“What do we do with our unlimited budget?” said no marketer ever.

The competition for marketing dollars has never been more intense. Even with multi-million dollar budgets, marketing channels compete for finite resources: influencers, podcast ads, YouTube videos, billboards, direct mail...where do you even start?

The answer is: with your customers. Understand where your best customers came from and how they got there. Talk to them. Study them. Get your hands on sales data and existing channel performance. Without knowing where your highest-value customers came from, you’ll be hard-pressed to attract new ones.

Getting a lot of referrals? Great. Your product is selling itself. Consider creating an incentive so more of your happy customers tell their friends about your product.

Lackluster sales from your recent influencer marketing campaign? Bummer. Maybe they weren’t the right influencers. Or maybe that channel shouldn’t be a part of your marketing mix. Run experiments on lower-cost channels like email or Instagram to stress test those insights before making another big influencer push.

There are infinite opportunities and strategies your team can pursue. The question is: what’s the best use of your time and effort?

This guide is designed for busy teams who need a framework to prioritize how to spend time and resources for maximum impact. We’ll start by emphasizing the importance of collecting and synthesizing data to guide your decisions. Then you’ll want to evaluate your company’s performance within the market landscape. From there, we’ll walk through a prioritization exercise to help your team rank what to tackle first. This will give you structure and clarity around where your team’s time is best spent.

First, a note on data:

Your strategy is only as good as your data

Engineers talk about technical debt. It’s when you build messy code on top of messy code which requires expensive rework over time.

Marketers should think about data debt. When your marketing analytics are messy (or nonexistent!) you have few signals telling you where to invest. Some examples:

Google analytics not hooked up to your website
Product data that isn’t shared back to marketing teams
Sales calls that aren’t logged in your CRM
Facebook ads performance that never leaves the dashboard and is only visible to the performance marketing team
Marketing and sales teams who work off individual and disconnected spreadsheets where campaign performance isn’t visible across the team

…the list could go on!

Bad data (or lack thereof) leads teams to make gut decisions. “Gut checks” can be valuable, but decisions purely based on instinct can go wrong all too often.

Build your data and tracking system early and establish an owner of all marketing analytics. This person should be the “enforcer,” who ensures consistency of how campaigns are tracked and how channels perform. They should work across the team and hold the growth org accountable for good data tracking.

Building this system requires a point of view on your North Star metrics, or Key Performance Indicators. That way, when you look back at performance, you have a benchmark for what over or underperformed.

When running experiments, be clear about what it is you are testing and collect enough data points to draw meaningful conclusions. This helps you avoid muddy data or decisions that aren’t statistically significant.

I recently worked with a client on their new brand identity. They went through early exercises with a branding agency to determine the general direction of their brand, but they hadn’t yet translated that into digital marketing assets.

As a consumer brand, their hypothesis was that the imagery associated with the brand would be one of the most important assets to test so they could understand its influence on conversion.

There were a million other variables to test: ad copy, button colors, landing page content, etc. But we isolated the creative variables so we could learn early on what brand imagery performed best. We ran the test on Facebook and Instagram, much more cost-efficient and scalable platforms than their existing channels (billboards, direct mail) and leveraged those insights to apply to other channels, including a new billboard campaign and refreshed website.

A 10-step guide to building a lean growth strategy

Now that we’ve highlighted how important it is to understand your customers and have a solid way of tracking data, let’s talk about the 10 main steps you should consider to deploy your marketing resources for maximum impact.

Even for a successful Fortune 100 or VC-backed company flush with cash, this approach requires a disciplined focus on ROI—a mindset and practice that is crucial to growth and profitability.

Why this approach works: this framework provides a clear plan that ensures alignment across the marketing team and broader organization. It helps teams stay focused, spending less time spinning wheels or making on-the-fly gut decisions, and more time on execution.

One of the biggest challenges high-growth companies face is putting execution before strategy. It’s a fatal mistake, one that requires expensive and often painful retooling over time. With a clear plan rooted in the company’s most important goals, your team can save a lot of time and headache over the long run.

Now, without further ado, here are the 10 key steps to building a lean growth strategy.

1. Evaluate existing channel performance

Take an inventory of all the data you can get your hands on and evaluate how your channels have performed over time. You want to look at top-of-funnel metrics like impressions and click-throughs. Most importantly, you’ll want to see which channels are driving your highest-value customers at reasonable acquisition costs.

It’s helpful to organize channels by the following categories:

Paid media
Owned media
Earned media

Each of these buckets have their tradeoffs (see image below) and you’ll want to consider investing in a healthy mix for an effective strategy. Paid has effective targeting, but ads have a lower trust factor than a news article written in an established publication. On your owned channels like your website and emails, you can control the message, but your reach is limited by your existing audience.

2. Assess competition

Doing your research on the market landscape is important for evaluating what to include and not include in your plan. Just because competitor X started TV commercials or ads on airport security bins (they’ll sell ad space anywhere these days!) it doesn’t mean you need to follow suit.

Evaluate the cost of those channels, the expected reach of your target audience, and expected conversions based on comparable channels for which you have data. Look at your existing customer data and determine whether these new channels would be compatible with trends you’re seeing.

3. Come back to your channel mapping and do a gap analysis

Consolidate your channel mapping with your competitive analysis and identify your top-performing channels, along with gaps or blindspots.

Are you finding many of your competitors are sponsoring podcasts targeting audiences aligned with your demo? Or maybe paid search has proven to be high ROI and you see a strong link to investing in visual search on Pinterest. At this stage, you want to create a full view of existing and potential channel strategies that could drive growth.

4. Identify the success criteria and KPIs most important to your team and company

Come back to your goals and define what your success metrics are. Be as specific as possible. Planning (and sticking to your plan!) will be easier if you know exactly why you’re investing in certain initiatives.

Obviously the end goal is to drive more revenue at reasonable costs, but take it a level deeper. Have you found that customers within a certain demographic are higher value customers? Or have you found that your product is selling itself to certain segments while other segments need a bigger push?

I recently worked with an enterprise SaaS company where organic growth within their SMB segment was healthy, but they needed to pour more investment into mid-market and large enterprises. That served as a guiding principle for targeting criteria on channels ranging from LinkedIn-sponsored content to email nurture campaigns.

The Google OKR framework is a good resource for clearly defining these goals in a structured and measurable format.

5. Create a list of ten major channels or campaigns you want to tackle

By now you’ve already done a lot of work, and we’re only halfway there. Based on your analysis, create a list of the 10 highest-opportunity channels that your team could consider pursuing. You could make the list longer, but you’ll only be able to master a few of these channels, depending on your team size and budget. Don’t plan to tackle everything at once. This is the early roadmap for your longer-term growth strategy.

6. Score the criteria for each initiative

Now it’s time to score each of the 10 high-opportunity campaigns with a set of criteria that are important to your organization. Each “score” could be on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 to 10 or 1 to whatever. The scoring range doesn’t matter. The importance is that you create a scoring mechanism that represents relative weighting.

Examples of what to score include:

Cost: CPMs/CPCs/minimum budget required
Reach: Density of target demographic
Resources/Staffing: Resource-intensive (internal resources)

Make sure your scoring is consistent and begin with the end in mind. Are low scores or high scores a good outcome? What’s going to help you determine what to pursue vs. not? Use this template to clarify your scoring criteria. This format makes for easy sharing and visibility across your team.

If you want to get fancy, you can weight each of these criteria according to relative importance. For example, if you care more about a channel’s impact on customer lifetime value vs. reach, you could weight CLV as a 40 and reach as a 20 on a scale of 100.

Once you’ve identified your scoring framework, set aside time with your team to go through the scoring exercise together. This can be a great exercise for a team offsite or growth summit. Walk through each channel strategy and its associated scoring criteria. These planning sessions are a great opportunity to discuss your growth strategy and priorities as a team.

7. Tally up and rank your scores

Once you’ve finished scoring, look at how everything nets out. Review with your team and gather feedback on whether the rankings seem in line with company priorities and why/why not. This could be a 1 hour meeting to review and refine priorities. Once you gather the team’s feedback, it’s time to put a stake in the ground and start executing.

8. Define priorities and start making progress toward your plan

Based on what you think is feasible in a given time horizon, determine the appropriate budget allocations. You may double down on channels that are already working for you or launch brand new campaigns. In either case, be sure you have the tracking mechanisms in place to evaluate performance and monitor your plan’s ROI.

9. Share with team for visibility, alignment and buy-in

Make your plan visible not only to your immediate team but to the broader organization. Share it at your next All Hands, send a company-wide email, drop it in Slack…use whatever is the best format for sharing with the broader company, especially your most important stakeholders.

Consider smaller-format meetings to review the plan with your VIP stakeholders. This may be finance if they need visibility of your return on marketing dollars. It could be sales if they need to understand what campaigns may influence lead volume throughout the year. Or it could be the product team if they want to know what tests performed well and why.

Marketing teams — and any department, really — can get caught in a trap of keeping only marketing up-to-date on the marketing plan, and silos are a major roadblock to growth.

10. Check in on the roadmap regularly and make adjustments as needed

Your plan should never be set in stone. It’s a living, breathing, evolving strategy. Every experiment or campaign you run should be closely monitored and measured against the KPIs you set.

Schedule monthly or quarterly meetings to recap campaign performance and stress test your plan going forward.

Product and engineering teams do a great job of running post-mortems or retrospectives to reflect on what worked vs. not and how that should feed into the strategy going forward. This is a muscle you want to flex as a growth organization. You need to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going.

An important note: the performance of ONE campaign — good or bad — should not result in a complete reworking of your plan. You’ll want to look at trend lines, not dots on a graph.

High-growth companies, especially startups, love to move fast and tend to make decisions on very short timelines. A month-long campaign can seem like an eternity for a startup. Give your campaigns time to run and collect enough data to make decisions. Even better, be sure you’re running statistically significant tests before you get them in motion.

Now that you have a plan for using data to drive decisions, a view of how your company stacks up against the competition, and a detailed ranking of which priorities to tackle first, you’re ready to take your company’s growth to the next level.

About West End:

West End works with companies large and small to identify their highest-opportunity customer acquisition strategies with the most efficient use of budget.

Learn more about West End’s approach and get in touch to explore opportunities for advancing your growth strategy.