Growth Marketing Specialist

A growth marketing specialist runs experiments to get more people to find, sign up for and keep using a product or service - usually for a tech company, app, subscription business or online retailer. The work mixes paid advertising, email, landing pages, referral schemes and onboarding tweaks, with a heavy emphasis on measuring whether each change actually moved a number like sign-ups, trials or revenue. Unlike traditional marketing roles that focus mainly on brand and awareness, growth roles are judged on specific, trackable outcomes across the whole customer journey.

Starting salary: £26k–£35k
Live graduate jobs: 10 open now
Main way in: Direct application to a junior or associate growth/performance…
They usually ask for: A degree is usually expected but the subject rarely matters much

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £26,000–£35,000 to start, though this varies widely. London startups and larger tech employers sit at the upper end or above it, agencies and regional employers often lower. Bonuses tied to performance targets are common in some companies and absent in others.

What you'd actually do

Setting up and monitoring paid campaigns on platforms like Google Ads, Meta, TikTok or LinkedIn - adjusting budgets, writing ad copy variants, pausing what isn't working and shifting spend to what is
Running A/B tests (showing two versions of a page, email or ad to different groups to see which performs better) and waiting for enough data before calling a winner
Building and sending email or in-app messaging campaigns - welcome sequences for new users, win-back emails for lapsed customers, promotional sends - usually through a tool like Klaviyo, Braze, HubSpot or Customer.io
Pulling numbers out of analytics tools (GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or a SQL query against the company's own database) to work out where in the funnel people are dropping off

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Writing or briefing landing page copy and working with a designer or developer to get pages live, often using a no-code builder like Webflow or Unbounce
Joining a weekly growth meeting where the team reviews last week's metrics, reports on experiments that have finished, and prioritises which ideas to test next
Coordinating with product, sales or content colleagues - for example, flagging that a sign-up form is losing people, or asking the content team for an asset to support a campaign

How graduates get in

Direct application to a junior or associate growth/performance marketing role at a startup or scale-up. This is the most common route - growth teams are concentrated in tech companies, and many hire for attitude and evidence of numeracy rather than a specific degree.
Graduate schemes at larger consumer brands, retailers or media owners, usually badged as 'digital marketing', 'performance marketing' or 'ecommerce' rather than 'growth' specifically. These are structured, often with rotations, and recruit on a fixed autumn cycle.
Starting at a digital or performance marketing agency, where you learn paid media on client accounts at pace, then moving in-house to a growth team after a year or two. A very well-trodden path.
Internships or placement years in marketing, ecommerce or analytics - a placement year on a four-year degree is strong evidence and often converts into a graduate offer.

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Sideways moves from adjacent junior roles: customer support, sales development, data analysis or content/social. Common in smaller companies where someone shows an interest in the numbers and gets handed growth work.
Self-taught entry backed by a portfolio - running ads for a side project, growing a newsletter, freelancing for a small business. Unusual as a sole route at larger employers, but genuinely effective at startups if you can show real results and explain your reasoning.

What employers ask for

A degree is usually expected but the subject rarely matters much. Marketing, business, economics, psychology, maths and data-related subjects are common; humanities graduates are well represented too. A 2:1 is a typical ask at larger employers, while startups often don't filter on classification at all.
Demonstrable comfort with numbers. You don't need a maths degree, but you should be able to work out a conversion rate, spot when a result is too small to mean anything, and not be put off by a spreadsheet of campaign data.
Spreadsheet skills (Excel or Google Sheets) at a decent level - pivot tables, lookups, basic formulas. This is asked for far more often than it is taught.
Some evidence of hands-on digital marketing, whether from a placement, internship, society role, side project or freelance work. Free certifications from ad and analytics platforms are easy to get and worth having, but they are a tick-box rather than a differentiator on their own.

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Professional qualifications such as CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) or IDM diplomas exist and some employers will fund them, but they are far less central here than in traditional marketing, and almost never required to get in.
SQL is increasingly asked for at more data-mature companies - not universally, but it is one of the clearer dividing lines between entry-level and mid-level growth roles.

Skills that matter

Reading data without over-reading it

Most of the job is deciding whether a change in a number is a real effect or just noise, and junior people routinely declare victory on tests that proved nothing.

Writing short, persuasive copy

Ad headlines, email subject lines and landing page hero text are the levers you pull most often, and small wording changes genuinely shift results.

Funnel thinking

You need to be able to map the whole journey from first impression to paying customer and identify which single step is leaking, rather than optimising something that doesn't matter.

Spreadsheet and basic query fluency

You will constantly be asked questions no dashboard answers, and waiting for an analyst to pull the data for you slows everything down.

Picking up new tools fast

The ad platforms, email tools and analytics stacks change frequently, and nobody will train you on most of them - you work it out from the documentation.

Explaining results to non-marketers

Founders, finance and product leads want to know what the spend bought and what you learned, in plain terms, without marketing jargon.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Junior / associate growth or performance marketer: executing campaigns and tests that someone else has prioritised, learning one or two channels properly. Commonly one to two years, though it varies a lot by employer size.
Growth marketing specialist or manager: owning a channel or a stage of the funnel end to end, setting your own budget allocation and experiment roadmap, possibly managing a junior or an agency relationship.
Senior growth manager or growth lead: owning a target (sign-ups, trials, revenue) across several channels, deciding what gets tested and what gets dropped, and often line-managing a small team. Timescales here vary enormously - fast at a growing startup, much slower in a large organisation.
Head of Growth, Head of Performance Marketing or Marketing Director: setting overall acquisition strategy and budget, hiring, and answering to the exec team or board for the cost of acquiring customers.
Common sideways moves rather than upward ones: into product management (the experiment-and-metrics mindset transfers well), into data or analytics, into agency-side account leadership, into freelance or fractional growth consulting, or into founding something. These are genuinely frequent exits, not fallbacks.

What people get wrong

“It's a creative marketing job about coming up with clever campaigns.”

Most of the week is spent in spreadsheets, dashboards and ad platform interfaces. Creative work exists, but it's generally producing many small variants to test rather than one big idea, and the decision about which one survives is made by the data.

“'Growth hacking' means finding clever tricks that make a product explode overnight.”

The term came from a handful of famous one-off wins, but the everyday reality is incremental: a slightly better onboarding email, a cheaper keyword, a form with one fewer field. Progress is accumulated rather than discovered.

“You need a marketing degree or a CIM qualification.”

Neither is usually required. Employers care far more about whether you can interrogate a dataset and show something you actually ran, which is why people arrive from economics, psychology, English and science backgrounds alike.

“It's purely about getting new customers in.”

Retention and activation - getting people who signed up to actually use the thing, and keeping them - are often where growth teams spend most of their effort, because paid acquisition gets expensive fast and leaky products waste it.

Where this varies

The job varies a lot depending on where you do it. At an early-stage startup you may be the entire marketing function - writing copy, running ads, building pages and reporting to a founder - with wide scope but little guidance. At a scale-up there's usually a defined growth team with specialists per channel and a formal experiment process. At a large consumer brand or retailer, the same work tends to be split into narrower roles (paid search, CRM, ecommerce trading) and sits alongside a separate brand marketing team, with slower cycles and more sign-off. Agencies offer the fastest skill-building on paid media but you're working to client briefs rather than owning a product's growth. There's also a split between B2C businesses, where volume and ad spend dominate, and B2B SaaS, where the focus shifts towards lead quality, long sales cycles and close work with a sales team. Geographically, the densest concentration of these roles is London, with meaningful clusters in Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds and Cambridge, and a reasonable amount of remote hiring.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.