The rise of the growth marketing platform in 2023

As the need for growth-related roles and hiring continues to accelerate, the platform, tooling, and software requirements for these roles, functions, and teams continue to evolve.

Today there are a number of leading growth marketing platforms, such as Truenorth, GrowthHackers Experiments, our own Growth Method. Additionally, a number of teams and companies are using Airtable for growth-related functions, a host of growth experiment templates exists for a wide range of more horizontal platforms.

What is a growth marketing platform?

When it comes to growth marketing platforms, there is no industry standard definition, no core set of functionality, and no Gartner magic quadrant. There are however a small number of companies, us included, forging a clear and separate path to the plethora of more generic marketing project management software.

Let's start with what is not, in our opinion, a growth marketing platform:

"A great growth marketing platform will be an all-in-one platform that has great analytics capabilities, social media planning, new landing page creation, and email automation to start."

https://sharpspring.com/marketing/what-is-growth-marketing/

"Growth marketing platforms use data-driven techniques to identify and activate your most valuable customers. They offer a suite of marketing tools to help you grow your business, including social media, email marketing, lead generation, website optimization, and more."

https://landbot.io/blog/growth-marketing

There are two main areas we disagree with definitions such as these:

1. A platform provides a foundation that other products can be added to, or stacked on top of. Platforms are not unified "one stop shop" offerings from a single vendor. At best, SharpSpring is a suite of growth marketing tools.

2. A growth marketing platform should enable growth through the ability to connect a variety of tools, teams, data, and processes. This means the ability to support the implementation of agile marketing and growth marketing best practices.

Why use a growth marketing platform?

We have written previously about marketing project management in general, the challenges of a waterfall-based approach, and the need for more agile practices. Unfortunately, many of the commonly used task management tools, such as Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Teamwork, etc., and great more general task and project management weren't built for the needs of more modern agile and growth marketing teams.

There are 3 main problems that we typically see when marketing teams decide to implement generic project and task management tools.

1. Outputs over outcomes

The biggest problem with traditional task management solutions is that quickly employees fall into the output versus outcome trap. "Work" quickly becomes focused on creating and assigning tasks, responding to notifications, joining team calls, communicating status updates, and discussing the next sprint cycle. Before you know it, high-impact work gets replaced with work about work, and goals start shifting towards outputs as opposed to outcomes - because they're easier to measure.

According to a 2021 study of 10,223 global knowledge workers, workers now spend 60 percent of their valuable time on work about work, or metawork, as it's become known. That's equivalent to spending January to mid-August on work that doesn't really move the needle.

For more information on this topic, see our review of marketing project management software.

2. Feature bloat

We believe there is no one-size-fits-all approach to project management. The needs of a modern marketing team (for example) are vastly different from the needs of an architectural practice. And yet, most project management tools are completely industry-agnostic - jack of all trades, master of none.

As a result, a race for feature parity has resulted in ever-increasing complexity and feature bloat. Work about work features such as custom fields, annotation, proofing, resource allocation functions, workload distribution reports, AI auto-scheduling, timesheets, time tracking, message boards, and auto check-ins add enormous complexity and do very little (if anything) to improve business outcomes.

3. Jack of all trades, master of none

Many project management tools want to be the "all-in-one toolkit" (Basecamp) and to "replace 6-7 apps with one project planning software" (ProofHub). They want all work to happen in one place.

However, this results in lots of very average "jack of all trades" software:

• Mediocre file storage, not Box/DropBox

• Mediocre task tracking, not Trello

• A mediocre chat solution, not Slack or Teams

• Mediocre video calling, not Zoom

• Mediocre document storage and collaboration, not Microsoft Office or Google Docs

• Mediocre image editing, not Photoshop

• Mediocre version control, not Jira or GitHub

We believe in the right tool for the job, and one built for modern marketing teams.

Growth marketing platform features

• Goal Tracking: Set KPIs and goals to keep everyone aligned.

• Custom Dashboards: Display how core metrics are trending.

• Idea Repository: Capture ideas in a central repository.

• Idea Scoring: Enables teams to make strategic work decisions.

• Agile Experimentation: Promote a fixed-time over fixed-scope mindset.

• Custom Reporting: Provide a 360-degree view of everything that matters.

• Sharing & Collaboration: Keep all stakeholders on the same page.

• Learning Knowledgebase: Reduce time-consuming work and onboard new team members fast.

• Templates Library: Use pre-made templates and playbooks.

• App Integrations: Integrate metrics from third-party tools.

• Custom Notifications: Keep your entire team updated.

Final thoughts

Keep an eye on our Airtable database below which we update in real-time.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or on Twitter.