As a marketer, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with where to start when it comes to growth marketing. Long-term goals are often drowned out by endless lists of tasks.
Data is all over the place. And valuable time is wasted manually reporting on and justifying decisions, instead of executing.
And you might be familiar with some of these other marketing challenges:
- Trouble tracking and managing goals properly
- Difficulty agreeing on priorities across your team
- A lack of time and resources for marketing management
The good news is that your marketing efforts don’t have to live in walled-off tools or spreadsheets anymore. Using a tool that focuses on collaboration will help your team to win the growth marketing game.
This will help your marketing department to better leverage their time and focus on the bigger picture. You’ll also be able to more effectively manage your growth-driving campaigns and projects.
Redefining Growth Marketing
Growth marketing is known for being experimental and agile, but a misconception has emerged that growth marketing’s test and learn approach is nothing more than a series of quick wins.
The truth is that what wins in growth marketing is being data-driven. In fact, the most successful teams live and die by their growth marketing metrics. Which leads us to the question: How can you excel with growth marketing?
Your business needs a growth marketing platform that has the infrastructure to plan, test, and measure in one place. With this, your team has a blueprint to test frequently, learn quickly, and adapt effectively. The result? Long-term, sustainable growth.
What Is TrueNorth? Built for marketers, by marketers, TrueNorth centralises: • Where you’re aiming, by guiding your team with a growth projection. • How you’ll get there, by prioritising marketing ideas with data. • What you plan to do, by enabling you to plan, test, and measure in one place. • Understand what happened, by capturing results in a single source of truth. Try TrueNorth for free >>>
Marketing strategies such as SEO, paid advertising, CRO, and email marketing become the pillars in which marketers can specifically and routinely gather data and make improvements.
With a tool like TrueNorth, you’ll be able to incorporate growth marketing practices that can be hypothesised, tested, analysed and optimised. Your ROI is in the data-driven insights that allow your marketing to be more customer-focused.
How to Use TrueNorth in 7 Steps
Now that you know what TrueNorth is and how it can help your team, we’re going to share 7 simple steps you can take to excel with growth marketing this year.
1. Align your planned activity
TrueNorth Features Used: Growth Projections and Timelines
The first thing we recommend is adding all of the marketing activities you have planned for the next 30 days to your TrueNorth account. The quickest way to do this is by importing your campaigns through our Google Analytics integration.
This will detect everything from your Google Ads campaigns to LinkedIn Ads and much more. You can click on any of them to see all of the data we’ve been able to fetch for that campaign.
You can then manually add any additional campaigns or marketing activity that wasn’t pulled through from GA. After that, you can add goals for each campaign, so you’re really clear on what you can expect every campaign to deliver.
Finally, all that’s left to do is organise your campaigns – you can easily group by channel and add any necessary information, like the expected budget.
2. Set goals and make projections
TrueNorth Features Used: Growth Projections
Next, it’s time to overlay your objectives. This will help your team to stay on track and tie results back to marketing activity.
To set up your goals, you need to go to the Growth tab. When you first visit this page, you’ll be asked to produce a growth projection. This only takes a couple of minutes and will unlock a tonne of features.
You’ll need to enter your most recent funnel data to set a goal. For example, to increase MQLs from 500 to 1500 per month by June 2023.
TrueNorth then automatically creates an interactive growth projection chart. You can click into any month to see a breakdown of your funnel and the metrics you need to stay on track. You can even adjust parameters to see how they’ll affect milestones.
3. Plan how you’ll deliver growth
TrueNorth Feature Used: Experiments and Ideation
The direction is now set. You know where you need to get to. Your next step is to work out how you’re going to deliver that growth. This is where we recommend inviting your team.
The best way to do this is to create an ideation session.
Essentially, this is like a virtual brainstorming session. Your team can share their ideas about how you might achieve the different milestones.
You can ask your team to each submit a specific number of ideas to a set deadline. Each one will receive an email inviting them to TrueNorth, which will take them straight to the ideation session page.
Once all ideas are in, you can then go through and “score” each idea based on the Impact, Confidence, and Ease method. ICE is a quick and easy way to understand where to focus energies and prioritise ideas.
4. Launch your marketing plan
TrueNorth Features Used: Growth Projections and Timeline
While you prepare to hit your first milestone, you can take “hope and see” out of the equation by discovering whether your planned activity is enough to hit your milestone ahead of time.
You can make any final adjustments and use milestones to calibrate your activity and spending. Once you have made any final adjustments, it’s time to plan your timeline.
TrueNorth’s interactive timeline tool allows you to plot campaigns by channel, allocate spend and owner, and you can even link it to live data to visualise how your marketing plan is performing in real-time.
The best bit? You can track campaigns without jumping between tools by pulling in your campaigns across channels with TrueNorth’s integrations. This allows you to see the big picture and campaign-level performance in one view.
5. Run marketing experiments
TrueNorth Features Used: Experiments and Ideation
Once your plan is in action, it’s time to build a culture of data-led testing to confirm the most effective ways to guide your audience to the next stage of the funnel.
It’s key here to run regular ideation sessions with your team to prioritise the right ideas. Testing in TrueNorth allows everyone to have the opportunity to discuss and add comments to ideas.
You can even stay one step ahead with ideation alerts. This works when you connect your growth projections and progress data. TrueNorth then provides tailored suggestions to help you stay on track.
Plus, the ideation tool allows you to build a backlog of ideas before you need them, which allows you to respond rapidly to any drops in performance.
6. Check in at key milestones
TrueNorth Features Used: Growth Projections and Ideation
Milestones set marketing plan tactics into practical, concrete terms with real metrics, budgets, deadlines, and management responsibilities. They are essential to your ongoing plan vs. actual marketing analysis.
That’s why milestones are a core part of TrueNorth and are essential for tracking progress. It’s all about making marketing as simple as possible by connecting goals and tasks with milestones.
By regularly checking in with your key milestones, you can stay aware of any problems and course-correct along the way. To do this, go to your Growth Projections and click on the interactive chart to see if you are on track.
As things move so quickly in marketing, we recommend you do this every two weeks. You can then run an ideation session with your team to generate the best ideas to move the needle.
7. Track and measure results
TrueNorth Feature Used: Results
Last but not least, with a tool like TrueNorth, you can finally show the value of marketing. How?
The Results feature allows you to gain a clearer picture of what works with every campaign you run, ensuring that your marketing improves with time.
Where most reporting and analytics tools are full of vanity metrics, TrueNorth focuses on the most crucial data. This enables you to take action on what to start and stop to hit your goals faster.
You’ll be able to track growth against projections, pull in results from third-party applications, and track actual results against ad spend.
A scientific approach to marketing provides an avenue to scale. Data can highlight issues, as well as areas to replicate. You can then leverage results to expand your team, budget, technology, and processes.
How to Hit Growth Marketing Goals
At the end of the day, growth marketing is all about replicating problem-solving, and controlled tests to deduce meaningful insights and create enhanced products or services.
Achieving this through a multitude of tools and spreadsheets is a recipe for disaster. TrueNorth is the best growth marketing platform to plan and track marketing in one place, with everything and everyone focused on the same goal.
There is great power in being able to capture everything in one place and not lose track of exactly what needs to be done, who’s doing what, or miss any deadlines.
By leveraging TrueNorth, you’ll be able to gain more time to start testing and trying new things that will take your business to the next level. We make getting started incredibly easy and frictionless – give TrueNorth a try for free today!
