Step 6: Create Your Growth Strategy Plan

Now that we’ve made those two decisions about existing vs new products and channels, it’s time to plan our growth strategy.

This step consists of two parts:

1. Brainstorm a bunch of marketing experiments.
2. Decide on the top five to start working on immediately.

Brainstorm Experiments

It’s time to brainstorm a bunch of marketing ideas that could get you to your growth milestone.

We want you to think of these marketing ideas as experiments. You’re guessing (or hypothesizing) that this marketing idea will help you reach your growth milestone. So let’s write these ideas down as experiments, including the following information for each:

• Channel — which growth channel does the experiment relate to?
• Name — give the experiment an identifiable name.
• Hypothesis — the expected outcome from the experiment.
• Description — how the experiment might work.
• Specific audience — this is especially true if you have multiple products and a different audience for each product.
• Specific sub-channel — i.e. Twitter rather than social media.
• Metric — what will you measure to know whether it was successful?

Before you start writing things down, we want to show you a worksheet that will help you keep track of these experiments.

The Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet

We’ve created an Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet that will help you quickly collect your brainstorming.

Click the button below to use this template and fill it with your own info. (Please notice the tabs at the bottom to switch from brainstorming mode to active mode. We’ll get into active mode in the next step.)

Fizzle Growth Experiments Decider »

Note: while you’re brainstorming, don’t spend any time on the last section about evaluation. We’ll walk you through that shortly. For now, just make a long list — as long as you can — of experiments you could run.

This brainstorming exercise is a great place to take advantage of the Fizzle Forums and your mastermind group. Or, if you have a team, get the whole team together to think through the growth strategy.

If you’re having trouble thinking of potential experiments, it can help to research the competition or other companies you admire. What channels are they using to grow? What channels did they use to grow when they were at your business stage? How are they using each of those channels?

One more thing: you know the rule about brainstorming, right? In brainstorming there’s no editing and no judging; every idea gets written down, you’ll evaluate the ideas later.

OK, now’s the time to pour a cup of something you like and start brainstorming. Make a big list, don’t focus too much on any individual experiment at this time. The name of the game is quantity, not quality right now.

Decision time: top 5

Once you have your list of potential experiments, the last step before starting on execution of your growth strategy is to pick the 5 most promising growth experiments to start with. (You can always go back to the brainstorming list for more.)

To do this, evaluate each experiment based on three criteria:

1. Feasibility — how possible or likely is this experiment given the current resource constraints? 1 = not at all feasible, 5 = extremely feasible.
2. Impact — how far would this experiment move the needle on progress towards your growth milestone? 1 = not at all impactful, 5 = extremely impactful.
3. Time — how long will it take to complete this experiment? 1 = a TON of time, 5 = a very small amount of time.

Now is the time to evaluate each experiment by the criteria above. We’ve added these criteria to the Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet so you can easily evaluate them there.

Then order the experiments by total score and choose the top five to move forward with.

Note: this is just one way to evaluate your experiments. You can always add another criteria (e.g., how much you personally like the idea, etc.) or make your own decisions yourself or with your team. These are simply 3 criteria that can help you make reasonably informed quick decisions.

OK, this step is done when you’ve chosen the top 5 growth experiments. Once you’ve done this, you can move those experiments to the Top 5 tab of the Experiment Tracker Spreadsheet and move on to the next step.