Simplistic Growth Marketing Framework

This is the framework I use for launching and growing a product or service to the market. I've outlined it all in 9 steps. If your solution is ready and not sure how to go about getting it out there, follow these simple steps to deliver the growth you seek.

1. Identify the target market
2. Develop a value proposition
3. Build a website or a landing page
4. Establish a presence on ''carefully'' selected (ie: matching) social media channels
5. Create and distribute content
6. Optimize marketing & distribution channels
7. Experiment and launch paid ads
8. Track, analyse, drive insights from performance metrics
9. Build a lab to drive continuous growth

If you are good with the outlined steps above, get started now. If you need any help with each step or fancy some tips, stay on this page to explore the greater depths. Let’s go!

Identifying The Target Market

There is a problem and you have the solution. It’s exactly where you begin with identifying your target market. If there is no solution to provide, what are you even planning to market? Back to your drawing board!

Identifying the target market is the most important step before launching any product. If you are able to pin point who you are serving, this will provide you with a huge advantage. Knowing who to sell, their pain points and of-course how you can help them are some of the top three pieces of tasks you will work on in this first step.

Simply, write down your who, what and how?

Who to sell? : Home owners

What's their pain point? : The stress and panic caused by leaky water pipes

How I can help them? : I've created a product that can bond with any type of water pipes used at homes and stops the leak in under 10 seconds to stop flooding, allow consumers to use their water and give them required time to call a plumber for a permanent fix.

Developing A  Value Proposition

Whenever we hear the word ''value proposition'' it sounds super cringe doesn't it? Well let's ignore that and focus on what do we need to do at this step. Define the problem and define how your business solves it. It's that simple! On that note, most people usually gets carried away preparing this to explain themselves. So much so, the longer it gets the less effective it becomes. So as a good tip, try to keep it as simple and as short as possible.

What's my value proposition?

A burst pipe is such a headache for home owners. My product can temporarily fix the leak within 10 seconds by simply wrapping the cracked water pipe with it and allow consumers the much needed time to call a plumber.

Building A Website

This barely needs any explanation but I will still go a little in detail to emphasise how important it is to have a website.

Think of your website or your landing page as a 24/7 operating sales agent or a portfolio that is available to anyone on the Earth. Of-course you might not be selling globally but it will still have the maximum reach advantage from the day 1.

A website with compounding benefit of every activity you will do to promote your business, will benefit and grow. This will bring you a continuous growth opportunity and sales enablement. A website has to have all of the required elements on it to be a smooth operator.

For the beginning though, keep it as simple as possible. Add new modules as required. This will keep things under control and help you understand the drivers of growth with ease.

Demonstrate your solution, list of clients, details about your offering, host your content, display pricing or place a button to receive contacts.

Establishing A Social Media Presence

In an ideal world you don't want to miss out on reaching potential customers. You want maximum number of sales. You want to be the alpha in your competition. You want to be on every single platform to show how big and dominant you are.

Why you shouldn’t be everywhere?

No business starts with an unlimited budget. That also doesn't just mean money. Workforce, time, focus, brain power and more... It's best to choose a social media channel that is super relevant to who you are and most importantly who your customers are. If your customers as you identified in step 1 hang around on a specific social media channel, it would be a false economy to go with another social media channel just because you used it before.

Simple rule with a social media presence is that you’ve got to be who you are. Don’t fake it. Have your branding established, tone of voice set, message crafted. Stick to it.

Remain consistent, grow gradually, be social and not KPI driven. Although every single person secretly cares about number of likes or followers, essentially what matters is the ability to strike a conversation. It’s your little super power. When you post something, can you trigger an interest to talk about your post amongst your followers? If yes, you are on a roller!

How many more social profiles do you need?

Like I wrote before, ideally every one of them! No, actually just don’t. Arguably, launching your social channels on a maximum of three platforms is a good start. Why?

• Your target audience are probably not that wide spread and very active on more than three sites
• Your competitors are probably not trying to be on tens of social media sites
• You don’t have unlimited workforce and cash available
• You can’t be super patient forever.

Spending your extra time to optimise a few social channels is much better than volume driven approach which falls flat and provides a dull taste. Rise and shine on one to three. Think about leveraging to more after.

Create & Distribute Content

Simplistic yet powerful way to create content

When creating content it’s important to plan what you expect from your content to do. Focus on content that contributes to your value proposition. This allows a powerful and simple content strategy to form. Yo don’t need to turn into a complete expert on a topic as well. If the main focus of your content is to help your potential customers to learn something new that could help them with their issue and your tool fits in there like a glove to help them making their life much easier, you are on a winner.

Enhance the content using various mediums such as photos, animations, videos, infographics etc. Package it well and make sure it's easy to read with little to no jargon. Convert into various formats and then deliver straight to your audience.

Steer away from being a news outlet.

Companies often find themselves leaning towards sharing latest news in their area. However, if there is no direct connection to your core value proposition it’s often a distraction to your customers. Remember, the reason our business exists is to make money. If your content adds friction and drops conversion, despite the fact that you might be getting some hits to your site, it is not the best investment.

I don’t always rule out newsy content though. There are ways to benefit from the heat of fresh news capturing attention. I will be exploring the techniques for this on another post. If anything is newsy and it’s super related to what you offer, bring your insight and your expert view to share it with your customers. That will separate you from other news outlets. I would still keep the newsy content under control and not let it exceed 20% of your output.

Main content structure

In a nutshell, content has to have a structure that starts from the main value proposition. What you create has to connect with your main reason you exist. Yes you guessed it right, main reason  to stick to is the solution you have for a problem you are proposing to solve.

You could explore how you solve the problem, who you are solving it for, what it means to solve it, what does your customers achieve by solving it etc etc…

You are creating mediums that connect closer and closer to your target audience. No human brain can see the second step with ease but we are all focusing on the exact thing, exact answer for our question. When you create mediums that come closer and closer to being the second step us humans look for, you connect and you convert. Your content then works to do its job.

Optimize Marketing & Distribution Channels

Setting up your distribution and running various marketing channels is a great start to promote your business via content you create. However, if these channels run inefficiently, you are not only wasting valuable time but also missing out valuable sales. It's often little to no effort to do basic optimisation which will flag up many glitches to be sorted. Optimisation will deliver smoother operations and reflect in your performance metrics.

Look up the best practices for the channels you operate. Make sure you stand out well.

Each channel could have tens if not hundreds of little bits and bobs to pay attention to. From the content length to using hashtags creatively, from image sizes to the time your post goes live…

Quality > Quantity

I’ve got to admit. This is not always the case. Also, in many cases you’ve got to hit hard on quantity to get to the quality you desire. I will have to keep it short here and do another post on that topic to explore the approach and framework I use.

The main reason I like focusing on quality is nothing to do with perfection. In fact it’s about making sure you have basics done right. Having at least one way of quality check in place will help you big time.

Add to all that, if you are producing shite,  you would rather make sure your next post is less shite.

Ignorance for quality improvement is a fast killer of any business.

Avoiding big risks

Build a checklist for the beginning and for consistency thereafter. Make sure the different formats of content you create goes through it and passes. This will reduce the risks to a minimum. By that I am talking about reputation management, confused branding, alienating existing customers etc…

Experiment & Launch Paid Ads

Despite paid ads might not be everyone's cuppa, I will keep it as a top level step of my framework. Why? Paid Ads even if you are not 100% sure can do wonders. Paid Ads could be a cheaper alternative to validate a business model. It can deliver in no time and help you hit your targets much quicker.

Best way to do Paid Ads is to start small, test, improve and scale up.

Track, Analyse, Drive Insights From Performance Metrics

Just as it says on the title, it's a must to be able to see how does your business perform. Otherwise you have no idea if things are going well or not.

I would not worry too much about the early days when there are barely anyone visiting or purchasing but as you start building up the marketing channels you will want to keep a close eye on how everything is performing.

Set necessary performance metrics which you can drive insights from. You might not need 300x individual metrics for a small business but at least know your top level KPIs that associate with your activities. Define, track, measure, review, optimise.

Setting up the tracking tools early on is a great approach but as I noted earlier don’t waste huge amount of time waiting for a scroll depth to hit 75% when only 10 people are visiting a page.

Build a Lab for Growth

Okay, I don't mean a real laboratory. An imaginary one will do. At least the mentality of an inventor who messes in a lab. You want to become an experimental geek to drive growth. Where else you can experiment the best other than a lab, right? What should a lab provide?

• Innovation
• Curiosity
• Materials
• Fire extinguisher (well things will go wrong and crying won't help.)
• An atmosphere that sees failure as being a step closer to success

Growth is about experimenting and scaling up the experiments to deliver what works and eliminate what doesn't. In a lab we don't do blames or point out mistakes as a discouragement.

Yes that's it. This is my framework for growth marketing of a product or a service that is launching into its market. Hope it helps.

Before you shoot off, another good read would be is ''Why testing an idea before implementation is not enough?''