4 Impact over activity
Article written by
Stuart Brameld
A growth marketing strategy should prioritise impact over activity, which typically means being aligned to business revenue.
Impact over activity
Outcomes of outputs
Results oriented
At Growth Method we believe every marketing function should contribute to revenue and should be part of the core revenue engine, alongside sales.
“Position marketing as a strategic growth lever for the company. Know the math for how $1 invested in marketing yields a multiplier for the company in revenue.
Sarah Franklin, CMO at Salesforce
Failure to do this dilutes the value marketing contributes to the organisation, erodes trust with the marketing org, and creates misalignment between marketing leadership and other C-level executives.
Choose impact-focused goals
This is done by ensuring your growth marketing strategy includes goals that prioritise impact and outcomes over activity and outputs.
Poor vanity marketing goals:
Keyword rankings
Traffic
Ad clicks
Content published
Forms submitted
Campaigns launched
Good business relevant marketing goals:
Leads
Demos
Trial signups
Opportunities
Sales pipeline
Closed won sales
Marketing goals should be both quantitative and aligned to revenue. For example "Generate 500 marketing qualified leads per month that convert to sales qualified at 25% or more". Conversely "do activity X" or "launch feature Y" should not be marketing goals.
This doesn't mean that it's not important to monitor other outputs, such as experiment velocity, but your primary goal should be focused on business outcomes.
Prioritise impact-focused work
Focusing on impact requires using some kind of prioritisation framework to ensure resources are directed towards the ideas and activities that are likely to have the biggest impact on the teams objectives and KPIs.
"Your primary job is to execute your strategy to the fullest, spending the most-possible time on the most-impactful thing. If an idea is less impactful, yet also quicker to achieve, that is not the right choice. When things go worse than planned, that “less impact” turns into “incremental impact,” and you cannot spend half a year on something so trivial."
The key here is to avoid the appearance of productivity - shipping blog posts, updating designs, running campaigns - as well as the low-effort, low-impact work (aka snacking).
The well-used phrase "work smarter, not harder" is particularly pertinent here. But be aware, maximising impact is harder than you think.
Avoid waste
From a systems theory perspective a marketing organisation is designed to take transform inputs (people, technology and assets) into outputs (leads and revenue) with as little waste as possible.
In a factory, waste includes defective units and wasted materials. In a marketing organisation, these are designs that never get used, website updates that don't deliver results, blog posts that don't generate views or leads.
Completing every marketing request and every new idea leads to incremental improvement at best, but more commonly little improvement at all. Your team should determine the best way to drive growth and win (your growth marketing strategy), set goals to aligned to that strategy, educate the company on your priorities, and then execute on your plans. A scattergun approach to marketing (aka random acts of marketing) is the best way to kill a marketing team.
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything
Warren Buffett
Build the discipline to avoid shiny objects - the thing the exec heard on a podcast, the new product your friend started using, the functionality your competitors just launched, the Slack request you got at midnight.
To summarise
Growth marketing teams should have clear and measurable goals focused on business and revenue outcomes. Everyone on the team should be able to clearly articulate what the goal is, which stage of the funnel the focus is currently on and why, and how success is measured.
Growth team members should take pride in, and be able to articulate their business impact when required, for example "I shipped 12 experiments last quarter, 6 of them were winners resulting in an estimated incremental $2M in revenue".
Tip: As a growth team you should broadcast growth and experiment news to your entire company on a constant basis. Share learnings, wins, opportunities, what's in progress. Do whatever you can to generate awareness, excitement, interest and buy-in.
7 Principles of Effective Growth
Article written by
Stuart Brameld