Adopting a growth marketing framework is an effective way to fast-track your transition to growth marketing – but once you’ve got a plan in place, how should you go about actually getting started?
In part one, we covered how to build a growth marketing framework. You’ve got the recipe for turbo-charged marketing. Now, in part two we explain how to bring it to life and get results
1. Align on the goal
Your North Star metric gives your company something to aim for. It’s your number one long-term goal, and the driving factor of all of your marketing efforts. But what should yours be?
The first thing to do is decide what metric is most essential to the business. Is it your revenue, leads or something closer to the top of the funnel?
From boosting customer lifetime value to increasing active usage, your North Star metric must be measurable, integral to your business’s success, and specific. After all, you could be aiming for “higher traffic” forever, whereas an objective like “10k unique users a day” will keep you on track and help you track whether you’re on target – or not.
Don’t worry about the different steps required to achieve your prospective North Star happen at this stage. During day-to-day dealings, the metric you choose will be broken down into more manageable sub-metrics that can be shared out to the relevant teams. From there, everyone on board can contribute to the North Star metric in their own way, and teams will be able to break down silo walls to collaborate effectively.
Then, with your North Star metric chosen, it’s time to work out how far away you are from meeting your goals – the gap between your current position and goal position might be smaller than you think!
Take stock of your current performance and ask yourself which metrics are both the most relevant to meeting your goal, and in greatest need of improvement to help you get there.
For example, if the business used in the example above had just completed this exercise, they would have a list of goals like “Decrease time to respond to customer queries by X%” or “Reduce returned orders by X%” – remember, these must be measurable metrics, not abstract suggestions like “Make customers happier”.
2. Prioritise experiments
You know what you want to achieve, and what needs to be done in order to get there – but how? One word: brainstorming.
Get every idea you have out of your head and into the world, whether that’s on paper or on screen. It may be a cliche, but no idea is too silly at this stage. What might initially sound ridiculous could lead you to a breakthrough, or inspire one of your colleagues to come up with a winning idea. You can build on ideas at this stage, but don’t remove or dismiss any. Get every stakeholder involved at one stage or another – again, you never know who’ll strike creative gold. Have fun with it.
- Virtual brainstorming platforms: Miro, IdeaNote, Mural, LucidSpark, Creately – or even just a shared Google Doc
- Exercises and games to boost creativity: 15 brainstorming techniques to try, 3 exercises to kickstart creative ideation, games to boost workplace productivity
Once you’ve got a solid list of ideas, you can begin to prioritise the good ones and strike off those with less potential. Just be careful not to completely delete anything, because you never know when it might be useful to come back to a previously dismissed idea. It’s also worth regularly checking in with different teams to ensure ideas are viable if you’re uncertain . What may sound like the key to boosting session duration may be unthinkably bad practice to your web developers.
But how are you meant to know if those ideas will actually work?
3. Test & Measure
Testing is quite possibly the most important step of your growth marketing framework. After all, your North Star metric and the ways in which you target it may evolve as you inch closer to your ultimate goal, so it’s not the end of the world if you don’t pin-point the perfect strategy on your first try. But, without testing, you can waste countless time pursuing ideas that don’t work out of blind faith.
These tests need to be iterative, fast, and regular. The idea is to deploy ideas quickly and test efficiently, with the goal of discovering what works best sooner. With every ‘failed’ test, you’ve learned something that you can apply to the next idea, shaping your strategy with fresh knowledge specific to your business.
Keeping on top of so many rapid experiments can become complicated. That’s where TrueNorth comes in.
TrueNorth is packed full of features to help you stay organised, focused, and effective. You can easily plan and measure marketing from one convenient platform, as well as model different scenarios against your current growth to stress-test new ideas. By being able to see the results and ROI of every campaign in one place, you’ll always have your finger on the pulse of what works, saving time by giving you an instant steer on what to do next.
Start implementing your growth marketing framework today with a free trial of TrueNorth.
