“Our 2023 marketing strategy is to invest in Twitter organic, Linkedin paid ads, content marketing, SEO and email”.

Some practitioners call this spray and pray marketing, Emily Kramer calls it random acts of marketing.

Whatever you call it, this isn’t a growth marketing strategy, this is a list of random tactics and channels. The worst marketing scenario is when you don’t have a clear direction. We often find a lack of strategy is most evident in companies that have little or no channel discipline. Omni-channel marketing is a terrible idea in general, largely peddled by consulting firms. If you’re not talking about trade-offs, its probably not a strategy.

Why would you diversify to something unproven when you haven’t taken full advantage of something that is already working?

Channel focus

Study some of the world’s best successful companies, and you will see a pattern whereby 90% of their growth came from 10% of the things they tried.

Similarly, whilst an early-stage marketing team requires a diversified portfolio of marketing bets, over time your goal is to find your one big growth lever.

ONE.

The “One Thing” is how founders like Peter Thiel & Jeff Bezos have built so many incredible teams. Here is our acquisition channel rule of thumb:

Business Size	Acquisition Channels
Small business or startup	1
Medium business	2
Large enterprise	3

Startups and small businesses should focus on a single workhorse channel whilst larger enterprise companies should have a maximum of 3 core workhorse acquisition channels, depending on the size of the team. Power laws and the Pareto principle apply to marketing too.

“Products mostly have one or two major growth channels, which they optimize into perfection”

Andrew Chen, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Experimentation focus

No good marketing team will ever be short of ideas. Most companies are great coming up with ideas but have an incredibly inefficient engine for prioritising and testing them. This lack of process and prioritisation often results in working on the wrong marketing activities.

What separates the good from the great is knowing where to focus in that sea of ideas. Thus being aligned to revenue requires ruthless prioritisation and a focus on only those activities that are most likely to lead to tangible growth for the business. This is a significant mindset shift from the busywork that occupies the resources of many marketing teams.

Every has opinions and ideas, and all experience creates bias. Use a prioritisation framework such as ICE or RICE as a forcing function to make the right decisions and allow you to say no. If a new idea falls below a certain score and threshold, move it out of the way in order to declutter your workspace.

Prioritisation is the answer to knowing what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. Do what’s important, not what’s urgent. Your goal is to find the areas where can you get the most leverage from what you have. When can small inputs result in outsized results?

“Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Iterative testing

Most marketing channels and tactics take time to work to their full potential. Good iterative testing requires both research and strategic thinking.

Teams that jump from one initiative to the next miss out on the really good results because they stop investing too soon. Chasing shiny objects makes iterative testing and continuous improvement impossible as you’ll never have a solid foundation to build on.

A new shiny object can easily consume an individual for a month yet deliver very little. Do this 12 times, and you’ve lost a whole year.

To summarise

Average marketing teams are average because they try to do everything. World class marketing teams are world leading because they’re laser focused on a small number of areas that are critical for the company to grow.

Focus is arguably the single biggest lever in your growth marketing strategy. Constant shuffling priorities stalls progress, frustrates teams and creates an environment of uncertainty.

Growth marketing teams create impact when they have a clear strategy that dictates the small number of things that matter for them to win.

Think of your marketing team as portfolio management, constantly placing strategic bets. How do you balance your portfolio in a way that is likely to deliver the best return.

At PayPal, Peter Thiel said the best thing he did as a manager was to “make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing”. Jeff Bezos called this ‘Single threaded leadership’ at Amazon. One clear owner for each critical initiative. They’d be reviewed solely for their performance against that initiative.

Growth marketing strategy principles