When to Build a Growth vs Marketing Team

In the early stages of scaling a business, one of the most important strategic decisions you’ll face is whether to build a growth team or a marketing team. While both functions drive visibility and revenue, their methods, mindsets, and metrics differ significantly. Hiring too early or investing in the wrong team can lead to wasted resources and stalled progress. So, when exactly should you build a growth vs marketing team?

Let’s explore the key differences, how to know which team you need first, and how to align them as your company matures.

Understanding the Core Differences

Before diving into when to build a growth vs marketing team, it’s crucial to define what each one does.

What is a Marketing Team?

A marketing team focuses on brand positioning, messaging, awareness, and demand generation. Their toolkit includes:

• Content marketing
• Social media
• Paid advertising
• Public relations
• SEO
• Email campaigns

They aim to attract and engage a target audience, often measured through metrics like website traffic, lead volume, and brand recognition.

What is a Growth Team?

A growth team, by contrast, is often more technical and experimental. Rooted in data, they prioritize scalable user acquisition and retention by running rapid, hypothesis-driven experiments across the full funnel.

Key activities include:

• A/B testing and conversion rate optimization
• Viral loops and referral programs
• Product-led growth initiatives
• Onboarding optimization
• Cross-functional sprints involving product, data, and design

Metrics they track include customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), churn rate, and retention curves.

When to Build a Growth vs Marketing Team

Startups don’t need both teams immediately. The right time to build either depends on your product stage, growth goals, and company maturity.

Build a Marketing Team If:

1. You’re in Pre-Product-Market Fit Stage
   • You need to educate your audience and build brand awareness.
   • Content, SEO, and storytelling are your primary tools.
   • You're focused on building credibility and community.
2. You’re Selling a Complex B2B Product
   • A longer sales cycle needs nurturing.
   • Buyers require education before making decisions.
   • Marketing creates the top-of-funnel momentum needed for the sales team.
3. You Need Inbound Lead Generation
   • Especially important when outbound alone can’t scale.
4.  
   • Consistent content creation (blogs, whitepapers, webinars) becomes essential.

📌 According to HubSpot's 2024 State of Marketing Report, 70% of B2B marketers cite inbound marketing as their primary lead generation strategy. (Source)

Build a Growth Team If:

1. You Have Product-Market Fit
   • You’ve validated demand and are ready to scale.
   • It’s time to optimize every part of the funnel—from signup to referral.
2. You’re a Product-Led Company
   • Think Slack, Zoom, or Calendly—where the product is the primary growth driver.
   • A growth team optimizes user flows, trials, and freemium conversions.
3. Your Acquisition Strategy Requires Iteration
   • You need to test hypotheses fast.
   • A technical growth team can tweak onboarding flows, run rapid experiments, and automate viral loops.
4. You Have Strong Engineering Support
   • Growth teams often sit close to engineering.
   • If your dev team is growth-minded, you're ready to unlock compounding gains.
5.  

Bridging the Two: When You Need Both

At some point, scaling companies need both marketing and growth. A mature organization understands the synergy between the two:

• Marketing fuels demand.
• Growth converts demand into results.

A successful go-to-market strategy often integrates:

• Marketing for awareness and trust
• Growth for performance and optimization

Startups like Airbnb and Dropbox credit their meteoric success to this hybrid model—early brand and content work backed by relentless experimentation and data-driven iteration.

How to Decide What to Prioritize

Here’s a quick checklist to guide your decision:

Tips for Building the Right Team First

1. Hire T-Shaped People
   Whether growth or marketing, prioritize generalists with a wide skill set and deep expertise in one area.
2. Align with Product Roadmap
   Building a growth team without engineering support is futile. Sync team buildouts with product milestones.
3. Start Small, Scale Fast
   Begin with one or two key hires who can build systems, not just execute tasks.
4. Set Clear KPIs
   Growth teams might own LTV:CAC ratios, while marketing teams might own MQLs or traffic benchmarks.
5. Test for Fit and Culture
   Growth teams operate differently—faster, scrappier, and more technical. Be mindful of hiring styles that match your company DNA.
6.  

Real-World Example: Notion’s Dual Strategy

Notion succeeded by investing in both fronts:

• Marketing: Beautiful design, strong branding, and a thriving community.
• Growth: Seamless onboarding, referral programs, and product tutorials driving user retention.

This dual investment led to over 20 million users in just a few years. (Source)

Conclusion

Deciding when to build a growth vs marketing team isn’t about choosing one forever. It’s about timing and alignment. Early-stage startups benefit from marketing’s ability to educate and attract, while growth teams become essential once you’re scaling known channels and optimizing the user journey.

Build intentionally. Know your product’s lifecycle. And most importantly, create cross-functional alignment between product, engineering, growth, and marketing from day one.

Ready to make your first growth or marketing hire? Take a step back and audit your funnel. The gaps will tell you where to invest first.

FAQs: When to Build a Growth vs Marketing Team

1. What’s the main difference between a growth team and a marketing team?
A growth team focuses on performance, experimentation, and product-led strategies. A marketing team drives awareness and leads through storytelling, content, and campaigns.

2. Should startups hire marketers or growth experts first?
If you're pre-product-market fit or have a complex B2B model, start with marketers. If your product is self-serve and growing organically, growth experts might offer faster ROI.

3. Can one person do both growth and marketing?
In early-stage startups, yes. Look for hybrid marketers with a technical bent or growth hackers with strong communication skills.

4. What tools do growth and marketing teams use?

• Growth: Mixpanel, Amplitude, Optimizely, Segment
• Marketing: HubSpot, SEMrush, Mailchimp, Google Ads
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5. When should you build both teams?
Once your business hits scale mode—when lead volume and user acquisition both become top priorities—it’s time to invest in both functions.