I didn’t start my career in marketing.
My background is mostly in customer support, operations, administrative work, and working with clients.
For a long time, I thought marketing was mostly about content.
Create a post.
Get some traffic.
Get people to notice the product.
Repeat.
Then I started working in growth marketing.
And I realized I was wrong.
Growth marketing is much more about understanding why people do what they do.
Why do they click?
Why don’t they?
Why do they sign up?
Why do they leave?
Why does one message resonate with one person but completely miss another?
And sometimes, you don’t even have enough data to answer those questions directly.
That’s probably been the biggest adjustment for me.
Coming From Customer-Facing Work Changed How I Look at Marketing
One advantage I didn’t realize I had was my background in customer-facing roles.
When you spend enough time talking to customers, you start noticing something:
People don’t always describe their problems using the language companies use to market to them.
A company might say:
“Our platform improves operational efficiency.”
A customer might say:
“I’m wasting three hours fixing this every week.”
Those are technically talking about the same problem.
But they don’t feel the same.
That’s something I’ve started paying much more attention to in marketing.
Not just what problem exists, but how people actually describe it.
The words customers use can tell you a lot about what your messaging should sound like.
I Stopped Asking “What Should We Post?”
This was probably one of the biggest mindset changes for me.
The easy question is:
“What should we post this week?”
But that’s not always the best question.
A better one is:
“What are people already struggling to understand?”
That’s a completely different starting point.
Instead of beginning with a content format, you begin with a problem.
Then you can decide whether the answer should be a LinkedIn post, an article, a comparison page, a community reply, a forum discussion, or something else.
The format becomes secondary.
The problem comes first.
Analytics Are Useful, but They Don’t Tell You Everything
I’ve also learned that numbers can be both helpful and misleading.
You can look at impressions, reactions, page views, traffic, clicks, and other metrics.
But a number doesn’t always tell you why something happened.
A post can get a lot of impressions and create almost no meaningful interest.
Another post can get relatively few views but attract one person who asks a very specific product question.
Which one is more valuable?
It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
That’s why I’ve become more interested in combining quantitative signals with qualitative ones.
Analytics can tell you what happened.
Conversations can sometimes tell you why.
Community Is a Different Kind of Research
One of the things I’m enjoying most about growth marketing is observing how people talk about problems in communities.
Places like Reddit, Product Hunt, and other online communities can reveal something that polished marketing pages often don’t:
People speak differently when they’re not being marketed to.
They complain.
They compare.
They ask for alternatives.
They explain what they tried.
They tell people what they hated.
They tell people what they wish existed.
And sometimes, those conversations contain better marketing insights than a keyword spreadsheet.
Not because analytics aren’t useful.
But because people are giving you context.
I’m Also Learning That Growth Marketing Is Messy
This is probably the least glamorous part.
You don’t always have perfect attribution.
You don’t always know which activity caused a result.
Sometimes you try something and nothing happens.
Sometimes something performs better than expected and you don’t fully understand why.
Sometimes you have five possible things you could work on and no obvious answer about which one matters most.
That’s where I’m learning to get more comfortable with experimentation.
Make a reasonable hypothesis.
Do something small.
Measure what you can.
Look at what happened.
Learn.
Then adjust.
It’s less about finding the perfect answer and more about getting better answers over time.
I’m Still Figuring It Out
I don’t consider myself someone who has “mastered” growth marketing.
I’m still learning.
I’m still figuring out how SEO, content, distribution, customer research, analytics, product marketing, and community all connect.
But I think that’s also what makes the field interesting.
The more I learn, the more I realize that growth isn’t just about getting more people to see something.
It’s about understanding people better.
Understanding their problems.
Understanding what they care about.
Understanding what makes them trust something.
And understanding what makes them take the next step.
That’s a very different way of thinking about marketing.
And I’m still learning how to get better at it.
Maybe that’s the most interesting part of starting over in a new field:
You get to realize how much you still don’t know.
And then you get to start figuring it out.
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