How To Set The RIGHT Marketing Priorities This Year

You already have dozens of growth ideas for 2024. Here’s how to pick the ideas that will actually move the needle for your brand.

This content originally appeared in the No Best Practices newsletter on 12.31.2023.

Earlier this month I explained how to build a customer-based forecast to go along with your revenue forecast, and why that is so important. In part 2 we’re going to put that forecast into action and build a tactical plan for achieving your growth goals.

Objective -> Strategy -> Tactics

One of my first bosses in digital marketing shared this framework with me: objective -> strategy -> tactics. It continues to be one of the most valuable things I’ve learned.

Most annual marketing planning skips from objective to tactics. Why does this happen? Because the objective is not defined well enough to yield a strategy. How can you build a strategy off of “make sales go up 20% YoY”?

The customer forecast we covered in part 1 gives you two critical pieces of information that allow you to build a real strategy:

1. How much growth will we need to generate from new vs returning customers if we want to hit our sales goal?
2. To what extent can we lean on “business as usual” marketing strategies to accomplish this (evolution v revolution)?

In an ideal world you would be able to forecast acquisition and retention at the marketing channel level–Meta will drive 10k new customers at a $100 CAC, direct mail will drive 5k new customers at a $75 CAC, etc. 

In the real world, that doesn’t work (and if you’re running a channel-level forecast based on traffic and conversion rates–stop!). 

You can think of each year’s performance as a black box algorithm: you can measure the outputs (sales, new customers acquired, CAC) and you can measure some of the inputs (marketing spend, merchandising mix, etc). But you can’t measure every input, because some of them are macro. And you can’t fit an equation to the inputs that will consistently predict the output.

So how do you navigate this situation? This is the 5 step process I use. This process assumes that you and finance/planning have come into alignment re: the customer level forecast. That is–you (the marketer) are comfortable with the goal you’ve been assigned.

Even if you feel like you’re being set up to fail, this process will allow you to “show your work” and prove to management that you’ve put in your best effort.

Step 1: Set Customer-Level Priorities

The customer forecast will tell you how much of your growth must come from new vs returning customers. The more you rely on new customer acquisition, the more expensive and/or riskier your marketing plan.One way to offset your new customer requirement is to make improvements to your retention rate. Your most powerful levers here will be increasing your 1st -> 2nd purchase conversion rate and increasing 6 month LTV for customers you acquire in 2024.

You can make some assumptions here and update your forecast, but be aware that there is a hard ceiling on what marketing can do. Marketing can shift a 2nd purchase conversion rate from 28% to 31%. It can’t shift the rate from 25% to 50%–only product and business model can do that.

If your brand is less than 5 years old, or has been doing less than $30M in average annual revenue for the last five years, focusing on iterative retention improvements will not yield meaningful revenue gains. You have to take big swings–direct mail post-purchase offers, acquiring higher quality customers, drastically rethinking your email strategy, etc.

For a smaller/growing business, your priorities should be:

1. Profitable new customer acquisition
2. Improving 1st -> 2nd purchase conversion rate 
3. Contacting more customers, more effectively in the first 6 months post-purchase

Step 2: Optimization

If your brand is consistently doing more than $1M/year in revenue, you’ve probably found product-market-channel fit in at least one acquisition channel. Optimization is all about greasing up that core acquisition flywheel to squeeze more profit out of your marketing dollars.

Optimization = taking what works and doing it better. If nothing is working, you’ll have to skip this section and head straight to step 3.

Ignore those SaaS-sponsored Twitter posts–there is no globally applicable formula for optimization. I’m going to walk you through an example for a hypothetical brand to give you a sense of where/how you should focus.

Let’s say Brand X sells women’s skincare. They have an anti-aging line and a sensitive skin line. The hero product is a moisturizing serum in the anti-aging line. It is the focus of most of Brand X’s Meta advertising and it is their top-selling product.

Optimizations would focus on improving the main acquisition funnel for that hero product:

1. Offer testing–could we improve CAC with an x% off 2 creams offer?
2. Bundling and upsells–could we improve CAC with a bundle offer 
3. Creative testing–what are new angles we can try? New visual hooks? New audiences we can speak to? 
4. Email funnels–could we scale acquisition for this product with a quiz + email drip sequence? 
5. Landing pages–can we improve conversion rate with different formats (advertorial, listicle, etc) 
6. Overall site performance–how is our site speed? Clarity of messaging across highest traffic pages? Any bugs?

You would prioritize these based on the ease of implementation given your brand’s current set of core competencies. For most brands, ad creative testing and offer/bundle testing is the “lowest hanging fruit”.

In addition to these core competencies, you should pick one or two additional optimization ideas to pilot. Growth initiatives typically fail because they’re implemented poorly, or because the team gives up after one false start.

I’m going to share something that might offend a lot of you: your existing team is usually not the right person/people to pilot new growth initiatives. They’re almost at capacity with existing projects, and they don’t have the knowledge or experience to execute new tactics properly. If you let your existing team test new initiatives without outside input, there is a 95% chance those initiatives will fail.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Members of your existing team might have a broad range of experiences. They might be good at structuring pilots and know how/where to learn about new channels and tactics.

But this is what I typically see: brands hand off new initiatives to junior team members and the execution gets watered down by consensus–to the point that it could never succeed. The junior “project leader” implements a bogus measurement framework, so the results of the pilot are inconclusive. The brand then pays to implement something ineffective, or abandons something that could have been a game changer with a different implementation approach.

To avoid this, work with at least two outside experts on the initiative in question. For example: an advertorial landing page copywriter AND a landing page CRO expert. Give both experts 2-3 shots on goal. If none of those attempts work, the initiative is probably a dud.

If you’re aiming for modest revenue growth on a flat CAC YoY, optimization may be enough to get you there; you don’t have to implement steps 3 or 4.

Step 3: Big Swings

Big swings include two types of initiatives:

1. Speaking to new products and audiences using your main acquisition channel (essentially, testing new funnels).
2. Scaling your core acquisition funnel in a new growth channel.

For the skincare brand in our example, there might be a few options on the table:

1. Using Meta to scale the best selling product in the sensitive skin line.
2. Using Meta to scale the second best-selling product in the anti-aging line. 
3. Using Meta to scale a new product launch. 
4. Trying to scale the core hero product on Pinterest, Youtube and/or Reddit

So, how many of these big swings do you take? And how do you prioritize them? That depends on the growth goal you need to accomplish. You might have to do all four to hit your number.

In terms of prioritization, you need to weigh two factors: potential payoff vs odds of success. The more a “big swing” aligns with your brand’s core competencies, the higher your odds of success. Because this brand’s core competency is Meta advertising, I would prioritize the first three options. That said, there are some brands who crush Meta but don’t have a core competency in customer research or copywriting. They might struggle to market a new product on the platform.

The key to success here, no matter which initiative(s) you choose, is to bring in multiple experts in whatever you’re trying to do and give them multiple shots on goal. Your internal team is good at what got you here, not at what will get you there. I wouldn’t pound the table so hard if I hadn’t seen this issue trip up almost every brand I’ve worked with.

This process might seem time consuming, costly and risky–you’re right, it is all of the above! Growth is risky. You don’t grow 20% YoY by doing what you’ve always done, 5% better than last year. If your internal growth initiatives keep failing, it might be because you are setting yourself up to fail.

eCom growth has been drafting off macro trends for more than a decade. It’s a mature industry now. These are the kinds of risks, calculations and investments that mature companies make. It’s time to put on your big boy/girl pants or go home.

Step 4: Moonshots

Moonshots are growth initiatives that sit entirely outside of your brand’s core competencies and don’t have a standard playbook. The payoff potential is huge, but so is the risk. If you’re taking huge risks for a small potential payoff, that’s not a moonshot–it’s a waste of time.

If your growth target is modest, you won’t need to take moonshots. But it’s good to build this muscle anyway; Moonshots are how brands “go viral” and become culturally relevant.

It’s hard to develop a good list of Moonshot examples for a hypothetical brand, because a successful Moonshot is built on the foundation of your core customer and what he/she cares about.Here are some examples from other brands:

1. Drunk Elephant using TikTok influencing to become a Tween status symbol.
2. Rowing Blazers re-releasing Princess Diana’s infamous “black sheep” sweater at the same time “The Crown” and Megxit translated into renewed cultural interest in the British royal family. 
3. The Stanley tumbler car fire incident. 
4. Plufl making dog beds for humans.

Moonshots typically combine merchandising, traditional PR and social media virality. Some brands develop moonshots that align with more traditional marketing funnels–ex. a viral customer referral program.

The payoff from a Moonshot is not particularly sustainable, and you put yourself in the position of having to comp it the following year with a completely new set of tactics. You can’t really “go viral” in the same way twice.Despite the downsides, you may need a Moonshot or two if you want to double sales while reducing CAC by 20%. And this is why the customer forecast is so critical–it makes your exec team acknowledge that big growth requires big risk. 

Step 5: Measurement & Management

I’ve worked for wayyyy too many brands that had to re-forecast sales halfway through the year, every year. Hint: this means your original forecast was not accurate, or your plan for achieving it was not good. Or it means that management is sticking their heads in the sand when things go off course early.

A good measurement system can solve for the former issue, but not the latter. At a high level, I like to track the following:

Customer Forecast By Month/Week: translate the annual forecast for new and returning customers, revenue, AOV and CAC into a monthly or weekly forecast. To do this, use last year’s split between new and returning customer revenue as a guide.

Each week, report on percent through the month vs percent through the forecast. If you’re 50% through the month and 20% to your forecast, that is a problem. 

At the end of each month, report on percent through the year vs percent through the annual forecast. Every 2-3 months, take a temperature check–are we on course, slightly off course, or adrift in the bermuda triangle? If you are hopelessly lost going into Q2, you should start adjusting inventory plans and media budgets accordingly.

Measuring Specific Initiatives: This newsletter is already ~1k words longer than average, and covering the best way to measure specific initiatives is a topic that deserves its own newsletter. But each of your growth initiatives, from optimizations to moonshots, should have the following:

1. An informed, realistic projection of the potential upside. Ex. “We expect that this CRO pilot will improve our average site conversion rate from 1.5% to 1.7%”.
2. A statistically sound measurement plan. This might mean holdout testing, incrementality testing, or just looking at the real metrics a new campaign yields vs the benchmark. 
3. A framework for deciding when to write something off as a dud. You should run the test/pilot long enough to collect meaningful data, but you shouldn’t drag it out indefinitely.

That’s “it”–it’s actually a lot. But that doesn’t mean you should chicken out and revert to last year’s backlog, or a list of tricks and hacks.

When the economy or your brand is running hot, prioritization doesn’t matter. But when the macro tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked. Don’t get caught with your pants down in 2024.