Growth Marketing: The 10 Pillars To An Effective Strategy

6 min readOct 19, 2016

You have a killing product?
Now you need a plan!

How to acquire customers again?
We’re going to do growth hacking!
Sounds great! How do you do that?
Hum, well…

The good news is that with a proper methodology, anyone can achieve anything!

To help startups and more established businesses launch and grow their revenue, I’ve build a canvas to craft a unique and actionable Growth Marketing Strategy (free download at the end of this article).

Below are more details about those 10 key components of a growth marketing strategy:

Who is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

Everything starts with knowing who you’re targeting. You may be familiar with personas.
To make it simple, Ideal Customer Profile is the same as Persona. It aims at describing the human behind.
Do your homework searching for ages, demographics, hobbies, position, mission…
The objective is to create homogeneous groups of people.
Give each of your profiles a picture and a name. It helps humanize the process.

Your Customers’ need, pain or problem

You need to get a deep understanding of what your customers are looking for. Interviews and questionnaire are key here.
Gather contextual elements of their need: when, where, frequency, urgency…
Highlight objections and drivers you could use afterward. The voice of your customer is here to inspire!

Buyers’ Journey Stages

As you may already guess, all your clients do not stand at the same maturity stage.
When some are already testing several solutions before they buy soon, others are still wondering what their problem really is.

This canvas is 2 dimensional.
Considering your customers’ maturity stage, lead you to build a better answer to each customer cases and educate them accordingly.

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and acknowledge.
It is composed of 3 dimensions:

Relevancy: It explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation,
Quantified value: It delivers specific benefits,
Unique differentiation: tells the customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition.

In other words, it states the How, What and Why of your business (more about the Golden Circle from Simon Sinek).

More about values

You may be familiar with the Maslow.

Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice recently came up with an enhanced pyramid of 30 different values a customer might consider when evaluating your product.

I really like this new pyramid as it is straight forward for marketers and product owners to anticipate and build the best response.
So as the study advises, make sure you fulfil several functional needs before considering higher level needs.

The Elements Of Value — Bain & Company Inc.

Offer

What can you offer to your customers to help them meet their needs?
A discount might be of any help for someone that hasn’t clearly stated his problem yet.
You need to educate them first.
Inbound Marketing is exactly what you need here.
This way of doing marketing aims at producing high-value content which serves to attract and nurture customers through the different stages of the purchase funnel.
It can be blog posts, guides, ebooks, infographics, video…

The rise of side projects

Side projects are “things” that are usually independent but related to your core business. They create/add value for your targeted audience. They help you acquire new or retain current customers.
i.e.: Buffer, a SaaS tool to automate your social media management, recommends using images to increase social engagement.
But most Marketers are usually not good designers, so Buffer came up with Pablo, a free tool to create in-minutes good quality images for your social posts.

Read this great post about Side projects.

Features

An added value can be associated with a specific feature of your product.

i.e.: integrating other solutions with yours eases the adoption process. It can also become a source of new customers acquisition (Zapier).
i.e.: if you want your customers to be rewarded for referring your product, then you have to set up a referral program feature.

Landing page

This is the place where your targeted audience will land.
Your home page is usually the generic one.
But the more you adapt to you customers’ needs and maturity stages; the more your conversion rate will increase.
Make an effort to build a specific landing page for each homogeneous group you’re targeting. You’ll be rewarded!

But the idea of “landing” is more important than “page”.
A blog post page, a Youtube channel, a Facebook page… can be considered as a landing page.
Depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Marketing Channels

Marketing channels are the websites, networks, medium… you’ll use as external levers to promote your product.
SEO, SEA, Social Networks, Outdoor Advertising, Trade Shows…
The Growth Marketing Strategy Canvas helps you draw a first list of marketing channels to test but it is not made to list them all.

To go into more details with your marketing channels, please use this additional Growth Channels Scoring Framework to brainstorm, prioritize and test channels. Bonus: you’ll find +30 channels ideas already listed.

Metrics

You’re going to make many assumptions in the canvas. That is normal.
But make sure you define the right metrics to measure your efforts.
Metrics depends on the Buyers’ Journey Stage you’re working on.

Need metrics ideas? Please refer to the Dave McClure AARRR framework.

Goals

The best way to achieve anything is to set goals.
A safe and straightforward way to define goals would be to use the very well known S.M.A.R.T method:

Specific: Precisely describe what you plan to achieve. How many signups for example.
Measurable: In the previous section you identified the KPIs to measure success. In the Tech requirements section make sure necessary tags are correctly set up.
Achievable: Try to figure out what is actually achievable. Are you going to convert 80% of your target? Probably not! It may also depend on your budget or human resources allocated to the experiment. Search for others returns on experiment.
Relevant: Is this goal aligned with your core values? Are you okay with stealing something from someone to succeed?
Time-bound: What is the deadline, the rhythm (monthly?) attached to the goal

Another well known method is OKR. It stands for Objectives and Key Results.

Invented at Intel and commonly used at Google, Twitter and Uber to set goals.