In 2009, having recently expanded operations from San Francisco to New York, AirBnB were failing to increase bookings and were heading towards bankruptcy. The founders went to New York and spoke with hundreds of hosts in a last-ditch effort to save the business, and came away with a hunch. The hunch was turned into a hypothesis, tested quickly, proved correct, and to this day is widely attributed to the transformation of AirBnB into a household brand and one of the world's most valuable companies.

This article dives deep into how to build a library of high-quality marketing ideas in order to achieve your business goals. It also explains why smart people don't consciously choose to do low-impact work, but often spend their time doing exactly that.

Avoiding low impact work

Clearly, our time is best spent on high-impact work. Typically we aim to focus on the stuff that is high impact but requires little effort first (the quick wins) before moving onto that which is high impact but requires more effort (the bigger projects).

There is plenty of evidence to suggest prioritising work in this way leads to a better work-life balance, reduces stress and helps teams focus.

Source

Clearly most people do not actively choose to work on low-impact work, though if you look inside many organisations and marketing teams, a lot of time is spent here.

Why?

The first rule of prioritisation - no snacking

A conversation between two Silicon Valley heavyweights (Des Traynor and Hunter Walk) resulted in one of the best explanations as to the challenge, and the magnetic pull, of low-effort low-impact work.

Source

In reference to the quadrant above, and the prioritisation of work in general, Hunter Walk noted:

"The high-effort, high-impact work reflects the strategy you’re deliberately deploying. Everyone’s favourite quadrant is the low-effort, high-impact stuff. But when you continually pick the low-hanging fruit, the branches will stop growing, so this work dries up quickly as your team matures. Most [companies] are sensible enough to avoid the high-effort, low-impact work, so it’s the last quadrant that’s worth talking about.

It’s the low-effort, low-impact work that can kill you, because it’s so attractive. Hunter refers to it as “snacking”. It feels rewarding and can solve a short-term problem, but if you never eat anything of substance you’ll suffer.

This work is easy to justify because “it only took 30 minutes”. And when it achieves nothing useful, it’s easy to excuse because it “took us so little time”. This is not strategy – this is flapping. Do this enough times and you’ll grow a low-impact team that doesn’t achieve anything.

The default position for a smart team without a clear plan is to snack."

Source: The first rule of prioritisation

Good marketing ideas aren't enough

For marketing teams to be effective, the challenge is therefore knowing what is high-impact work. Put simply - out of the hundreds of things you or your team could work on today, what is likely to have the biggest impact on your objectives?

Let's assume we work for a B2B technology company. We know 20% of people that sign up for our online sales demo convert to paying customers, so our objective for the year (our north star metric) is to increase the number of demo requests coming through our website.

Our team has followed best practices to come up with good experiment ideas, and we have a list of 50 marketing activities we could work on, including:

1. Running Google ads promoting content to target customers with a demo request CTA

2. Adding a demo request button to the header navigation of the website

3. Including the demo request action in a short nurture sequence after people download gated content

4. Using pop-up modals instead of inline forms to increase conversions

5. Running an ABM campaign to an existing vertical promoting relevant content with a demo CTA

These are all excellent ideas, but there are 50 of them in total.

Which are the high-impact ones?

What should we work on first?

Without some kind of prediction as to the outcome, it is impossible to know. Without some kind of prediction as to the outcome, it is impossible to prioritise work.

What is a growth hypothesis?

Modern marketing teams at companies like HubSpot, IBM, LinkedIn, Slack, and Amazon operate in largely the same way as the scientific method you likely studied at school - driven by data, process, and experimentation. The scientific method has been in use since the 1600s largely as a systematic way to acquire new knowledge.

These teams form hypotheses before testing new ideas. The hypothesis outlines what you expect to happen and why.

Once a clear hypothesis exists, it can then be tested and proved right or wrong before analysing the results.

The benefits of a growth hypothesis

As the first step in the process, a good hypothesis is the key to a high-impact, high-performance marketing team.

A good growth hypothesis:

1. Is based on some kind of research or data

2. Clearly explains how the idea aligns with the team objective

3. Is testable

4. Helps with gathering marketing insights

5. Allows a team to assess the likely impact of an idea and therefore to prioritise high-impact work.

From a good to great hypothesis

A great growth hypothesis is based on some kind of research or data. Great hypotheses aren’t random.

Great growth hypotheses are based on analysis or observation of some kind of data. This can be quantitative or qualitative data but is preferably data you have gathered about your users (known as first-party data).

Here are examples of popular data sources for growth hypotheses:

• Previous experiments: Quantitative, First Party

• Analytics Data: Quantitative, First Party (Google Analytics, FullStory, CrazyEgg)

• Surveys, Support emails, User surveys & other customer data: Qualitative, First Party

• Competitor Observation: Qualitative, Secondary

• Blogs & Industry benchmark data: Qualitative, Secondary