Shawn Hansen: 4 Types of Marketers and 3 Types of CRO

Shawn Hansen: 4 Types of Marketers and 3 Types of CRO

Shawn Hansen offers a compelling framework for understanding different marketing approaches and how they relate to conversion rate optimization (CRO). His model helps teams identify their current capabilities, understand their blind spots, and determine where to invest for the greatest impact. Whether you are building a marketing team or evaluating your existing capabilities, Hansen's framework provides a useful lens for assessment.

The Four Types of Marketers

• The Channel Specialist: Deep expertise in one or two channels (Google Ads, SEO, email marketing). Strong at tactical execution and optimization within their channel but may miss cross-channel opportunities and struggle to see the bigger picture. Channel specialists are invaluable for execution but need strategic direction to ensure their channel expertise is applied to the right objectives.
• The Strategist: Focuses on the big picture: customer journey, channel mix, competitive positioning, and brand strategy. Sees how pieces fit together and can design comprehensive marketing plans, but may lack the hands-on execution skills to implement their vision. Strategists excel at planning but need doers to turn plans into results.
• The Data Analyst: Driven by numbers and measurement. Excellent at identifying what is working, quantifying results, and building models that predict future performance. May struggle with creative thinking and qualitative insights that data alone cannot capture. Analysts provide the rigor that prevents gut-feeling decisions but need creative partners to generate the ideas they analyze.
• The Growth Generalist: Combines elements of all three types, understanding channels, strategy, and data well enough to connect the dots across the entire marketing function. The generalist may not be the deepest expert in any single area, but they can see patterns and opportunities that specialists miss. Growth generalists are particularly valuable as growth leads who coordinate the work of more specialized team members.

Three Approaches to CRO

Hansen identifies three distinct approaches to conversion rate optimization, each reflecting a different level of maturity and sophistication:

1. Tactical CRO: Focused on individual page elements like button colors, form field layouts, headline variations, and image selections. This is the most common starting point and produces incremental improvements. Tactical CRO is valuable but limited in its impact because it optimizes within existing structures rather than questioning them.
2. Strategic CRO: Focused on the overall user flow and journey. Instead of optimizing individual elements, strategic CRO examines the entire path from landing page to conversion and identifies where fundamental changes to the flow could produce larger improvements. This might involve rethinking the number of steps in a process, changing the information hierarchy, or redesigning the entire conversion experience.
3. Systematic CRO: Treats optimization as an ongoing, data-driven process integrated into the entire marketing and product operation. Systematic CRO is not a project with a start and end date. It is a continuous capability that runs experiments across the full customer lifecycle, builds institutional knowledge over time, and informs strategy at every level of the organization.

The Takeaway

The most effective teams combine multiple marketer types and operate at the systematic CRO level. Understanding where your team sits in this framework helps you identify skill gaps, prioritize hiring or training investments, and set realistic expectations about what your current capabilities can achieve. The progression from tactical to systematic CRO is a maturity journey. An experiment-based digital strategy helps teams advance through these levels that most organizations need to travel deliberately rather than expect to achieve overnight.