You gotta execute!
Right? You gotta DO marketing.
“If you’re not executing early and often, you can’t drive growth.”
Sure, but what a massively partial truth!
The fact is growth does not come from tactics. It’s been a painful lesson for many of us. But growth comes from process.
You might roll your eyes at that one – it’s ok.
For the record though, we’re not talking about process in the sense of just some generically “organized approach” to marketing.
We’re talking about a proven five-step growth process designed to let marketing teams learn the fastests in the most impactful areas of growth for the business.
And bear with us as we look at a few questions every marketer can relate to:
1. How do we know our teams are working on the most important things right now?
Like, really – what method are we using to evaluate importance and potential impact? Can we actually quantify it? Are we going beyond our or somebody else’s gut?
2. How did we decide on doing the things we’re currently doing in the first place?
We all know the list of options, right? Are we starting with content? SEO? Running paid? Are we going deep enough in any of them or are we spreading our efforts too thinly?
3. What exactly have we learned this year and how is it helping us now?
Isn’t it enough to look at the results of our campaigns and programs? Why can’t we just do more of “what’s working” and less of what’s not? Aren’t we all seeing the data?
It doesn’t just add up on its own.
Which is why a growth process is needed.
Here are the five steps we go through:
I. Growth Hypothesis
We look at where we believe the growth is really going to come from with an eye towards potential for unlocking sustainable growth.
II. Focus
We decide on either optimizing or expanding an existing growth hypothesis or validating one and then gear up to run a 30-90 day sprint.
III. Build Ideas
We brainstorm across experiment type, channel and input metric and rank potential experiments based on ICE score (impact, confidence, ease).
IV. Compile Learnings
We obsess over capturing learnings to avoid lost learnings at all costs – it’s all about understanding how we do relative to the hypothesis.
V. Report & Improve
We track number of experiments and success rates to improve the process on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to see how we can learn even more.
The growth process ensures that we’re learning as much as we possibly can about the most impactful areas for growth so we can make sure the team is always doing the most impactful work. All towards sustainable growth for the business.
The biggest misconception around growth is that it’s about doing. But the hard lesson is that it’s about doing the right things. And that’s always less obvious than we’d like to think.
Speed to learning what matters most is the biggest competitive edge.
Check this post from our CEO for more details.