In the same way that products and services need to be updated over time to stay relevant, your marketing also needs updating to keep reaching the right buyers.
With a growth marketing approach, your team can continuously experiment with different strategies and channels, helping you optimise your marketing spend for the tactics that are actually effective.
Growth marketing can accelerate a company’s trajectory – but it only works when done properly. And to effectively carry out a growth marketing strategy, you need a growth marketing framework.
Why your business needs a growth marketing framework
A growth marketing framework helps to adopt growth marketing best practices in a systematic and repeatable way so that you can grow strategically and quickly.
The experiments run within the framework typically help teams focus on the lifetime value of a customer, as opposed to simply increasing the number of buyers. In other words, growth marketing considers which tactics can increase not only initial sales but also the value (and frequency) of future purchases.
Why should you use a growth marketing framework? Because it’s the best way to find the right marketing strategies that are highly effective for your specific business, while at the same time optimising your marketing spend.
These frameworks help businesses develop data-driven marketing strategies and a sustainable approach to marketing in the long-term.
The growth marketing framework
There are countless ways to approach growth marketing, but our team has honed our own 4-step framework over the years that is both highly effective and simple to replicate. Step one is about deciding where; two is the how; three is the what, and four measures the result that improves the whole cycle. Let’s break it down:
Step 1: Align
Without a target, your team will have nothing to aim for. That’s why this first step is all about deciding which objective your marketing is working toward and what growth means to your specific organisation.
It might seem counterintuitive to pick a single goal; but focusing down to a very specific goal will streamline your iterative process and help align the team on the most important thing.
Which goal should you choose? It depends. While many marketing teams are measured on how many leads they bring in, growth teams are more likely to focus on metrics closer to revenue.
Whichever metric your team picks, it will be used to guide the rest of your growth marketing decisions – so take the time to choose wisely.
Next, align with the team on where you are now and what metrics need to be achieved to deliver your goal. This involves projecting the growth needed to achieve your goal.
Agree on a target: For example, “We’ll increase traffic by X%” or “We’ll boost the traffic-to-lead conversion rate by Y%.”
Step 2: Prioritise
Now comes the fun part – the creative process of coming up with ideas for how to achieve your growth goals through marketing.
Some ideas may have already come up naturally during the first two steps. As you add to them, think through your weaknesses as a business and how you can turn those into opportunities. Remember that the best ideation sessions are pure brainstorming – meaning you shouldn’t analyze, criticise, or remove any ideas from the list yet. Hopefully you’ll end up with a whole laundry list of ideas for how to optimise your goal metric, and then it’s time to start prioritising.
Look for ideas with the highest potential to yield the best results. Consider questions such as:
- How expensive would this idea be to implement? What’s the cost of not implementing the idea?
- Which teams within the company would be involved? Who would manage the execution?
- How much time would it take? How much time are we wasting without the fix?
- What level of growth do we forecast with this idea? Is the benefit worth it?
The ideas you choose to prioritise can then be planned out and executed by the proper departments or teams.
Step 3: Test
Here’s the most important piece of growth marketing: Testing. Iterative testing for every chosen idea is a crucial part of this process, and the goal is a high-frequency, high-velocity approach.
Deploying ideas quickly makes your experiments shake out insights more quickly, so you can pinpoint the strategies that work – and should be continued – and the ones that aren’t worth it.
Step 4: Measure
One of the most crucial parts of growth marketing is that it is evidence-based. Every experiment or test has an associated result, free of fluff, opinion or vanity metrics.
It’s important that you’re diligent in recording the result of every experiment, so that you not only know what works (or doesn’t), but you can use these insights to refine your next iteration through the cycle.
Only by centralising your results are you able to move quickly and effectively through the focus, prioritise, test, measure loop.
Continue repeating this process and reevaluating old strategies that may be outdated. Growth marketing doesn’t have an endpoint; it’s a continuous process that the whole team adopts for the long-term to be successful.
Your growth marketing stack
As you utilise your growth marketing framework, it’s helpful to have the right tools that enable you to be successful.
For years we tried to run growth marketing in a tangle of spreadsheets, docs and project management tools. It quickly became apparent that this fragmentation not only slowed us down, but created misalignment.
That’s why we built our own platform, TrueNorth.
TrueNorth pulls together all of your ideas, experiments, and their performance under one roof. The platform also connects all of this to a growth projection. Most teams set goals, but visualising how that breaks down can be difficult. TrueNorth is the only tool that helps teams visualise the path from where they are now to achieving their goal. We enable them to test out different “What if?” scenarios, like “What if we spend more on traffic?” or “What if we focused on increasing our conversion rate instead?”
TrueNorth can enable your team to implement your growth marketing framework and hit your growth objectives with fewer headaches. We cover how to get started with your growth marketing framework (and TrueNorth) in more detail in part two.
