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The Growth Marketing guide – everything we’ve learned

Article originally published in September 2022 by Stuart Brameld. Most recent update in March 2023.

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Having worked with businesses from 5 to 5000+ employees over the last 3 years, and with almost 1500 marketing ideas and experiments in the Growth Method platform, we’ve put together this guide based on everything we’ve learned so far on our journey.

What is included in our growth marketing guide?

The guide consolidates the systems, frameworks and thinking from many of our growth marketing articles into a more easily digestible format. We cover the core topic areas below with links to over 20 additional articles written by our team:

  1. What is growth marketing?
  2. Why you need growth marketing
  3. The growth marketing process
  4. How to build a performance marketing culture
  5. Growth marketing software platforms
  6. The best growth marketing resources on the web

What is growth marketing?

Most of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries from antibiotics and water purification to breakthroughs in agriculture and sanitation, owe themselves to the scientific method – the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation. This basic process involves making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and analysing the results.

Perversely, the method of progress and discovery employed by many marketing teams today is to place big bets on big ideas, largely based on faith, and with no hypothesis or prediction of the likely outcome.

However, the world’s fastest growing companies, digitally native companies like HubSpot, LinkedIn, Atlassian and Slack are taking a very different approach. They all use the exact same process to run their marketing and growth teams. A process known as Growth Marketing.

Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a more rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results. It is a system, or framework, for running marketing teams optimised for growth.

Put simply, growth marketing is where the scientific method and marketing collide.

For more information see our article on What is Growth Marketing?

Why you need growth marketing?

Growth marketing helps companies move away from the big bet culture of traditional campaigns and brand marketing practises in favour of a rigorous process that guarantees impact and predictable results.

There are 5 problems with traditional marketing teams that the growth marketing process is designed to solve:

  1. Intelligent decisions are not based on assumptions or gut feel
  2. What works for others is not going to work for you
  3. Growth is the sum of a lot of small parts
  4. The effectiveness of all marketing tactics decreases over time
  5. Every marketing team has finite resources and needs to optimise for efficiency

1 Intelligent decisions are not based on assumptions or gut feel

Traditional marketing teams decide what to do based on assumptions, gut-feel, or the highest-paid person’s opinion (aka the HiPPO, for short). Every time you or your team makes a guess, you are introducing bias and risk into what you do.

The best marketing teams put tests out into the wild and let the user, their actions and the data from those actions inform their next steps. 

2 What works for others is not going to work for you

Copying what your competitors are doing, or what you see other companies doing online is not a strategy. There is no “one-size-fits-all” advice when it comes to scaling marketing.

You need a process to find the unique combination of things that are going to work for your business.

3 Growth is the sum of a lot of small parts

There is no one thing that will alter the trajectory of your marketing efforts or dramatically increase results. Implementing the latest marketing tactic or “growth hack” is unlikely to have any material impact on your business long term. There are no silver bullets.

The most successful marketing teams achieve success through a continued focus, execution and optimisation of activity that builds momentum over time.

4 The effectiveness of all marketing tactics decreases over time

The first ever banner ad debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78%. Clearly, nobody is getting that kind of clickthrough rate today.

First ever banner ad on HotWired in 1994

The window of effectiveness for specific tactics and strategies within any given platform decreases over time. As new tactics become adopted widely the effectiveness of that new tactic starts to diminish rapidly. This is consistent with the Sigmoid (or S-curve) which states that everything in life begins, thrives, declines and dies.

Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

The impact to marketers is an ever increase rise in customer acquisition cost (CAC).

5 Every marketing team has finite resources and needs to optimise for efficiency

We live in a world with finite resources and unlimited expectations of results. A good marketing strategy helps to ensure marketing resources are allocated to the areas where you can gain competitive advantage.

For more information see the section in this article on why you need a growth marketing strategy.

The growth marketing process

The growth marketing process is a scientific approach largely based on agile best practises. The 7-step process is outlined below:

  1. Set goals
  2. Research ideas
  3. Prioritise ideas
  4. Run experiments
  5. Analyse results
  6. Build assets & flywheels

1 Set goals

Having the best team, optimised processes and a world-leading technology stack doesn’t matter if the marketing team aren’t working towards a common goal.

Whatever you call them – KPIs, OKRs, North Star Metric (NSM), the One Metric That Matters (OMTM) – uniting a marketing function behind a common goal is one of the most high-leverage activities for a marketing leader. Aim to get as close to revenue as possible with metrics such as marketing qualified leads, late-stage pipeline or revenue, and avoid vanity metrics such as impressions, clicks and visitors.

Depending on your core traction channels, your KPIs may be channel specific (such as number of leads from organic search) or channel agnostic (such as marketing qualified leads). Early growth teams with lower traffic volumes may find it useful to focus on engagement metrics over conversion metrics initially.

2 Research ideas

Ideas are the leading input to the entire growth marketing process, they are the rocket fuel for growth. Without a consistent, steady pipeline of ideas there’s a lesser chance your team will make an impact because there’s less to test and learn from.

Find high quality experiment ideas through continuous research into your users and the barriers in your user experience. Customer insights can be gathered from a range of different sources such as:

  1. Analytics tools
  2. User testing
  3. Polls
  4. Chat logs
  5. Surveys
  6. Customer interviews
  7. Sales interviews
  8. Industry and competitor research

For more information see our article on where to find high quality growth experiment ideas.

3 Prioritise ideas

Every marketing team is resource constrained. For marketing teams to be effective, they must be able to accurately identify and focus on high impact work. Ask yourself – 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?

The only way to known this is to store ideas in a consistent format in one place, and to prioritise them effectively. As the productivity guru David Allen once said “Your head is for having ideas not for holding them”.

Growth teams use a standardised idea template to build a database full of growth insights and hypotheses ready to be prioritised and tested in accordance with your growth KPIs (see next step).

For more information see our article on marketing hypothesis best practises and high impact work.

Where companies have traditionally used opinions and archaic decision-making processes to place bets on a handful of unproven ideas, growth marketing teams adopt a more quantitative approach to uncover high impact work. Growth marketing teams use prioritisation frameworks such as the ICE framework, PIE framework or RICE framework.

Early on for new growth marketing teams, the goal is to prioritise the quick wins – those tests that are quick to run and high impact. The “low hanging fruit”. Clearly, over time, there will become less of these. Equally important is to ignore the HiPPO effect.

Remember, the primary goal of marketing is to increase sales and revenue, not to publish blog posts, create a corporate video, update the Intranet or help plan the company’s 10th birthday celebration. Align your team to work on the things that matter.

4 Run experiments

Waterfall project management and task-based systems evolved during the era of mass production and the 2nd industrial revolution and work best for predictable, frequently recurring projects (such as car manufacturing, tobacco and steel production).

However, modern marketing teams operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty and constant change. Customers and audiences are changing, experiences and expectations are changing, acquisition channels are changing, company strategy and messaging is changing. In this kind of environment your marketing plan very quickly becomes less of a “plan” and more a case of “build it and see what happens”.

The most common outcome when using waterfall project planning in conditions of uncertainty is the successful execution of a bad plan, or what Eric Ries refers to as “achieving failure”. The campaign is on time, on budget and beautifully executed with all planning and tasks completed perfectly. Regular updates show everything to be on-track, and yet the end result is no increase in leads or revenue.

The solution is to adopt an agile approach, an an incremental and iterative approach to project delivery. Keep our checklist below on-hand to help.

For more information see our articles on why marketing project management is more important than your tech stack and Steven Bartlett on building a culture of experimentation.

5 Analyse results

Every experiment is an opportunity to learn more about your customers and successful growth teams understand the more they learn about their customers, the more they will succeed.

“Every experiment you run should be designed so that, no matter the outcome, you learn something”

Chris Goward, GO Group Digital & WiderFunnel

It’s ok to fail. Failures aren’t really failures at all, rather hypotheses are proven wrong – which is hugely valuable. In many cases, failed experiments can deliver insights that end up having a much larger business impact than the initial successes.

Focus on learnings over results. For more detail on this topic, see marketing experiment analysis & understanding your experiment results and I need you to fail more, a guest post from Laura Perrott.

6 Build assets & flywheels

Many marketing teams today are still structured around the idea of marketing campaigns. When running a marketing campaign teams see a temporary boost in key metrics but, in most cases, those metrics fall back to where they started once the effects of the campaign have worn off. There is no compounding, or flywheel effect.

Speak with any successful growth team leader and you will quickly discover that success lies in making small, consistent, incremental improvements that get amplified over time in unimaginable ways.

There are no magic bullets or hacks to growth, it is about building systems that compound in order to create flywheel marketing. The best growth marketing teams achieve success by continually improving systems, assets and activities that deliver value over time.

We’ll summarise each of these steps below, but for more detail see the 6-step growth marketing process explained and compound interest & flywheel marketing.

How to implement a growth marketing culture

The People, Process, Technology framework (aka the “golden triangle”) is widely used to describe the key elements of a successful company or team.

People

Good growth marketers typically have a wide base level of knowledge, covering everything from user and behavioural psychology to data and analytics, as well as a deeper knowledge in one or two areas well-suited to growth marketing.

Seek to hire T-shaped or Pi-shaped marketers, particularly for more early-stage or smaller marketing teams. You can hire an agency but focus primarily on building in-house expertise.

Process

Though it’s not sexy, some of the world’s most successful marketing and growth leaders talk more about process than about anything else.

Growth has nothing to do with tactics, and everything to do with process.

Brian Balfour, VP of Growth @ Hubspot

Break-down large projects into smaller testable ideas that can be improved upon and scaled after they have been proven to be successful. Running marketing activities in an agile manner and employing iterative processes has become an essential characteristic of modern growth teams.

Avoid the outputs over outcomes trap where time is spent creating and assigning tasks, responding to notifications, joining team calls and communicating status updates. This is work about work (aka busywork) and doesn’t help achieve your primary goal, or to build confidence in the marketing function.

The best marketing teams achieve success by continually improving systems, assets and activities that deliver value over time. Your goal is to build a repeatable acquisition strategy using assets and activities that can be continuously tweaked and improved to achieve compounding results over time.

For more information see our articles on a guide to the minimum viable test (MVT) for marketers & marketing teams and compounding interest and flywheel marketing.

Technology

AB testing

have a good understand of conversion rates, traffic, mqls, mqls etc

Growth marketing software platforms

Software

https://growthmethod.com/marketing-project-management-software/

Our platform helps businesses build a performance marketing culture and grow in-house capability resulting in reduced costs and improved efficiency and results. We do this through a purpose built agile project management tool, supplemented with consultancy.

We have a number of marketing core principles we believe in, that may help you decide if we are likely to be a good fit.

If you’re wanting to build a growth marketing machine, a marketing function optimised for growth, you’re likely to agree with most of them.

https://growthmethod.com/growthhackers-experiments/ or https://growthmethod.com/airtable-growth-marketing/

or https://growthmethod.com/growth-experiment-template/

The best growth marketing resources

  1. Growth marketing experts
  2. Growth marketing agencies
  3. Growth hacking services
  4. Growth hacking books
  5. Growth marketing courses
  6. Growth marketing podcasts (coming soon)