Growth is one of the most important words for the average CEO or business manager.  Even more so for a startup business looking to set itself apart as a new business, or business in high-growth mode.  The fundamental way to achieve growth is to know where the business stands, understand where the business needs to get to and distill all the tools, strategies, and concepts into something the marketing team and the entire organization can work with.

However, before we can go about establishing how a growth-focused organization (hopefully one like yours) can create a solid growth marketing framework, a good understanding of growth marketing and the growth marketing framework is first needed.

What is growth marketing?

Growth Marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that.

Growth marketing uses a full-funnel, data-driven approach. They use analytics to track progress and make decisions about where to focus their efforts. This data-driven approach allows growth marketers to be nimble and experiment with different growth marketing tactics to find the ones that work best for their business.  

Growth marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it prioritizes small hypotheses, fast experimentation, and rapid iteration over large, long-term campaigns.

 Growth marketing supports the marketing flywheel model, an update to the traditional marketing funnel model, which essentially takes an ongoing and cyclical view of marketing for growth rather than a one-off campaign approach.

 Growth marketing teams need to mix creative and technical expertise, spanning the entire growth marketing framework in order to adopt growth marketing best practices in a systematic and repeatable way in order to enable strategic, quick growth. 

The experiments run within the framework typically help teams focus on the lifetime value of a customer, as opposed to simply increasing the number of buyers. In other words, growth marketing considers which tactics can increase not only initial sales but also the value (and frequency) of future purchases.

What is the growth marketing framework?

To put it in simple terms, a growth marketing framework is a tool developed to help a business grow as quickly as possible, and in the most strategic manner. It is not just another generic marketing tactic, but a unique, ongoing approach to stimulating growth, involving critical steps that take the position of the business and where it needs to get into account.

As mentioned previously, growth marketing considers the entire business cycle as a potential lever for growth.  Now depending on the nature of the business itself, the specific framework can differ.  Just as a reminder:

A:  Acquisition

A:  Activation

R. Retention

R. Revenue

R.  Referral

This framework was created as a way of giving small companies a method by which to focus on the right metrics, and more importantly, the events/occurrences that truly impact their business’s success. By shifting a business’s focus to the channels that move the needle most at every stage, smaller companies can find a way to thrive and, in many cases, even outperform bigger competitors, by identifying the best channels to focus on by virtue of metrics such as the number of interested visitors, conversion rates, ROI, CPA etc.  This framework has allowed many businesses to maximize growth on a comparably razor-thin budget (certainly compared to their more established competitors).

Why should your business use a growth marketing framework? 

Simply put, it’s the best way to find the right marketing strategies that are highly effective for your specific business, while at the same time optimizing your marketing spending at specific points on the customer journey.

These frameworks help businesses develop data-driven marketing strategies and a sustainable approach to marketing in the long term. 

While the premise of this article is to establish how to create a growth marketing framework for your business, before establishing the framework, there is an underlying process that needs to be part of any growth marketing framework.   Let us go through that process below.

The 4 necessary elements needed for a growth marketing process to be properly implemented

1) Aligning a KPI to focus on

Without a target, your team will have nothing to aim for. That’s why this first step is all about deciding which objective your marketing efforts are working toward, what growth means to your specific organization, and flowing from that, which metric should be used to measure this.

It might seem counterintuitive to pick a single goal, but focusing on a very specific metric will streamline your iterative process and help align the team on what they must focus on. 

While many marketing teams are measured on how many leads they bring in, growth teams are just as likely to focus on metrics that are directly tied to revenue, such as ROI or ROAS.  However, this depends on the particularities of organizations and what they believe is the primary driver of revenues.

2) Prioritizing the growth marketing tactics to achieve this agreed-upon KPI

Once you have done this, align with the team on where you are now and what growth marketing tactics need to be implemented in order to achieve your target goal metric.  This involves projecting the growth needed to achieve your goal.

Agree on a target: For example, “We’ll increase traffic by X%” or “We’ll boost the traffic-to-lead conversion rate by Y%.”

 Look for ideas with the highest potential to yield the best results. Consider questions such as:

• How expensive would this idea be to implement? What’s the cost of not implementing the idea? What is the potential return?  

• Which teams within the company would be involved? Who would manage the execution?

The ideas you choose to prioritize can then be planned out and executed by the proper departments or teams in collaboration with marketing. 

3) Testing and Iterating:  

This is the most important piece of growth marketing.  Iterative testing for every chosen idea is a crucial part of this process.  What you are ultimately looking for is a high-frequency, high-turnaround approach to this process. 

Doing this allows your business to accurately pinpoint the strategies that work – and should be continued – and the ones that ultimately aren’t worth it.

4) Measuring Repeatedly and Continuously Reevaluating

On a related note, it’s important that you’re diligent in recording the result of every experiment, so that you not only know what works (or doesn’t), but can use these insights to refine your next iteration through the cycle, or to continue to test as is until a more conclusive conclusion results.  

Continue repeating this process and reevaluating old strategies that may be outdated. Growth marketing should never have a precise endpoint, rather it’s a continuous process that the whole team adopts for the long term to be successful.  This holds true regardless of what framework you adopt.

5 Steps to Creating a Growth Marketing Framework

 Now that we have established the elements needed to have as part of the growth marketing process, it is now incumbent to concretize the steps needed to create a growth marketing framework for your organization.

1) Map Out Your Overall Customer Journey and the Key Steps to Prioritize: To create a sustainable growth marketing strategy, you need to understand your customer and customer journey. Once you fully understand your customer’s journey, you can more accurately track the success metrics for your goal at each step of the AARRR growth marketing framework, and work to establish audience segments that you can establish channel-specific marketing efforts with the aim of improving ROI.

• Acquisition:  What channels are your visitors come from?

• Activation: What channels are causing people to take their first action”?

• Retention: Which channels are generating your most loyal customers?

• Referral: What channel is generating the most customer advocates?

• Revenue: Which channels are bringing the most paying customers? What is the return?  What is the CLV?

2) Set high-level goals:  Start by identifying what you want to accomplish and get specific. This goal can take many forms, but it needs to be concrete and have a clear definition of success. For example, you might have a general goal that you want more online orders from your website. But you’d have a more specific goal that allows you to determine if your marketing messaging and conversion tactics are improving or if they still need work. A better objective would be that you want to increase the order conversion rate by 10% month over month.

3) Establish those key steps to prioritize and the experiments to run at these steps

Now that you have established your best-performing channels, you want to ensure that all aspects of conversion are maximized for each specific channel.  This is done by experiments in the form of A/B and A/A tests, and which one is used depends on the size of the audience.  If emails were your top-performing channel, for example, you might A/B test your subject lines to see which one gets the most opens. Or you might A/A test an HTML-based email template vs. a plain-text template to see what your target audience responds to.

Testing in either fashion is important as it lets you accomplish two things:

• Identify any channels with more potential than you’d previously seen

• Optimize existing channels for even more conversions

4) Establishing Growth Marketing KPIs: Now that you have your high-level goal, you need to break it down by looking at which channels are leading to the highest growth and remember our conversion criteria. You’re looking for channels that:

• Perform best in terms of conversions

• Attract the highest volume of people

• Cost the least to operate

Focus on your top two or three channels to start and grow from there as your resources/bandwidth allows.   From there, you need to establish by channel current revenues, targeted revenues, the number of visits, the desired conversion rates, and average order value, among other metrics.

5) Identify Your Winning Experiments, Scale, and Repeat

Once you’ve identified your top-performing channels, it’s time to double down on your efforts.  As you scale your experiments, keep track of the results month-over-month to identify any new or shifting trends with your marketing channels.

 Having a Growth Marketing Framework in Place Is a Difference-Maker for Your Business

As mentioned, having a proper growth marketing framework in place to leverage growth at all potential avenues within your business is a tremendous equalizer for businesses trying to achieve traction in a generally crowded marketplace.  For businesses like these that are in some form or fashion at least, not established market players, any additional edge can be of infinite help. Of course, having a framework is not the be-all and end-all.  What’s even more important is that your business continuously applies this framework, by testing, evaluating, and re-testing to find as many growth avenues/angles as possible.

If you are looking for help in establishing a growth marketing framework in your organization, don’t hesitate to reach out to us anytime to book a free growth marketing consultation.  Our growth marketing experts will be more than happy to sit down with you to review your situation and see what we can do together.