“Growth has nothing to do with tactics and has everything to do with process. Silver bullets don’t exist, you need a growth machine.”

Brian Balfour

Look inside many functions within a business – sales, finance, research & development, IT – there is often a process discipline that doesn’t exist in traditional marketing teams. Conversely, look behind the curtain at any success growth team and you’ll discover a team committed to executing the scientific method – a systematic approach to understanding phenomena through observation, experimentation, and hypothesis testing.

If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

W. Edwards Deming

Reducing uncertainty through experimentation

Many marketing teams operate in a haphazard way, flinging ideas and tactics around like spaghetti trying to see what will stick with no overarching plan – another blog post, another feature announcement, another ad campaign. This is no way to generate long-term growth in a predictable, reliable way. In fact, it actively prevents it.

The combination of your business, your product and your customers is unique. What worked for someone else, at another company, with a different target audience isn’t automatically going to work for you. Applying most marketing advice and tactics found online often leads to more chaos, more spaghetti on the wall.

The real problem is a lack of strategy and process. The experimentation process provides marketers an opportunity to challenge assumptions and reduces battles of opinions in favour of empirical evaluation.

Process process process

As a growth team you should aim to refine your processes around every element of growth, including:

• Ideation
• Work prioritisation
• Experiment design
• Experiment cycle time (we recommend 28 days)
• Continuous improvement and iteration
• Stakeholder engagement
• Weekly, monthly and quarterly growth meetings
• Documentation and reporting

There are many ways to manage your growth marketing system though email is not a business system and is definitely not a way to manage a marketing or growth team. Clearly we have a preference for our own tool, but there are many. See our marketing project management software review for more information.

To summarise

Marketing teams often hear about tactics online and jump from one to another one. They can even get trapped in the “hack loophole”, trying to find that elusive silver bullet (spoiler alert – silver bullets don’t exist in life, or in growth).

There are no quick wins or silver bullets when it comes to growth. Adopting new tactics and technology isn’t the answer. Successful growth teams apply discipline and rigour to every aspect of the marketing oraganisation.

Growth marketing strategy principles