As we know, growth doesn’t just happen on its own. Sure, some companies hit the lottery but you can’t leave your success up to the fates by waiting for that to happen.

So you have to plan, week by week, month by month, to achieve steady, scalable growth.

Set Your Goals

The first step will always be to decide what your goal is. Paul Graham has mentioned that growth of 5-7% per week is a good rate. Some startups I’ve worked with are happy with 10-15% per month. Choose your most important metric and an increase that seems plausible based on past months but a bit of a stretch as well so you have to hustle.

No doubt, your growth schedule for the next month looks something like the following for a 15% month over month (MoM) weekly active user (WAU) goal, starting with 2500 weekly active members.

Month 1	Month 2	Month 3	Month 4	Month 5	Month 6	Month 7	Month 8	Month 9	Month 10	Month 11	Month 12
2875	3306	3802	4373	5028	5783	6650	7648	8795	10114	11631	13376
375	431	496	571	655	755	867	998	1147	1319	1517	1745

Now, this is great information to put into a goal tracker, like HubSpot or Chart Mogul. But, you need a drawn out plan that details how you expect to hit these goals, at least a few months planned out at a time.

Growth Marketing Calendar Month 1

For example, in Month 1 you have a gap goal (my saying for the increase from what you have to what you need) of 375 weekly active users. Now, what can you brainstorm to help you reach that goal?

Let’s look at your marketing options:

Facebook Ads– optimized, more specific campaigns and target audiences, like audiences, geographical audiences, campaigns for different offers.

Social media– Organic, with images, without images, paid ads on Twitter or Linkedin, subscribe cards, with links, without links, more replies and conversations, giveaways, referrals, contests

Email– onboarding, activation, reactivation, engagement, education, cold email, campaigns per offer, improved subjects, better format for click through rates, build a list, newsletters, swap campaigns.

Content– blogging, downloads, 10x content, guest posting, accepting guest posts, SEO, podcast, book.

In-app– messaging, ads, chat, support.

There are dozens of ideas for marketing, and there are always ways to improve what you are already doing in marketing, so coming up with a plan depends on identifying what you are doing, where you can improve, and choosing and implementing new methods.

Email Marketing Tactic #1

Assuming you are already using a bit of email, let’s fill out Month 1 with additionally weekly emails that engage the audience. We will call this “Email Engagement”- helping all members grasp deeper feature usage.

Example: For a SaaS metrics or analytics tool this could mean sharing dashboard templates, specific report links, or offering the ability to sign up for daily emails to your entire team.

I suggest sending 2 emails in the first week to see how well they are received if it goes well stick with that schedule for the month. If you receive a lot of complaints or unsubscribes cut back to 1 email a week and make sure it is of high value.

You could use MixPanel to identify features used by your most successful users, then share more about these features.

Facebook Ads Tactic #1

Now I always recommend having more than one idea to reach your monthly goals, so let’s add to this plan by slowing starting a couple of Facebook ads campaigns.

I would choose these for the first month because you’ll want to test and move slowly and you have a small gap goal this month so there is time to deal with setbacks if they happen.

And since you already know that SEO and content can take some time in showing results, let’s also add a 10x piece of content to use in next month’s newsletter, and on social media to get leads now. If possible add a download to the content to collect leads for email marketing.

Monthly Analysis & Adjustment

At the end of each month, you want to analyze your results and adjust the upcoming month based on what has worked, and what results you can expect going forward. I recommend using a spreadsheet to keep track of all experiments, adjustments, and tactics for future reference, in my experience growth teams are constantly growing and changing.

I suggest planning at least 3 months ahead when possible. This will give you time to handle larger goals as they come about. During Month 1, you’ll want to keep track of what worked as far as the email engagement and Facebook ads. Did you see an opportunity for improvement? Did you need it? Did you use it? If not, now is a great time to try. Add more?

It’s a good idea towards the end of the month to hold a team meeting to discuss results and how they affect future goals. If everything went well, discuss what your needs are for next month, how the calendar should change, whether it’s time to add a new marketing method, or if you have plans to improve on the methods you are using.

During this time I also suggest brainstorming for what to do if and when you come up short to meet a goal. It’s always best to stay on top of your goals with a goal tracker, if you have one so that you will know right away if you fall behind your growth goals.

If this happens, I suggest using an ace in the hole, which is basically my fall back plan for making sure I hit a goal when things don’t go as they should.

Let’s say you get to the 20th of the month and you’ve only gotten 200 WAU, clearly something is wrong and you need to come up with a plan to hit that goal of 431. This is when you use the aforementioned ideas from your meeting to close that gap. An ace in the hole is basically a trusty growth method that you can pull out when needed to hit your goals.

Growth Marketing Month 2

Based on a successful Month 1, the analysis of Month 1 and brainstorming for Month 2 we are going to plan the following for Month 2 where we need to get another 431 weekly active users.

We will assume Month 2 looks like this:

• • Email Engagement

• • Facebook Ads

• • Another 10x Content Piece

• • Cold Emails

• Work on product based on survey
  

You’ll notice that only cold emails are new because there are a lot of opportunities to improve your emails, ads, and content. Let’s add the following specifications for Month 2, brainstormed after Month 1.

Improvements for Month 2

Email- target subsets of users and funnel them into their own reactivation campaigns, test 3 new campaigns, and be sure to take these users out of the pool of general users who get the first campaign. Additionally, try a few email subjects, and add a link call to action to the emails to increase CTR.

Ads- What campaigns did well? Can you test or improve the copy of the landing page or ad copy? Supplement newer images and ads in new campaigns to catch the eye of users who have now overlooked your ads. If you have time, add retargeting to your new campaigns for users who have been inactive for 14 days.

Content- How did the content do last month on social media? Remember to send it in the newsletter in Month 2. We should also plan some content promotion. Start with the bookmarking sites, multiple social media updates, and asking people on the team to share on social as well (no demanding it though), then consider adding the content to Quuu for promotion, or spending $30 on Facebook ads for the piece.

Cold Email Tactic #1

Cold Emails– With these, we’ll want to encourage people to join your free service, as they count as weekly active users as well. But, it’s not as easy as sending one email and forgetting it.

Today you have to send a drip email to make cold email effective. It must be clever, people are probably well aware that you offer a free trial (if you do) and just haven’t felt the need to sign up, so it’s your job to make them feel the FOMO, or at least understand how valuable it will be to their team to sign up.

I go over this extensively in a post on Crazy Egg, grab a pdf copy here.

Growth Marketing Month 3

Now we will plan Month 3. Email Engagement, Facebook Ads, 10x Content Piece, Cold Emails, Social Media, Event with CEO or CMO, and product update based on survey

This month we need almost 500 more WAU, the goals are starting to get bigger and heavier, but we have plans and can make this work.

We’ve been optimizing email, starting new campaigns in email and Facebook and should do the same this month. We might even try a like audience on Facebook to see if that will bring results.

The content we’ve written is getting picked up by Google so we are seeing some SEO improvement, let’s schedule more SEO tweaks for Month 4, Cold emails haven’t been doing great so we will shelf that for now and instead work on guest blogging to get exposure, we have a few sites willing to take our content.

We are going to put a special focus on social media this month and see if we can turn our likes and followers into more users, and last but not least the CEO or CMO will be a host on a podcast, or hold an AMA somewhere to help us meet our goals. Schedule this event early in the month to get exposure and have time to use an ace in the hole if things aren’t going well.

During Month 3 you should take time to schedule months 4-6, what new methods do you think you should include, how many appearances for your CEO? What has worked and what hasn’t? What needs to be improved to make it work? Have you had a hard time hitting your goals? Are you confident you can keep hitting them as each month gets harder?

A lot of thought and energy goes into your monthly marketing calendar, and it will no doubt change over time, but it’s still good to plan it out, have an idea of what you are doing, and stay up to date on where your metrics currently are.

If you need help hitting your goals, I can help, send me a message and we’ll talk soon. I look forward to helping your team build a growth goal streak.

Month	Tactics	Month	Tactics	Month	Tactics
Month 1	Email Engagement Facebook Ads 10x Content Survey Users	Month 2	Email Engagement Facebook Ads 10x Content Survey Users Cold Email	Month 3	Email Engagement Facebook Ads 10x Content Survey Users Cold Email Social Media CEO Event

As I say, growth doesn’t happen on its own, you have to plan it for it to happen. Hopefully, this post will help you jog your mind to come up with some marketing activities that will help you meet your goals.

There are so many factors that contribute to the confusion around choosing a strategy for growth.

After working with multiple startups, I’ve noticed 5 issues that specifically prevent companies from meeting their goals. Here, I’ll explain what each roadblock is, how it affects results, and how it can be remedied.

1) Your Biggest Roadblock Is a Lack of Planning & Strategy

You don’t just select a goal and expect you’ll make it happen. It won’t. Like anything else in life, it needs to be planned out, you need a strategy and a framework to ensure you meet your goal every month.

This planning, should include experimenting, and keeping easy access to tactics to help you meet goals.

The major indication of needing to plan is when you get close to goal deadlines and are still lacking in results.

Many startups use HubSpot for their website and the reporting is awesome. The ability to set goals is very useful because it lets you see when you are off track to meet your goal, Chart Mogul is another company with this feature in their toolset.

Examples of Needing A Growth Plan:

• For instance, if you are in the middle of the month and your goal is for 3,000 visitors (very small number) but you’ve only gotten 1,000 visits, you’ll see that you are off by 500 visits which means you have a bit to make up for.
• On the other hand, the goal tool in HubSpot also tells you if you are ahead, say it is the 20th and you have 2,800 visits. You are over by 800 visits and might not need all of the tactics you’ve planned for the month.

The Many Benefits of Having a Growth Plan

Having a dashboard for goals is immensely helpful. When you are falling short, it’s time to plan an additional activity to make up the difference by the end of the month. You’ll want to do it quickly to get back on track and leave yourself time in case it doesn’t work to plan another tactic.

In the case of being on track to meet goals early, you should hold off on planned tactics/events until the next goal period (if possible) so that the results aren’t wasted on a month where you are already meeting goals.

More Opportunities to Experiment

Being ahead of goals gives another opportunity, one to experiment with things that might work. Say you normally get 25% of your monthly conversions from Social Media but you want to try to improve those conversions by setting up 2 landing pages specifically for organic social traffic.

Since you are already ahead with your goals, you can take the time to try this and see if it moves the needle.

Keep Track of Experiments & Successes

I suggest making lists, perhaps in Trello, of what you do regularly to meet your goals, where you’d like to experiment, and what you’ve tried in the past that will contribute to your goals in a pinch. 

I’ve been asked, “If you keep these goals for when you are in a pinch why not just always use them?” One of the reasons is it would get tiresome for the market to constantly use these as a way to get people to convert. It would stop being effective. Instead you keep these activities as aces in the hole that you can pull out to make sure you succeed in meeting goals.

Fix This Roadblock- Get The 7 Step Growth Plan

Each month write up your marketing calendar, compare the results you expect with your goal and plan enough that you will hit the goal. You can do this by using the 7 Step Growth Plan I’ve written for you, it’s free to download.

Now, use a goal dashboard and if you see you are falling behind brainstorm on how to fix it immediately, schedule more activities to make up the difference, and pull in an ace in the hole to hit your goal.

This might take some time to perfect, and growth is a process so it requires regular configuring and strategizing, but when you take the time to plan you’ll be far less likely to miss your goal.

2) You Aren’t Focused on Sustainable, Long-Term Growth ie: Stop Chasing The Silver Bullet

Brian Balfour wrote in one of his blog posts about how the lack of focus and the search for the silver bullet were two ways that growth could be stunted. I’ve seen this myself, w n you are trying to handle 30 different activities, it’s a lot harder than handling 3-4 of them well.

Are you distracted by silver objects?

• Trying to make too many activities work at one time, without the team to handle it
• Trying growth hacks that seem easy and doable just because you have the budget
• Aren’t fully vetting an idea by testing it out on a small segment of their users
• Implementing, hoping it works, and moving to the next experiment
• A hurried team, lack of focus and scaling on activities that could work better

There should be a balance between experimenting and focus.

There should be time available and planned for where you can actively work on the things that contribute well to your growth, and then time to play/experiment with ideas and ways to improve growth even more. In my plan for growth, I call this the core to experiment ratio.

The average startup will grow slowly and incrementally over time.

They don’t go to bed one night and wake up a month later to find success. They keep pushing for it, every day, and once in awhile they strike gold that makes a major impact, then it’s back to the slow improvements until it happens again.

Stories about using 500 t-shirts to catapult a startup to success are outliers that break rather than prove the rule.

A Ratio of Incremental to Experimental Growth That Works

Try to focus on incremental growth 80% of the time and experimental hacks 20% of the time. What you can do will be based on your resources, the team size you have, the budget you have, and the goals you are trying to prove. This ratio works for me for 10%-25% MoM growth.

3) You Need To Investigate Your Analytics

There are now mountains of data available for SaaS companies specifically and no one should overlook the possibilities of understanding the information they are privy to, but many do.

Metrics like MRR, WAU, and CLV are some of the most common to track, but they are far from the only metrics that matter. In fact, other metrics will impact the above numbers quite heavily, and you’ll notice that an increase in Search Traffic might increase MRR, or a higher number of emails leads to higher CLV.

This is why you need to spend abundant amount of times understanding and analyzing your analytics regularly. A tool like Chart Mogul is perfect for this as they know exactly what SaaS and startup companies need to see.

Are You Spending Enough Time in Analytics?:

1. Do you have analytics and activity tracking installed?
2. Do you check the data daily?
3. Do you understand the data AND implement changes based on the information?
4. Does your team understand the data they have or how to access it?
5. Does the team struggle to understand what the data means?

It’s easy to identify if your company isn’t making proper use of your data. And the only way to fix this issue is to get educated about possibilities in data, understanding data, and making decisions with data.

This is one area where I can help, I’m offering monthly growth mentorship that includes data and decision making. Please email me to learn more, marygreencny@gmail.com

Additionally, here are several resources to help you understand and improve your approach to data:

• The first 6 steps to home growing basic startup analytics by Andrew Chen
• Startup Analytics: Why and How we use Mixpanel by Hubstaff
• The Tools Early-Stage Startups Actually Need to Understand Their Customers by First Round

4) Your Marketing Lacks Motivation

Photo by Gonzalo Arnaiz on Unsplash

Marketers of all types run into poor conversions and it can be difficult to diagnose the problem because there can be so many factors at play.

Lack of Motivation = Lack of Conversions

Simply put, you aren’t connecting with your audience. Prospects can’t see the value in your product from the words you are using, the copy lacks motivating evidence to drive a conversion, you are missing certain elements from your site, or you don’t present a trusting business.

You Aren’t Speaking Your Market’s Language & Acknowledging Their Pains

For starters, not knowing, understanding, and using what you know about your target market (potential buyers) is one of the biggest issues I see in all marketing today. Companies don’t always take the time to investigate their market well enough to understand what they need and how to convince them they can deliver.

This lack of understanding the target market is a major cause of low conversions. If you can’t speak to your market in a way that helps them solve a problem, you can’t convert them to buyers.

To solve this, start thinking about what the visitor needs to see to convert.

What buyers need to know to convert:

• What makes your product better than competitors
• What it costs
• How they’ll benefit from using your product
• How long it takes to get started and become successful
• How easy it is to integrate into their lives
• What the dashboard looks like

This information should be on your site instead of content that simply explains what you want to say.

You Are Missing Site Elements That Encourage Conversions

When the content on your site doesn’t encourage the visitor to take action, you are losing conversions due to poor copy. You might be sharing the information the buyer needs but you aren’t convincing them to do something NOW to fix their problem.

Now this could be related to not knowing your buyer well enough and therefore not writing content they find motivating, but it could also mean you didn’t hire the right person to ‘sell’ your product (a copywriter).

What your site needs to convert buyers:

• A benefit driven headline
• Supporting sub headline that explains what you do and how
• Call to action buttons that tell the reader to take action
• Social proof that shows how others feel about having purchased
• A look at the product dashboard or other screenshots

Both ‘lack of understanding’ and ‘lack of copy’ can be easily fixed. You can survey colleagues to get their opinions, or survey others in your industry. You could also ask me, you can call me on Clarity and I’ll help you figure it out.

Here are a few links to help you fix both of these problems:

• 2x your conversions and 3x your prices by addressing your customers’ secret desires
• Poor conversions: the usual suspects
• 10 Dangerous Threats to Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

5) People Don’t Love Your Product 

It’s easy to ignore churn, if you aren’t careful. The startup world rewards high growth and blames churn when things go bad. But, experts agree that churn should be prioritized above growth, one of the reasons being that growth will only feed a leaky bucket leaving nothing solid behind.

Chances are you know your churn rate, and you know if it is problematic. If not, you should know that something as ‘low’ as 10% is still quite high depending on the time period. But the biggest indicators of churn are poor reviews and high unsubscribes by paid users.

Unlike the other items on this list churn has a different affect on growth. It doesn’t seem to hurt it the same way because it happens after growth has happened, people simply stop using the product after they’ve converted. But it affects word of mouth, PR, partnerships, and other aspects you might not consider.

No matter how you slice churn, it is a company killer and needs to be contained and fixed immediately, before you focus on growing more.

To do that, you need identify the reason for high churn via extensive user surveys.

Churn can be caused by several factors such as:

• Marketing that over promises
• A product that doesn’t deliver
• Difficult user interface
• Poor customer support experience
• Better options with competitors

The only way to know for sure is post churn surveys. There are many tools out there that can help you with this. But, if you struggle with understanding the answers you get, or fashioning the survey at all, give me a call through Clarity and I will help. You can find the link at www.mary-green.com/contact I also offer a free 20 minute consultation to help diagnose your problem.

I wrote this post for AutopilotHQ an email marketing SaaS company. 

Please check it out here: https://www.autopilothq.com/blog/grow-your-online-community/ 

1. Curate Good Content

2. Host Events with Industry Influencers

3. Show Off Your Best Content

4. Mention Influencers 

5. Keep An Ace In The Hole

6. Host Live Events

7. Community Alerts

8. Create Original Content 

9. Optimize Content for Search

10. Experiment with Tweeting Frequency

11. Send Personal & Relevant Emails

12. Boost Facebook Content To Drive Member Signups

13. Show Up Day After Day

14. Get To Know Your People