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:
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- How much growth will we need to generate from new vs returning customers if we want to hit our sales goal?
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- 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!).