Job titles in this field have drifted apart from what they actually describe. "Growth marketer" and "performance marketer" get used almost interchangeably in job postings, but they describe genuinely different scopes of work, and hiring the wrong one for what you actually need is a common and expensive mistake.
Performance marketing is paid acquisition and the measurement layer underneath it. Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, programmatic, and the tracking, attribution, and reporting infrastructure that tells you whether that spend is working. It is a deep, specialised discipline focused on the top and middle of the funnel: getting the right people to your product and understanding what got them there.
Growth marketing is broader and sits closer to product. It typically includes paid acquisition as one input among several, but extends into onboarding, activation, retention, lifecycle email, in-product experimentation, and referral or virality mechanics. A growth marketer is often running A/B tests on your signup flow as much as they are running ad campaigns, and their success metric is usually a full-funnel outcome, activation rate or retained users, rather than a channel-level metric like CPA.
Companies post a "growth marketer" role expecting someone who will run and scale paid channels with deep platform expertise, and hire someone whose actual strength is product-side experimentation and lifecycle work. The paid channels underperform because that was never the hire's core skill. The reverse happens too: a company hires a performance marketing specialist expecting them to also own onboarding experimentation and retention, work that requires product analytics skills and access most performance marketers do not have and were never asked about in the interview process.
Both mismatches produce the same symptom from the outside: "we hired a growth person and growth did not happen." The actual cause is usually a scope mismatch between the job description and the skill set, not a failure of the individual.
If your core problem is "we do not have enough qualified traffic or the traffic we have costs too much," you need performance marketing expertise: platform depth, bidding strategy, creative testing, attribution. If your core problem is "we get traffic and signups but people do not activate or stick around," you need growth marketing expertise: funnel experimentation, onboarding design, retention analysis, often working closely with product.
Many companies genuinely need both, at different points or through different people. Very few early-stage teams need a single senior hire who is world-class at both, that combination is rare and expensive, and settling for a mid-level generalist in the role often means neither discipline gets the depth it needs.
Be specific about outcomes, not just activities. "Own paid acquisition and hit CAC targets" attracts performance marketers. "Own the activation funnel and improve trial conversion" attracts growth marketers. A job description that lists both without prioritising will attract candidates from both backgrounds and you will not be able to tell from the CV alone who actually fits.
If you are trying to figure out which of these your business actually needs right now, I am happy to talk it through.