new hire up for success and helps them become a valuable contributor to your organization. Also, look out for a detailed 30-60-90 onboarding plan for your new growth marketer.

✈️ Why onboarding is important for growth marketers

On average, companies spend 11.2% of their revenue on marketing each year. 

Growth marketers work on:

• optimizing your customer acquisition cost to drive conversion;
• analyzing data and metrics to improve user experience;
• combining innovative and traditional marketing layers to increase your brand's active users.

A growth marketer is a vital new hire, just like every other employee.

Much of the onboarding process is the same. You need to orient them on:

• your company culture;
• vision, mission, and goals;
• procedures, rules, and regulations.

But it doesn't just stop here. Remember that the position of a growth marketer is strategic: A growth marketer manages the customer acquisition funnel. 

Provides information on current marketing processes and funnels

A comprehensive onboarding strategy ensures your growth marketer is familiar with your current product-market fit, existing customer base, and brand guidelines. This lets them strategize, develop, and execute new marketing processes to promote rapid growth.

Lays the foundation for healthy teamwork 

A successful onboarding process for new employees is key to their success in working well in and across teams, especially for a growth marketer.

Growth marketers must work closely with the product, sales, and content teams to create a successful and complete user journey. As a result, they will need to be familiar with the processes on each team.

Good onboarding lays the foundation for smooth teamwork between team members.

Inspires role confidence and clarity

As new hires, growth marketers may hesitate to create growth solutions for their new workplace. However, proper onboarding can teach them all they need to know about the company's processes to help them gain confidence to perform their role.

Another essential thing, according to Trevor Sookraj, Divisional's CEO, is to give your growth marketer lots of context. This role is strictly data-driven, so providing context for everything can go a long way. In his words:

"This will help them quickly realize what channels aren't worth exploring, how to frame experiments, and how to work with your team."

📝 Growth marketer onboarding sample 30-60-90 day plan

A 30-60-90 days plan is a three-month approach to getting a person settled into their new role and addressing their concerns.

This framework is excellent for onboarding all roles, including a growth manager. 

By adopting an onboarding template and customizing it to suit the peculiarities of the position, you can target the nuances of a growth marketer's role while maintaining an aligned company goal with everyone else. 

Don't forget about preboarding. Preboarding gets your employees pumped for work before day one. 

Here's our sample 30-60–90 day plan for onboarding new growth marketers. 

The first 30 days: Adoption 

The adoption stage is crucial for growth marketers. This stage is about acclimating them to the company and its products. 

Growth marketing is multidisciplinary, so it is essential to focus on integrating your staff, providing them with data on internal processes and products, and explaining how their role ties to overall performance.

In this stage, a growth hacker should learn about the following:

• the company's mission and vision;
• teamwork and communication culture;
• current marketing tools and resources;
• user data, user journey, internal KPIs, and metrics

It's also crucial that this stage is interactive. Many companies get it wrong by loading growth hackers with several information sessions without interaction opportunities. 

Creating an interactive process allows for questions and provides adaptable solutions. 

💪 Discover more best practices for training new employees effectively.

Day 1: 

• Provide a warm reception. 
• Introduce the onboarding buddy program. 
• Share access credentials.
• Provide organizational materials and company and team handbooks. 
• Introduce company vision and goals.
• Share simple details on current marketing projects.
• Introduce your new hire to the product, sales, and marketing departments. 

Don't forget to share and answer questions on the company's work-from-home policy. This bit has become very important for employees. 

If your company has not created a documented policy, check out our work-from-home policy template. 

Week 1:

• Have them sign all compliance policies.
• Communicate the 30-60-90 days plan. But, keep revisiting the plan throughout onboarding to adjust if necessary.
• Explain and establish the timeline for your probation period review.
• Share the company's financial structure with tools like Crunchbase. 
• Ensure access to necessary growth marketing resources like Ghostery, Similarweb, AngelList, and Amplitude.
• Document and share information about teams' and managers' preferred communication methods. 
• Offer training on the company's product or service, target market, and competition. Include detailed information on the customer journey, value proposition, and unique selling points.
• Arrange for them to shadow a top growth marketer or head of growth. Or include shadowing in a more extensive mentorship program for new hires to promote the right work attitude and give new hires a personal goal within your organization. 

Tasks for your growth marketer’s first 30 days: 

• Complete training on the tools and platforms used to track and analyze key metrics, such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Segment. The goal is to understand how to use data to inform growth strategies and make data-driven decisions.
• Examine existing user data and review customer persona. 
• Examine the company's current user-onboarding process, conversion rate optimization, content, and analytics. 
• Pinpoint the company's current North Star metric for products. 
• Map out the user journey, and identify significant retention points. 
• Start attending internal meetings. 
• Highlight problems or areas of adjustments in current marketing processes. 

Day 30:

• Ask for employee feedback in the first 30 days to ensure your onboarding creates a positive first impression.
• Set 60-day goals. 

The first 60 days: Integration, training, and taking responsibilities 

The second month of onboarding focuses on creating autonomy. 

You should give the new hire opportunities to take ownership of projects and make meaningful contributions to growth efforts. 

You will help them build confidence and feel like a valued member of the team.

Tasks for your growth marketer’s next 30 days:

• Meet with teams like marketing, product, design, and sales. 
• Create standard guidelines for implementing ideas. 
• Attend marketing team meetings to generate ideas on growth marketing.
• Identify and prioritize ideas with the ICE (Impact, Confidence, and Ease) scoring method.
• Pick a specific idea and create a hypothesis and action plan around it. 
• Develop a new marketing strategy through new or existing channels. 
• Offer insights on brand marketing, positioning, and architecture. 
• Launch a campaign through a specific channel to meet a desired user growth rate. 

Day 60: 

• Encourage the employee to reflect on 60-day goals. 
• Conduct a performance review to provide feedback on progress, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that the new hire is on track to meet their growth goals.
• Set 90-day goals.

🆘 Conflicted over when and how to give feedback to new employees during onboarding? We have gathered multiple practical tips to help you.

90 Days: Full transition, autonomy, and accountability

The last stage is all about taking complete control of activities and working on big projects. 

Finally, you can actively make demands of your new employee, launch their solutions, and measure their performance with KPIs.

Tasks for your growth marketer’s remainder next 30 days:

• Actively construct experiment design briefs and set KPIs. 
• Work with the social media marketer to launch and test novel retention-focused campaigns.
• Develop and launch a new user onboarding experience that accelerates user growth. 
• Create a customer retention strategy to enhance product-led growth. 
• Create a data-driven, cross-channel approach to drive feature adoption, engagement, and conversion.
• Identify whether to automate repetitive tasks, delegate them internally, or outsource to offshore VAs.
• Maintain and communicate product/growth marketing and customer education throughout the lifecycle. 

Day 90:

• Submit a self-evaluation of the past 90 days.
• Discuss areas of concern.
• Prepare for the future: co-create the first employee development plan.

🚀 Is your company growing at the speed of light? Check out onboarding plans for CMO, Product managers, and Market research analysts.

➡️ Set up your marketing department's new hires for success with Zavvy

Now that you fully understand how proper growth marketer onboarding can positively propel your business, it's time to make a move!

Give your new growth marketers an excellent onboarding experience with Zavvy. 

Our onboarding process is fully automated, which prevents repetitive processes and errors and saves time. In addition, our model is flexible and can fit your company's context.

Our employee onboarding software lets you: 

• select a befitting onboarding template for your company;
• assign onboarding journeys to new hires;
• automate  onboarding event scheduling  and reminders;
• track your new hires' progress at every turn. 
• translate your onboarding journeys into multiple languages.

What's even better? Our preboarding software helps you kick-start processes before your new employee's first day. 

With Zavvy, you can:

• Send new hires basic company information before their first day.
• Schedule virtual meet-and-greets with their team.
• Sign and collect documents electronically.

📅 Book a free demo to see things for yourself! Our employee experience experts will show you how our automated onboarding tool will take your onboarding to the next level.