The Best Growth Marketing Resources for Scaling Companies
Most “best growth marketing resources” lists are written for people who want to become marketers. This one isn’t.
This is for founders and marketing leads at companies doing $1M-$10M who need to understand growth marketing well enough to build systems, hire the right people, and evaluate whether what they’re paying for is actually working.
You don’t need a 40-hour course on Facebook ads. You need to understand what a growth system looks like, how the pieces fit together, and what to prioritise when everything feels urgent.
Every resource on this list has been tested in real growth builds. Not academic exercises. Real companies, real revenue, real results.
Books That Change How You Think About Growth
“Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
If you read one book about growth marketing, read this one. It lays out 19 traction channels and, more importantly, a framework for testing which channels work for your specific business.
The key insight: most founders pick a growth channel based on familiarity, not data. They run Facebook ads because they’ve run Facebook ads before, not because it’s the best channel for their business. Traction gives you a systematic way to test channels cheaply before committing budget.
Best for: Founders who feel stuck in one or two channels and need to think broader.
“Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford
This is the best book on positioning I’ve come across. Dunford argues that most companies fail at marketing not because their product is bad, but because their positioning is wrong. They’re trying to compete in a category where they’ll always lose, instead of creating or reframing the category so they win.
The framework is practical: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target market, market category. Work through those five things and your entire marketing gets sharper. We’ve written a full guide on how to write a value proposition that converts if you want to go deeper.
Best for: Companies whose marketing messages feel generic and aren’t cutting through.
“The 1-Page Marketing Plan” by Allan Dib
Strips marketing planning down to its basics. Before, during, and after the sale. It’s structured around a simple grid that forces clarity on who you’re targeting, what your message is, and how you’re reaching them.
Not deep on any one topic, but excellent at giving you the complete picture of what a marketing system should look like. I’ve used this framework with clients who had zero marketing structure and needed to build from scratch.
Best for: Companies that have never had a proper marketing plan and need a starting framework.
“Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller
Miller’s point is simple: your customer is the hero, not your company. Your company is the guide. This framework changes how you write every page of your website, every email, and every sales conversation.
The book is strongest on messaging and weakest on implementation, but the mental model is worth the read. Once you start seeing your customer as the hero and your brand as the guide, your copy gets clearer overnight.
Best for: Companies whose marketing is too focused on themselves and not enough on their customer’s problem.
“Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
This one gives you the mechanics of running a growth team. How to structure experiments, build a growth backlog, prioritise tests, and create a culture of testing. Less about what to do and more about how to build the machine that figures out what to do.
The early chapters on product-market fit are solid too. If you’re not sure whether you have it yet, start there before investing in growth infrastructure.
Best for: Companies with a marketing team that needs a system for running and measuring experiments.
Frameworks Worth Understanding
The AARRR (Pirate Metrics) Framework
Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral. Created by Dave McClure, this is the foundation of how most growth teams think about the customer journey.
The power of this framework isn’t the stages themselves. It’s the discipline of measuring each one independently. Most companies measure acquisition and revenue but ignore everything in between. The gap between acquisition and revenue is where most growth dies.
How to use it: Map your current metrics at each stage. Find the biggest drop-off. That’s your highest-leverage growth opportunity right now.
The Growth Models ACCER Framework
This is the framework we use at Growth Models. Attract, Capture, Convert, Engage, Refer. Similar to AARRR but structured around buildable assets rather than metrics.
Each stage gets one core asset: a traffic engine, a lead capture mechanism, a conversion sequence, an engagement system, and a referral loop. When all five are working, the system compounds. Most companies are missing at least two of these entirely.
How to use it: Audit your current marketing against the five stages. Where you have no asset, that’s where the system breaks. The 90-Day Growth Stack builds all five.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
Created by Clayton Christensen, JTBD reframes how you think about your customer. Instead of asking “who is our customer?” it asks “what job is our customer hiring our product to do?”
This changes everything about your messaging. A customer doesn’t buy a growth marketing service. They buy predictable revenue. They buy getting their time back. They buy not being dependent on agencies. The job they’re hiring you for is rarely the literal thing you sell.
How to use it: Interview your best customers. Ask “what was happening in your business when you decided to buy?” The answer reveals the real job they hired you for.
Tools That Actually Matter
There are thousands of marketing tools. Most of them solve problems you don’t have yet. Here’s what companies at $1M-$10M actually need.
Analytics and Measurement
Google Analytics 4 + Google Search Console — Free and non-negotiable. GA4 for site behaviour, Search Console for organic search performance. If you’re not using both, you’re flying blind.
Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity — Heatmaps and session recordings. Watching real people use your site teaches you more in an hour than a month of analytics dashboards. Clarity is free. Hotjar has a generous free tier.
Email Marketing
ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign — For most companies at this stage, one of these covers everything you need. ConvertKit is simpler and better for creator-led businesses. ActiveCampaign is more powerful for complex automation sequences.
The tool matters less than the strategy. An email system that segments properly, triggers based on behaviour, and nurtures leads through a defined sequence will outperform any tool upgrade.
CRM
HubSpot (free tier) or Pipedrive — You need somewhere to track leads that isn’t a spreadsheet. HubSpot’s free CRM is surprisingly capable. Pipedrive is more focused on sales pipeline management and easier to learn.
Landing Pages
Your own website — Don’t build landing pages on a separate platform unless you have to. Every page on a third-party tool is a page you don’t fully control and can’t optimise as freely. Build landing pages in your CMS. If your CMS can’t handle good landing pages, that’s the problem to solve first.
SEO
Ahrefs or Semrush — For keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink monitoring. These aren’t cheap, but if organic search is part of your growth plan, one of them is worth the investment. Ahrefs is stronger on backlinks and content analysis. Semrush is stronger on keyword research and competitive intelligence.
AI Tools
ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — For research acceleration, competitive analysis, customer language mining, and content structuring. Not for writing your final copy. For doing the thinking work faster so your human-written output is better.
I use all of ther AI tools I can get my hands on pretty heavily.
And while they all have their benefits, personally, I’m finding Claude Code to be the best all rounder. It’s something I’ve used to cut thousands of dollars in SaaS subscriptions and get higher quality work done in a fraction of the time.
This is, of course, right now at the time of writing. This is going to change as new models are released and this AI service war rages on.
So just keep an eye on what tool is being improved and focuses on the problem you want solved.
Newsletters Worth Reading
Lenny’s Newsletter
Focused on product and growth for B2B SaaS but useful for any company thinking systematically about growth. Deep, tactical, specific.
Growth.Design
Case studies that break down real products’ UX and growth flows using illustrated walkthroughs. Teaches you to see the psychology behind growth decisions.
Demand Curve
Tactical growth marketing advice. More actionable than most newsletters. Good for getting specific ideas you can test quickly.
Podcasts for the Drive
“My First Million” (Sam Parr and Shaan Puri)
Less about marketing tactics, more about business opportunities and growth thinking. Useful for founders who need to think bigger about what’s possible.
“Marketing Against the Grain” (HubSpot)
Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan discussing marketing trends and strategies. Good for staying current without the hype.
“Everyone Hates Marketers” (Louis Grenier)
No-BS marketing conversations. Grenier asks the uncomfortable questions that most podcast hosts avoid. Good for cutting through the marketing echo chamber.
What to Skip
Generic marketing courses. Most teach you how to be a marketer, not how to build a marketing system for your company. If you’re a founder at $1M-$10M, you don’t need to learn how to run Facebook ads yourself. You need to understand what a growth system looks like so you can evaluate the people you hire to build it.
Anything that promises a “hack” or “secret.” Growth marketing isn’t about tricks. It’s about building infrastructure that compounds. Hacks stop working. Systems keep running.
Guru-led masterminds. If the person selling the mastermind makes more money from the mastermind than from the thing they’re teaching, the incentives are wrong.
Tool-specific courses. Don’t take a course on “how to use HubSpot.” Read the documentation. Tool skills are commodities. Strategic thinking is not.
Where to Start
If you’re a founder at $1M-$10M and marketing feels like a mess, here’s the reading order I’d recommend:
- “Obviously Awesome” — Fix your positioning first. Everything else gets easier.
- “Traction” — Figure out which channels to invest in.
- “The 1-Page Marketing Plan” — Build the overall structure.
- Map your ACCER framework — Identify which stages have no asset built.
- Set up GA4, Search Console, and a heatmap tool — Start measuring.
Those five steps will give you more clarity than 90% of the marketing consultants you could hire. You can see real examples of what these frameworks produce in practice on our case studies page.
And if you’d rather skip the reading and have someone build the whole thing for you, get a free Growth Audit. We’ll diagnose where the system is broken and map what it would take to fix it. You keep the audit whether you work with us or not.
