OK, so you want to grow your brand and you need to lay out a plan to get to your goal.
But, you’ve no clue how to create a decent growth marketing strategy framework to help your team move forward.
What do you include? What detail is needed? Who should be tasked with what?
If you want to grow your brand, or you’ve been tasked with setting up a framework for growth strategy, this is for you.
I’ll lay out the system I’ve used to help client generate millions.
What is a growth marketing strategy framework?
In essence, it’s a high-level plan.
A plan that helps you identify the key steps you’ll need to include in your more detailed strategy.
I always like to think of it as a sort of guiding light, or rails that keep subsequent strategy planning on track.
Usually, these strategy frameworks are built around tried and tested approaches. They’re stripped back to the core steps and allow you to use them as a foundation.
A good strategy framework will look at the entire customer journey and outline what should be done at each stage to progress users to the next.
Here’s the thing.
A lot of the advice and beliefs on growth strategies and frameworks is – in my opinion – overly complex.
They might fit $1B+ companies with massive resources and reach, but for the rest of us it’s overengineered. And honestly, even those big players could benefit from simplifying things.
You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. When you come across a sales page which is trying so hard to hit all 300 use cases of a service that it becomes too unclear.
When you try to appeal to everyone, you convince no one.
Simplification and focusing on specific cohorts is key.
Not being happy with this, I’ve worked on my own approach to generating better growth which has worked for a lot of brands I’ve worked with.
The ACCER growth strategy framework
I look at growth marketing in terms of individual customer journeys.
A lot of brand will try to create a spaghetti junction-type approach to growth where they’re service dozens of different people at the same time.
It’s an exercise in futility and usually goes unnoticed when the brand is so big they’re not entirely certain where users are coming from, or they can simply lean on massive brand equity to drive sign-ups.
With ACER, I recommend my clients look to service individual cohorts and create a customer journey that helps them get the best results so they’re more likely to sign up and stay a paying customer.
I’ve written before about ACCER, but here’s an overview.
Attract
Attract is all about getting your offer in front of your users where they hang out.
That could be on a specific social media channel, through SEO if they’re avid searchers, in-person if they go to events, etc.
What you’re looking to do here is get people from where they hang out to your owned asset (like your website).
You’re not building a following on LinkedIn for the sake of having a LinkedIn following. You’re doing it because you can then direct them back to your website where they can become users and customers.
Attract is, in essence, getting people from where they are to your site.
Common Attract tactics
Some of the more popular attract methodologies include…
These are all ways for you to get your offer and brand in front of an ideal set of potential customers.
Common Attract metrics
You could just measure the success of this stage by how many people see the attraction tactic.
However, attract is more than simple impressions. You need to know how many people are seeing your tactic AND taking the action. If you know these two numbers you get a better understanding of how relevant and successful the tactic is.
So you want to be keeping an eye on the below for this stage.
- Impressions
- Click through rate
- Cost per click
Capture
The next two stages of capture and convert work kind of in tandem.
Capture is about collecting someone’s contact details so you can continue to market to them.
Think in terms of grabbing an email address so you can send marketing sequences to build trust and get them to the point where they’re ready to convert.
This is an underserved and overlooked step for many because there’s a focus on making the sale.
However, less than 5% of your customers are ready to buy right now, which means if you’re not collecting email addresses you’re missing out on 95% of your customers.
An example of a good capture mechanic can be seen in the opt-in right below this piece of text.
I use opt-ins just like this one across the site to capture email addresses of potential clients so I can nurture the relationship.
Common capture tactics
There are lots of ways for you to capture email addresses of your ideal users.
A few of the more popular methods include…
- Content upgrades (for content-led approaches)
- Free trails for SaaS
- Request for consultation for services
- Discount codes for eCom
- Gated content for B2B
All of these will require the use to hand over an email address which you can then use to nurture them towards the sale.
Common capture metrics
This is again looking at how many people see the offer and take the action you want. So you’ll be looking at…
- Impressions
- Conversion rate for lead gen
- Cost per lead
Convert
Convert is about getting people to actually pay for your offer.
Sometimes, you’ll find that the 5% of people who find your website and are ready to buy will just take the action you want them to today.
And that’s great.
If your sales page or conversion tactic is well-optimised, you’ll see some good customers trickle in.
However, it’s more likely that most of your users won’t be ready to buy and so you’ll need some form of nurture sales sequence to get them to buy.
This i usually a combination of an email series linked to a landing page. And you can speed the time it takes a person to purchase by incentivising with things like discount and deals.
Common convert tactics
This is where things can get pretty varied. Depending on your audience, offer, pricing etc. you could end up with any number of conversion tactics.
Some of the most common I’ve seen and worked on include…
- Simple sales pages (great for low-threat offers)
- Sales calls/consultations (great for higher priced offers)
- Email sales sequences (good for nurturing people towards one of the two above)
- Video sales letters a great addition to a model that’s mid-priced
You can see an example fo a sales page that I use to successfully sell my Growth Model Audits here.
Here you’re really looking to allay the fears and remove objections of the ideal user.
So, you need to focus on the channel and approach that will best help allay those fears.
Common convert metrics
Here you’re looking to make some actual money. So that’s going to be a core focus of the measurement.
Generally speaking, you’ll; be measuring…
- Impressions / number of people who go through this stage
- Number of sales
- Cost per acquisition
Engage
Once you’ve got the sale, don’t think you’re done. Hol doff on running to the boozer and grabbing a celebratory pint.
You have to keep your new customers engaged with the product.
Engagement is key because 90% of users who use an app even once per week will stick around.
Your job is to keep your users logging back in or using your offer as often as possible so they keep on paying you.
Email is often a good way to do this as you can contact them through a channel they check frequently and incentivise them to come back to your offer.
Common engage tactics
The tactics here require on you actually knowing your users and what they find useful in the offer.
One of the strategies I’ve had great results with in the past is something I call the “highest engagement feature”.
in short, you find the feature or use case of your app the majority of your top users rely on and promote it to new users. When they come into the offer, you onboard them by highlighting that feature.
It’s a proven feature that gets a win, which is what helps keep them around and paying.
Other general tactics include…
- Emails with changes in their reporting and key learnings from their usage
- Highest engagement feature onboarding
- Updates on their results
Common engage metrics
On the base of it you want to keep people engaged with things like log ins and open rates of messages.
however, those are micro-conversions here. You really want to focus on what they do for the product.
For that, you’ll wan to look at the entire customer journey including.
- Email opens and CTR
- DAUs / MAUs
- Frequency of log in
- Highest used features and revenue-driving uses
- Churn rate (this is the most important you NEED to lower this)
Refer
Refer is all about turning your current users into advocates of your brand.
Depending on how you organise your referral, you can use this step for multiple ends.
- You can have people share about your offer in groups or on social to increase brand recognition.
- You can have them send invites to friends to try it out
- You can turn power users into affiliates and have them promote your offer for you
There’s lots of ways to get this done.
the key thing here is you need to get your existing users and fans to talk about or promote you to other people within their network. This creates a network effect which, if done well, can lead to exponential growth.
I did a study of Clubhouse and talked about how their invitation-only referral mechanic worked so well for this.
Each person was given 2 invites for their friends which led to insane growth.
Common refer tactics
There’s lots of ways to get people to refer others to your app and it really depends on the goal of the campaign.
However, one thing you’re going to need without question is an incentive to take the referral action.
People won’t promote your brand for free. As such, the tactics here are about finding the right incentive. A couple of popular tactics include…
- Sharing key screens/results of your app to grow the user’s platform (“look how much my traffic has grow” with an Ahrefs dashboard type thing)
- Sharing with friends for an extension of trial, discount, or free usage
- Bringing in new customers on an affiliate basis where they get a % of the fee their referred people spend with you
Common refer metrics
As for the metrics here, you’re going to find that 90% of your referrers drive little to no real results.
10% of the people who are in your referral program will give you nearly all of the results.
What you’re looking to measure here is the effectiveness of each person within the channel. You’ll also want to keep an eye on the effectiveness of referrals as a whole to make sure you’re not wasting time and resources by creating a referral campaign that doesn’t gel with your audience.
So let’s break this down by the two areas of referral campaign and referrers for metrics.
Referral campaign
- CPA (specifically through referrals)
- Impressions from referrals
- Conversion rate (leads and customers) from referrals
Individual referrers
- Impressions from that referrer
- Conversions from that referrer
- New customers from that referrer
By focusing on the strategy as a whole you’ll understand if there’s a fundamental problem ith the incentive or funnel.
By focusing on the individual referrers, you’ll be able to find your power referrers so you can reach out and double down with them.
Summing up the growth marketing strategy framework
So, that’s the overview of the growth marketing strategy framework.
You’re basically going to need to create a plan that covers those 5 key growth stages.
You need to come up with a basic plan of how you’re going to…
- Attract ideal customers
- Capture their details
- Convert them to users
- Engage them to keep them with you
- Get them to refer their friends and followers
This is step one though.
This is not a full strategy. If you want to build this into a growth marketing strategy, you’re going to need to look more deeply at the individual stages and figure out which levers you need to pull and devise individual approaches to do that.
If you want help doing that, you’ve two options.
- Apply for a growth audit from yours truly
- Read this article on building a growth marketing strategy (and then apply for a growth audit) 😉