Growth marketing focuses on achieving rapid and sustainable business growth through effective customer acquisition and retention. Vadim Mennanov, Director of Growth Marketing at Juro, shares insights into his approaches for increasing company revenue, his experience in content marketing, and the importance of synergy between marketing and sales.
Can you tell us about your current project and your responsibilities as the Director of Growth Marketing?
Juro is a contract management platform that simplifies and automates processes at all stages: the creation, negotiation, signing, and storage of legal documents.
It provides templates, supports electronic signatures, integrates with CRM and other business tools, and offers analytics for tracking contract statuses. Our main goal is to make working with contracts faster and more efficient, reducing risks and increasing process transparency.
The title of this position perfectly describes my responsibilities, as I am indeed accountable for growth — specifically, revenue growth. This growth is driven by increasing the volume of qualified leads, which in turn depends on the overall volume of leads. Therefore, in essence, my role is to generate as much high-quality traffic to the site as possible.
I read in the media that you generated a manyfold increase in revenue at Juro. How did you manage to achieve this result?
I started with attribution and tracking the traffic that was already coming to the website. When I joined, the company didn’t understand which channels were generating revenue, which were not, what content was most effective, and so on.
So, I implemented reporting, set up tracking and attribution models, and saw direct traffic drop from 50-60% to 10-15%, which is a healthy level. In other words, we started to see which channels, even down to the keyword level, were generating leads and how these leads were moving through the funnel.
At the same time, we needed to increase traffic to the website. For organic growth, I revised the content creation strategy and relaunched all paid channels, significantly improving their efficiency.
For content production, I used the low-intent, high-intent methodology. High-intent content is valuable, informative, and high-quality material tailored to specific search queries. It targets people at the bottom of the sales funnel (BOFU) who are already prepared to make a purchase.
These queries and content are also known as “transactional”, and I prioritized the production of this type of content to cover queries that are more likely to lead to a conversion and a closed deal. In essence it is about creating content that subsequently converts users into customers, not just content for traffic’s sake.
Since I joined, we have launched three versions of the website, after testing product positioning and messaging. Additionally, we released a new brand book, created a new corporate style and logo, and a new brand identity. All this, taken together, allowed us to increase the conversion rate from website visitors to leads.
Another important change was improving the collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. I conducted training sessions for colleagues so they knew the context behind each lead from marketing before calling them.
I provided them with the basics of user behavior analytics: what pages they viewed, when, what they were interested in, and what they downloaded.
This allowed sales to form a more complete picture of customer needs and communicate with them personally. Additionally, I implemented a lead scoring model to help sales prioritize leads and choose who to process first. This work increased the return on each marketing lead, boosting sales.
Let’s talk more about measuring results. What metrics, besides revenue growth, do you use to measure success in growth marketing?
I use a marketing funnel specifically designed for B2B SaaS companies like Juro. We track every step of this funnel, influencing them with marketing tools. The lower the funnel stage, the less it depends on marketing and the more on sales.
There are five main conversion metrics:
- Website visit → Lead CR — conversion from site visitors to leads.
- Lead → MQL — lead qualification rate, reflecting the quality of leads.
- MQL → SAL — the percentage of marketing-qualified leads that sales consider quality and take into work.
- SAL → Opportunity CR — the share of hot leads ready to buy.
- Opportunity → Customer – win-rate.
Based on which channels bring the highest quality traffic, we determine what to cut and what to scale for maximum business growth.
But as I understand it, stimulating business growth is also a classical marketing responsibility. How does growth marketing differ?
Primarily, it differs in focus: classical marketing focuses on positioning, value, increasing brand awareness, and visibility, while the goal of growth marketing is to accelerate business growth.
I’ve already mentioned working with sales; cross-functional interaction also plays a significant role in growth marketing. We closely collaborate with the product team, sales department, and customer support to create synergy and improve all aspects of the user experience.
Another difference is that growth marketing covers the entire AARRR cycle (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue), which includes user acquisition, activation, retention, referral marketing, and revenue growth. Typically, marketing specialists focus on acquisition and maybe activation.
Of course, growth marketing is used specifically in digital business, so the approaches will differ. For example, Coca-Cola focuses on brand awareness and invests heavily in TV and offline advertising, where measuring effectiveness is challenging. Our approach is more quantifiable and involves optimizing every stage of customer interaction.
You built the marketing department. Can you share your approaches to forming a team?
When hiring senior specialists, their hard skills are always more important to me than their soft skills. Therefore, there is always a test during the selection stage, requiring specific technical actions which would be useful for the project.
For example, I provide data for analysis, asking the candidate to find correlations, propose hypotheses, and conduct an investigation analysis. This task helps us to understand how deeply the specialist thinks, what problems they have encountered, and how immersed they are in the market context.
As an example, only someone with real experience of working in the US market can correlate the decrease in lead volume with Thanksgiving. If you’ve never worked with the American market or are generally inexperienced, you might propose a million different hypotheses without noticing the obvious seasonality. Experience is always more valuable to me than theoretical knowledge.
I also don’t shy away from working with junior specialists. Even if someone doesn’t yet deeply understand the subject, it doesn’t mean they won’t become an effective employee in the future. A capable, smart, and development-oriented junior will grow quickly. For example, a senior manager in my team joined us three years ago as a junior without any marketing knowledge.
In addition to attracting customers, you also participate in product development. How do you work with the product team to integrate marketing strategies into product features?
We provide the product team with a lot of information about customer needs and competitor offerings. Essentially, we give the product owner insights into what features are necessary to be competitive and attractive to customers.
Competition analysis is a significant part of our work—we constantly monitor what competitors are doing in terms of pricing, new features, and promotion channels. We also pass on competitor leads to the sales team to get feedback, which helps to further improve our product.
On the other hand, we are responsible for the client onboarding processes: what tasks the product can solve and how to use it. My team develops such educational materials.
Which project in your nine years in growth marketing do you consider the most significant and why?
I would highlight Wargaming, which became my first large product company. Before that, I had my own marketing agency, which I grew tired of and wanted to transition to a different level of business. At Wargaming, as the Senior SEM & Digital Marketing Manager, I had the opportunity to apply my knowledge to develop major gaming brands.
Of course, it was important for me to show results in the new role. During my time at Wargaming, the number of new users increased by 2.5 times while maintaining the same budget.
I conducted many experiments and proposed numerous interesting ideas, some of which were successfully implemented, significantly improving the player acquisition funnel, from creative ads to in-game payments.
The experience at Wargaming showed me the directions I wanted to take in moving forwards. Firstly, I realized that working in a product company is much more interesting than in agencies or elsewhere. Typically, product companies have the time and resources to actually implement any ideas. Secondly, the niche matters a lot.
It was surprising to me that Western companies always strive to find employees with experience in their niche. In growth marketing, the tools often don’t depend much on the niche, as SEO, Google Ads, Meta, and other channels and analytics systems are used in most cases. Therefore, it’s better to decide on your favorite niche right away and then build expertise in it, as changing direction is not easy.
