Imagine going to your pantry and finding only 3 ingredients: eggs, milk, sugar. After lamenting that you didn’t make it to the grocery store, you put on your creative recipe hat (or ask Chat GPT) and realize you can make a couple of very different dishes:
- A Custard
- Whisk together a few eggs, a lot of milk, and some sugar.
- Gently cook over low heat until it thickens into a smooth, creamy dessert.
- The outcome is a sweet, silky custard.
- Scrambled Eggs
- Whisk the eggs with a little milk, skip the sugar.
- Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly.
- The outcome is soft, fluffy scrambled eggs.
Of course you also need some tools: a heat source, a pan, a whisk, and a spatula—but the interesting part is that you can get very different results with a limited number of ingredients by changing the proportions and the method.
What does this have to do with growth marketing program success?
Growth marketing programs are similar in that there are really a limited number of base “ingredients” or activities that need to be creatively used together in different recipes to get the outcome you are looking for. Many companies get wound up in complexity, but at its core, a growth marketing program has a recipe and 3 main ingredients:
- GTM and program strategy (the recipe)
- Content
- Paid Media
- Digital Experience
You may argue that I’ve left some ingredients off. For example, physical events can be very helpful, but as we learned during the pandemic, they are not strictly necessary for success. More like the icing than the cake. Corporate Communications (earned media, brand, PR, analyst relations) is a partner and part of a full campaign design but traditionally additional to the scope of responsibility of growth marketing.
Is it my recipe or my ingredients? How to tell what’s going wrong.
Just like a custard can become sweet, runny scrambled eggs if there is too much heat too quickly, growth marketing programs can fail when the balance of ingredients and the method are not correct.
Let’s look at how this plays out in some representative and common scenarios.
Example 1: Good recipe—for a different outcome.
Your software company has specialized in selling to large, complex enterprises. It has been successfully selling a limited number of very large deals with a lot of customization services. In order to grow, the company has decided to package up a skinny, “out of the box” version of the software to sell to smaller (commercial) companies and is looking to sell to many more companies. You turned to your trusty GTM playbook and got to work—but your campaign is not delivering the same kind of results you usually get.
When selling a new solution to a new account, Marketing’s job is to evangelize. It’s tempting to use an existing playbook for this. Once you find a method that works it seems logical to use it as frequently as possible. Even recognizing this is a different audience and a largely different solution, companies will turn to the old playbook due to a lack of time or experience.
The solution is, not surprisingly, to revise your GTM strategy and program plan (the recipe), starting with your audience segmentation. Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have your audience segmented and have you isolated the specific segment you are working on?
- Do you know the personas in the buying group?
- Are you aware of market and competitive conditions?
- Have you mapped all the marketing activities targeting each buying group member and checked for dead ends and out-dated content or over-rotation into a single channel?
| Why isn’t my growth marketing program delivering? | |
| Scenario | Sell a new solution to a new account |
| Marketing’s job | Evangelize |
| Most common growth marketing mistake | Using your existing playbook. |
| The growth marketing fix | Revise your GTM strategy and program plan (the recipe), starting with your audience segmentation, to ensure that for each member of this buying group, there are no disconnects, poor activation choices, digital dead ends and over-engineering. |
Example 2: Underperforming media starts a chain reaction.
Let’s look at another typical scenario: The C-suite of your professional services company has determined that new logo growth is the highest priority for the year and charged you with increasing pipeline—and given you a 20% increase in paid media budget to do it with. You increased your spend across your regular channels, but are not seeing comparable returns.
Diagnosing issues with ingredients can be challenging—but if your paid media results are going down and your approach hasn’t changed, you can bet that’s part of the problem. New logo acquisition is always on the menu and because of that, and the amount of setup time and tuning paid media requires, it can easily end up as “set it and forget it”: stale, repetitive and underperforming.
The fix involves taking a more strategic approach to your media planning. This may mean getting more precise with your targeting, leveraging a more sophisticated mix of channels—including often ignored niche opportunities in industry publications or product review sites—or paying more attention to mid-funnel conversion (versus top of funnel awareness).
| Why isn’t my growth marketing program delivering? | |
| Scenario | Sell an existing solution to a new account. |
| Marketing’s job | Provoke, progress and accelerate new buyers. |
| Most common growth marketing mistake | “Set it and forget it” media strategy |
| The growth marketing fix | Paid media creativity: Bust out of the status quo and take calculated risks, shifting budgets, ad creatives, and platforms or vendors quickly based on the results. |
Example 3: Untuned content leaves your target buyers out.
Your company just finalized its last strategic acquisition and now has an interesting and unique product portfolio of a solution that is complementary to your main solution area. Your customers know and value you in your current line of solutions—but this is new. Your strategy includes targeting existing customers with ads, emails and content offers related to the new solution—but these tactics are not delivering interest. Why?
The most common culprit in this scenario is content and messaging. Your existing customers know you and want to feel known by you. When you approach them with messaging and content designed for a net new audience, the best case scenario is they’ll ignore it because it’s not for them. Worse, your customers may feel like you’re pulling away from investment in the products they’ve already bought and worry they’ll be left high and dry with an outdated solution (and start looking for companies they feel are committed to that original solution).
The solution here is to build a content strategy for this audience: a set of decisions about what assets are required to tell all the parts of your story and to answer the questions a buyer will have in their mind at each stage of their buying journey. How will you show empathy and understanding of the clients needs? What will the client review to get more information? How do you leverage the good experiences they have had with you into trust in this new area?
This strategy should not only guide the format and topics of the assets you create, but their delivery mechanisms (e.g. delivered by sales, through in-product messaging, directly to clients via email or trade shows) and the website and landing page experiences that will help them continue the journey with your brand.
| Why isn’t my growth marketing program delivering? | |
| Scenario | Sell a new solution to an existing account |
| Marketing’s job | Make an introduction. |
| Most common growth marketing mistake | Content and messaging treat the customer like strangers rather than part of the family. |
| The growth marketing fix | Create a targeted content strategy that considers the best messaging, topics, formats, delivery mechanisms and experience for this buyer’s journey. |
Putting it all together: Diagnosing your growth program problem.
Looking at the examples above, it’s easy to see how the problem could have been some other part of the package. Poor engagement might be due to ad placements or creatives. It could mean your content isn’t interesting enough, or that it doesn’t match expectations set in the ad. Or it might mean the buyer hit a dead end when they got to your site—that there was no obvious path for self-serve exploration.
A big part of diagnosing the challenge is not assuming you already know which ingredient is the problem, but looking at all the ingredients carefully for gaps.
When your campaign or program isn’t delivering the results you expect, you can bet that either the recipe is wrong, or one of these key ingredients is not delivering.
Here are some basic diagnostic steps that anyone can take:
1. Identify your desired outcome.
Just the act of writing this down with a little more specificity can really help. “Get more leads” is too broad. Get what kind of leads for what solution under what conditions needs to be articulated crisply.
2. Define Marketing’s job.
Once the problem is isolated, identify what Marketing must do (stating the outcome). Is the job to create breakfast or dessert? You can’t define your recipe without that information.
3. Look for areas that haven’t gotten enough attention.
Clear reflection is much harder, but using a simple checklist and rating yourself on each item is a good starting point. Download this checklist.
The Iron Horse insight.
One of my favorite recipe sites is the New York Times Cooking site. The site is easy to use and the recipes are great—but probably my favorite feature is the user notes provided by those who are experienced in cooking the recipe. These are little ingredient tweaks, substitution suggestions and method/measurement adjustments based on the outcome they want.
Marketing programs are no different. Use a GTM strategy and 3 key activities as your starting point. Find the tweaks that work for your unique situation by asking experts with experience.
