We live in a time of abundant growth potential. However, the same proliferation of marketing channels, data and activities that create this growth potential can make it difficult to prioritise marketing budgets and efforts. Marketers are spoilt for choice and drowning in data. And that can be more crippling than enabling.
Modern companies that unlock growth rates impossible only a couple of decades ago all have one thing in common. They design and manage a Marketing Growth Engine - a system at the heart of their business that consistently produces compounding performance. In this post we’ll give a brief overview of the key components to a Marketing Growth Engine and how you can begin applying them to your business.
A Marketing Growth Engine is made of five core components: 1) your growth model, 2) marketing activities, 3) data infrastructure, 4) understanding and ideas.
1) Your Growth Model: The Blueprint
Your Growth Model is an abstract representation of how your business grows. It’s different for every company and represents how customers are acquired, activated, retained and monetised.
Your Growth Model sits a the heart of your Marketing Growth Engine as it answer questions like:
Which metrics best predict my business’ long-term success?
Which marketing activities cause these metrics to change and how?
How do all of my disparate marketing activities fit together?
Where should I focus my efforts for the best Return on Marketing Investment?
2) Marketing Activities: The Fuel
Every engine needs fuel, Marketing Growth Engine’s are fueled by your marketing activities - the content, campaigns, promotions and product enhancements that are distributed via owned, earned and paid channels.
Marketing activities tend to fall in four categories: always on, optimisations, trials and big bets. The different types of activities have different risk and reward profiles and it’s important to have a mix of the different activities at any given time to ensure you’re building on proven activities whilst able to identify new opportunities.
3) Data Infrastructure: The Dashboard
The data representation of a Marketing Growth Engine looks different from the standard marketing and analytics dashboards we swim in everyday. It is a representation of the growth model and includes forecasting and scenario modelling as well as historical data.
Critically, the visualisation breaks down every activity and channel that acquires, activates, retains and monetises your customers. It also knits together like a financial model so you can identify which activities could have outweighed returns through scenario modelling.
By constantly comparing the expectations you have (your forecasts) with actual results, your marketing team gets consistently better at understanding which activities drive results. It’s also increasingly easier to pick opportunities and issues, allowing you to be far more nimble with how you manage your team’s focus.
4) Understanding & Ideas: Your Driver
The heart of any business or marketing team is its people. In that way a Marketing Growth Engine is nothing without the people producing the marketing activities, analysing why something did/didn’t work and coming up with new ideas.
When developing a Marketing Growth Engine it’s important to understand and design a cadence of team interaction to consistently bring together: an understanding of what is working; ideas of what to do next.
Typically these interactions happen within three different cadences:
Ongoing dip-dive: usually weekly meetings aimed at reviewing and optimising performance
Ad hoc deep-dive: usually every few months and dedicated to a particular new opportunity to take advantage of or issue to resolve
Planning: at least annually or supplemented with semi-annual reviews.
Conclusion
Building a Marketing Growth Engine is no mean feat. However, it helps marketers navigate an increasingly complex and opportunity rich marketing landscape. We’ll continue to dig deeper into each of the topics covered in this post over the coming months.
Have you built a Marketing Growth Engine or do you have any questions? Get in touch!
