04
Prioritization
An open scrapbook that includes a sense of what we are learning and thinking about right now with our clients when it comes to growth.
“More effort is wasted doing things that don’t matter than is wasted doing things inefficiently. Elimination is the highest form of optimization”
At the very beginning of this Growth Marketing Guide, we mentioned prioritization. Now that you are armed with every tool you need to grow, let’s talk about order of priority.
To recap: we’ve spent the last sixty (or so) pages teaching you how to craft a professional growth strategy.
At a high level, a growth strategy is a list of steps of what you should do to achieve your goals.
The order in which you take these steps, ie “what you should try first,” is based on what is most likely to succeed.
It’s a prioritized to do list.
How Important is Prioritization?
At Tuff, we see too many teams doing too many low-impact things at once: get expensive creative developed, draft email newsletter blasts, prepare Instagram photos, etc. All of this movement without a real idea of whether those tasks are likely to attract real customers.
A growth strategy frees you from that hamster wheel, enabling you to methodically test every task. This ensures that your work is high quality and gives you insight into what can come off the list. Do this, and you will save a ton of time.
For small startups with product-market fit, the big challenge is to understand which marketing channels will help you grow the fastest.
Everyone’s time, money, and manpower has limits. You can’t afford to waste time on channels that have suboptimal results. Instead, you need to identify the highest ROI channel and then scale it. You do that through experimentation.
Tuff Tip
Growth marketing goals aren’t the same as “normal” marketing goals. The latter often look like revenue projections, year on year. In growth marketing, your goals are all about speed: how can we grow faster? How can we learn more quickly? When you put your tactics down on paper and prioritize them, you can quickly eliminate what won’t work, leaving room for what will work… and work fast.
Get Your Priorities Straight
If you’ve read this guide through consistently, you’re going to see the prioritization process look eerily familiar. In fact, the steps you take to form a growth marketing strategy are the same ones you revisit to prioritize it.
Prioritization Process:
Tuff Tip
Document everything you do through the prioritization process. Your foundational research is only useful if you make strategic decisions based on it. You’ll want to reference things you uncovered as you are identifying tactics and areas of optimization. Then, be sure all of your execution is carefully tracked. You’ll only see what works and what doesn’t if you’re keeping records of your efforts.
See it in action: How We Build Growth Marketing Strategies at Tuff
This article provides real-life examples from past clients and 8 steps to get you from start to finish (at which point you start over, but you’ll see why).
How Trial and Error Works
I’ve spent the past seven years working with all kinds of businesses across a range of industries to help them with growth marketing. The one consistent strategy I’ve seen add more to the bottom line than anything else is trial and error.
Trial and error, or executing then analyzing, benefits you by narrowing your vision to what makes your business money. Revenue generating activities should be prioritized. For growth marketing, you will only know which activities directly impact revenue if you test and measure. The byproduct is to give you blinders, effectively filtering out all of the noise you don’t need to care about, from the signal that indicates success.
Takeaways
“Scaling your business is hard and growth marketing is not a hat trick.”
This has been a lot. If you take it in, digest it, and use it, you will change the course of success for your business.
But you have to be dedicated to taking the process we’ve outlined. You’ll get knocked down. It’s easy to be impatient. If you have investors, deadlines, overhead, and acquisition targets, you’re going to feel pressure from all sides to produce results. You must be diligent with the process. I can’t stress that enough. Think through the steps you take, and take them in order and according to plan.
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