How to shift from media buyer to growth marketer thinking

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👋 Hi, I’m Amanda. I’m a fractional head of growth with a decade of experience working with rapidly-growing B2C startups. I work with lean teams in a few ways:

✅ Fractional: You have an expertise gap on your team you need to fill with someone who can flex into both strategy and execution, for an open-ended time frame.

✅ Advisory: You need to validate your existing approach or are just starting out, and need someone with growth expertise to guide you.

✅ Project-based: You need someone experienced to execute quickly and cleanly on a specific scope and deliverable you have in mind.

If you’d like to explore working together, start here to tell me a bit about what you’re looking for. If you’re not quite ready but have growth questions you want to chat about, you can book office hours here.

Shifting to a growth mindset

One of the misconceptions I hear over and over about growth marketing is that people assume growth marketing = paid ads. Of course paid ads are a huge part of most successful growth marketing strategies, especially if you need to learn and acquire customers more quickly than with “free”, but slow-burn, organic marketing efforts.

But growth marketing is an entire operational function that spans from messaging and positioning, to acquisition strategy, to conversion optimization, to analytics and modeling (and much more). This means a full stack growth marketer has many more tools in their toolbox and levers to pull than someone who is focused exclusively on media buying. Most importantly, operating with a growth mindset leads to effective prioritization of these levers for business impact, without getting distracted by noise.

The media buyer mindset

When you’re operating with a media buyer mindset, you’re deep in the weeds. You’re up to date on every new feature a platform releases, toggling and tweaking settings, working closely with account reps, and closely watching your CTRs and CPCs tick up or down. As a channel expert, you have your finger on the pulse of what Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are doing to – theoretically – make your ads better.

To be clear, this level of detail is really important to a well-functioning growth org. But the most critical task is to be able to filter through all these features and settings to determine what drives true impact, or you may be wasting time forcing a square peg into a round hole. Most of these levers are optimizations at the edges, and probably won’t end up having meaningful business impact.

The growth marketer mindset

A full-stack growth marketing mindset involves zooming out. Growth marketers start with top-line KPIs, like revenue, or CAC, or LTV, and then work backwards into which levers across the business can actually drive those numbers.

Sometimes that lever is a paid acquisition test, but other times it’s restructuring a landing page to present information differently to a key audience segment. Or it’s running a test that changes the onboarding experience to improve conversion to activation. Or it’s building a new reporting view that drives action by providing new insight into which channels drive the most valuable retention, not just the most conversions.

Deciding where to focus your effort and what kinds of trade-offs to make is what separates a growth mindset from a media buyer mindset.

Tapping into a growth mindset requires being open to expanding the universe of possible tools in your toolbox you can use to drive the business forward.

Balancing short and long term

Where media buyers tend to focus on what the platform data is telling them right now (CPM is up, CPCs are down, ROAS looks strong), growth marketers think in longer time horizons. They know that paid ads can deliver quick insights and immediate customer acquisition, but they also know those wins won’t be sustainable if the business isn’t thinking about all stages of the customer experience. That might mean anything from investing in organic content or focusing on retention, to developing a user feedback loop and making meaningful product improvements. Growth requires balancing immediate traction with compounding, longer-term bets.

Rather than try to prove or disprove the value of every feature an ad platform gives them, growth marketers use ad platforms (and every other channel) as a tool to drive their goals.

Ruthless prioritization

This shift in thinking comes down to prioritization.

A media buyer mindset might lead to preserving campaigns even when they’re no longer serving their purpose, and hoping a tweak or toggle will unlock performance. A growth marketer mindset will instead lead to cutting losses quickly, reallocating budget and effort, and moving on to higher-leverage tests.

A growth marketer mindset also ignores a lot of noise. Growth marketers know that some metrics don’t matter when others aren’t where they need to be, and which opportunities are relevant while others aren’t worthwhile. Rather than getting distracted by vanity metrics or the newest features, they stay focused on what ladders up directly to business outcomes.

This discipline is what allows growth marketers to move fast, not because they’re running more tests, but because they’re ruthless about focusing on the right ones.

Reframes to try

Test yourself. If you’re ready to uplevel your thinking as a growth marketer, try these reframes:

• If you think: “My job is to drive the best performance on paid channels.” → Try thinking: “My job is to grow the business using paid marketing as one lever.”

• If you think: “This campaign has a good CPA, let’s scale.” → Try thinking: “Is this campaign driving high-quality customers at the right CAC?”

• If you think: “I want to test this new platform feature to see if it improves performance.” → Try thinking: “Knowing what we know about our customers, will this feature will help us better achieve our KPI?”

• If you think: “Spending more on our paid channels will drive more growth.” → Try thinking: “Optimizing our acquisition, conversion, and retention levers will drive more growth.”

The TL;DR

Where media buyers know the tools inside and out, growth marketers know how to use the tools to drive the business.

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