Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy β€” Reforge

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Hatched by Glasp

Sep 06, 2023

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Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy β€” Reforge

What's a Design Sprint and why is it important?

Becoming a marketing leader means moving beyond traditional definitions of growth and integrating the three domains of marketing: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. These three domains work together to create a complete marketing strategy that drives customer acquisition, retention, and brand loyalty.

Brand marketing is all about sharing the story of why your organization exists and creating meaningful, emotional connections with customers. It increases awareness and captures new customers, but it also continues to reinforce the brand promise at every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. This includes brand partnerships, drip campaigns, and more.

Product marketing, on the other hand, focuses on delivering the brand promise. It involves packaging, pricing, and making features accessible and understandable to users. It ensures that the organization is delivering on its brand promise and meeting customer expectations.

Lastly, growth marketing is all about acquiring and retaining customers. It uses triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring customers into the product and keep them there. It ensures that the organization is reaching the right customers and providing value to keep them engaged.

These three domains are interconnected, and changes in one domain will impact the others. For example, if the growth marketing efforts bring in new customers but the product doesn't deliver on the brand promise, those customers will ultimately churn. This highlights the importance of aligning the growth marketing and brand marketing strategies.

To have a compounding impact, marketing teams need to sequence the changes in each domain. Siloed teams often struggle to bring these pieces together, but those that integrate successfully will have less brittle strategies. This means that changes in each domain should be planned and executed in a way that builds upon the changes in the other domains.

Proactivity is essential in marketing because changes in each domain happen over different time horizons. While growth marketing performance can be measured quickly, product and brand marketing may take months to develop and the impact can unfold over years. This requires marketing leaders to monitor internal and external factors that may signal the need to revisit their strategy.

Some internal factors to monitor include audience expansion, business model evolution, and product launches. Expanding to new customer segments or geographies requires evaluating if the current brand positioning, value propositions, and channels will resonate with newly acquired customers. Business model evolution, such as adding a B2B sales channel to complement a B2C offering, can also impact the marketing strategy. Additionally, new product launches may require adjustments to the marketing approach.

External factors to monitor include macro trends, competitive landscape, regulatory trends, and technology or user behavior changes. These factors can influence the effectiveness of the marketing strategy and may require adaptations to stay relevant and competitive.

Incorporating a design sprint into the marketing process can help streamline and accelerate the strategy development and execution. A design sprint is a five-day process that involves understanding the problem, ideating solutions, making decisions, creating a prototype, and testing it with users.

During the design sprint, the marketing team spends the first day understanding the problem and setting the long-term goal. This includes empathy mapping and creating a customer journey swim lane diagram.

The second day is dedicated to ideating solutions. The team takes notes, sketches out rough ideas, and uses the "Crazy 8s" exercise to generate different variations of the strongest solution. Finally, they draw a detailed end-to-end solution for the problem.

On the third day, the team makes a decision on the solution to pursue. This involves evaluating the different ideas and selecting the most promising one.

The fourth day is all about creating a prototype. The team hacks together a realistic prototype that can be tested with users.

Finally, on the fifth day, the team tests the prototype with real users. This feedback is invaluable in refining the marketing strategy and ensuring that it resonates with the target audience.

In conclusion, a complete marketing strategy involves integrating brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. These three domains are interconnected, and changes in one domain will impact the others. Marketing leaders should proactively monitor internal and external factors that may trigger a need to revisit the strategy. Incorporating a design sprint can help streamline and accelerate the strategy development and execution process.

Actionable advice:

  • 1. Align your growth marketing and brand marketing strategies to ensure that the value promised is delivered to customers. This will help prevent churn and build brand loyalty.
  • 2. Sequence the changes in each marketing domain to have a compounding impact. Plan and execute changes in a way that builds upon the changes in the other domains.
  • 3. Stay proactive and monitor internal and external factors that may signal a need to revisit your marketing strategy. This will help you stay ahead of the curve and make necessary adjustments to stay relevant and competitive.

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