Hey ,

Here’s how most marketers would proceed if their client/employer hired them to grow their business from $100k to $500k MRR?

1. Market segmentation and prioritization

2. Ideal customer profile

3. Competitor's analysis

4. Positioning and unique selling proposition

5. Customer journey

6. Channels

7. Goals and metrics

But before you start working on the first step, there are 2 important things you need to think about:

• the challenges you might have
• the backward road from the company's goals to the current situation

In this newsletter, we’ll speak about system approach to B2B marketing and what growth hacking really is and how to design a growth process at scale. 

Let’s get started.

What is the difference between growth marketing and growth hacking?

First of all, it's all about semantics. The words surrounding marketing have now become marketing themselves, so to say. But in fact, there isn’t really any big difference between growth marketing, growth hacking, and digital marketing. They're all slightly different words for more or less the same thing. 

There are the right ways of growing a company these days and there are the wrong ways. There are new ways and there are older ways. There are inovative ways and there are traditional ways. People attribute certain concepts, ideas, or expectations, to these words which become dogmatic. 

When we say growth marketing, growth hacking, or just marketing, (all of which is absolutely fine and legit), what matters is that you need to have a fullfunel approach to growth. 

You shouldn’t just focus on driving awareness and then hope to get some conversion. Instead, you should focus on the entire customer journey, owning the metrics of the customer journey and optimizing them for scalability. 

All the same, you might not want to dissociate yourself from some of those buzzwords because sometimes you need to use them. That's how people talk these days. 

System approach to marketing 

There are a lot of different ways to have a more comprehensive approach. There's no specific way that works best. 

But essentially, the first step is to have a clear roadmap, a clear vision, and a clear mission for your company. Then list down what you need in order to achieve your goals. 

Some people love KPIs, some love OKRs, and some others love metrics based scores. But keep in mind that your goals can also be more general. 

For example: 

• I want to build an amazing product. 
• I want to solve this specific problem. 
• I want to add value to these types of business located in so and so area.

So you need to have a clear goal and roadmap of what you're trying to achieve. Based on that roadmap, you then build a team and develop a process. And then once you have that, you run various projects and experiments that help you increase your metrics at every stage of the customer journey. 

How to create a roadmap for a company's growth? 

When it comes to the roadmap, you can work backwards. Start with the goal and then retroactively break down what you need.  

Look at other companies that are doing the kind of things you want to achieve. And look at how they’ve changed and boosted their business over the course of their growth. 

analyze how they went from 100K to 500K MRR, from 500k to millions, or how they grew their team from 10 to 20, 40, or 60. When you do that, chances are you will see a lot of differences. There is a  certain unique aspect in every company's growth and every industry. You will see that they're all doing things their own way. 

Mind you, as you look at their success, analyze also the kind of challenges they’ve had and anticipate the ideal situation and setup. 

Think about where you want to be in two years time and list down what you need to achieve that. Thereafter, work backwards, build the process, and map out what you need to get done by what time. Then turn that into different projects and those projects will get broken down into experiments which are there to validate these options. 

Here's a concrete example of how Ferdinand did it at Recruitee.

They were on the verge of making their content strategy more scalable and smooth.

In order to do that, they came to the conclusion that they needed to restructure their blog from scratch and create a real clean strategy for the long term. 

They first defined the end goal: create a much better content strategy and have the best recruitment blog in the world. 

So the one-million dollar question was: how do we come up with the best recruitment blog ever? They thought about: 

• the infrastructure they needed, 
• who would be running the blog, 
• who would own it, 
• how would they optimize it for SEO, 
• would they differentiate between different types of content? 
• how would they format it? 
• what would be the best design? 
• the brand identity, etc. 

They broke this down and created a project out of it. They mapped out their resource needs, broke down all the tasks, and assigned different tasks to different people who have the skills to complete those tasks. And of course, they assigned an owner. 

Basically, this is how they went from having an idea to creating their own ideal situation that's scalable.  

PS: This interview has been condensed for clarity. If you’re interested in listening to the entire interview, please click here.

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Adechina ODJO