How to Build a Growth Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

Every marketer knows that the ultimate goal of marketing goes well beyond the next sale. It’s growth—of customer lifetime values and trust, new acquisitions, and overall market share. This fulsome, long-term strategy is known as growth marketing.

Beyond its status as one of the latest industry buzzwords, growth marketing has earned a reputation for being a scalable, holistic, and sustainable approach to growing your business. Simply, it sets up your business for success, particularly from launch to the next phase of expansion. You can think of a growth marketing plan as a bible or secret recipe that’s data-driven, with actionable insights into automation, conversion, and retention.

So, how can you build a solid growth marketing plan that will shape the future of your business? Follow these steps to realize the next stage of growth.

What is growth marketing? A quick refresher

In the simplest terms, growth marketing is a long-term plan for success. A growth marketing plan outlines a comprehensive approach to achieving measurable, sustainable growth. It’s a strategy for looking beyond making the next sale to drive repeat purchases and increase customer lifetime value, as well as growing your market share and expanding into new markets. 

Essentially, growth marketing allows you to define these growth targets, plan for achieving them, and leverage data-driven insights to continuously optimize campaigns and tactics. Here’s how:

• Test key processes and identify opportunities for improvement
• Develop, test, and optimize new marketing and sales processes
• Conduct A/B testing to determine the effectiveness of campaigns
• Analyze results and use data-driven insights to shape success.

SMART Goals and the Pirate Metrics

A key component of every growth marketing plan is defining SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Once you’ve laid this groundwork, you can begin to implement growth marketing strategies, measured along the pirate metrics at every stage of the customer journey: 

• Awareness: A customer’s first contact with your brand through various channels, including SEO, content marketing, social media, referrals, and more.
• Acquisition: This happens as a result of cross-channel engagement strategies targeted towards various buyer personas each representing your customer segments and the campaigns they most respond to.
• Activation: Close the deal by converting leads to customers through marketing automation and sales enablement, eventually reducing churn.
• Revenue: Maintain an optimal ratio of customer acquisition cost to customer lifetime value. Keep marketing and sales costs low by focusing on personalized customer experiences, cross-selling and upselling, and your pricing strategy.
• Retention: Keep existing customers satisfied and happy by promoting brand loyalty. Offer helpful content, special discounts, targeted and personalized emails, and more to increase your retention rate and customer lifespan.
• Referral: Convert influencers and happy customers to brand ambassadors who will provide valuable referrals to new, ready-to-buy customers in their circle, effectively reducing customer acquisition costs.

Steps for Creating a Growth Marketing Plan

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork with the essential components of growth marketing, and defined goals and metrics, it’s time to do the work. Let’s talk about the key steps for creating your growth marketing plan—and building the future of your business:

1. Identify target areas of growth

There’s no growth marketing plan without a defined target. While the end goal of growth marketing is the successful future of your business, you need to identify specific areas to work on. Start by defining target areas that you would like to build on, whether it’s acquiring new customers, expanding into new markets, or promoting repeat purchases and overall retention, and implement corresponding strategies that help achieve your goals.

2. Define campaign KPIs

Building off your growth goals, you will need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs). These are measurable, achievable, and realistic objectives for every phase of growth, from initial customer acquisition to long-term value. 

As the term suggests, KPIs inform the stage of growth you’re at and define when you progress to the next phase. Well-defined KPIs and metrics are crucial to growth, since without these milestones each phase may be extended, eventually causing you to lose momentum and waste resources.

3. Market and industry research

How well are you performing compared to your direct competitors and the broader industry? Growth marketing isn’t insular—it can’t be isolated from the rest of the market. Simply, it’s impossible to know how well your business is growing if you can’t measure its market share against the competition.

Market and industry research is a key component of your growth marketing plan. This will help you determine the feasibility and profitability of each phase of growth, and identify opportunities for growth and expansion. It’s important that this analysis is data-driven—simply, because numbers don’t lie. You’ll need this research to inform how you can effectively compete to grow your market share in an increasingly competitive market.

4. Create a production calendar

The next step in your growth marketing plan is creating a plan of action. A production calendar allows you to map out specific timelines for implementing growth marketing strategies and milestones. The calendar should list detailed deadlines, necessary resources, team roles, and specific KPIs. With a full view of your growth marketing plan, you can begin working on implementation and optimization as needed.

5. Acquire growth tools

Building off of your production calendar, you will need to acquire the growth tools that will enable execution. These may include marketing automation and CRM integrations so that you can automate regular customer touchpoints. Similarly, you may also need sales enablement services to get the most out of these applications and ensure that customers move along the sales funnel, stalled leads are converted, and sales goals are met. 

6. Get ready to execute

Now, you’re ready to set your growth marketing plan in motion. If you’ve identified growth areas and defined KPIs, conducted market research, created a plan of action, and acquired the right tools, you’re finally ready to begin implementing growth strategies.

A key part of the execution phase is building A/B testing into every strategy and campaign. Try different modalities, whether it’s as simple as ad creatives or creating new promos and a pricing strategy. It’s important to be flexible and let data-driven insights inform how your strategy will evolve.

7. Continuously test and optimize

And finally, remember that growth marketing is a cycle. To keep growing and progressing through the various stages of building the future of your business, it’s important to keep testing and optimizing your growth strategies. This involves talking to stakeholders as you execute, maintaining cycles of development and A/B testing, and optimizing strategies in response to evolving market trends.

Start with Step Zero: Get a Free Growth Marketing Plan from Consultus Digital

For a limited time only—claim your free growth marketing plan from Consultus Digital! Get expert advice for beginning the growth marketing phase of your business. Start with a roadmap that outlines how you can transition from simply closing the next sale to building a strong, steadily growing sales funnel and customer base. 

Consultus is your partner for long-term growth marketing and success. We’re committed to going above and beyond conventional marketing strategies by leveraging actionable, data-driven insights and a complete suite of services from first click to sale and long-term trust. Let’s build the future of your business with a robust and scalable growth marketing plan fully tailored to your long-term goals.
Ready to start the next phase of growth? Claim your free growth marketing plan, only from Consultus Digital, and start seeing results you can trust.