How we think about… Growth

Setting your Growth Strategy 

We’ve seen too many brands charge into trying to scale revenue without pausing to ask: "What are we really aiming for?”

A smart Growth Strategy makes that ambition real. It starts by understanding the commercial health of the business, the milestones, and the trade-offs that matter most, and then it's fully rooted in what the customer needs.

A humble warning...

The Brand Hackers Way thinks about Growth & Brand as two different chapters, but this is to organise information, and it’s inherently flawed. Growth doesn’t live in a silo - the work of a growth team absolutely defines how people experience your brand.

We like Jeff Bezos’ definition of brand: “it’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room”. In this world, the idea that “brand” can be owned by a “brand team” and “growth”, owned by a “growth team” is nonsense. Your customers don’t have any distinction on who signed off what (of course!), they just see your business out in the world and make their judgements, fast.

But first, you need to define the actual growth goal

It's easy to think that growth = revenue growth, but in reality, every single business has a slightly different growth goal. It's not just revenue growth, and it might not even be bottom line growth. Instead, it’s intrinsically linked to the hopes, dreams and needs of the owners.

Hopes and dreams? Yes, often.

Needs? Absolutely.

Plus, if the owners need to fundraise soon, then their growth goals are more likely to be what investors want to see, rather than what the owners want to achieve.

It would be very easy to assume that every business owner knows their goal at any given point, right? Not quite. In reality, we often see that this foundational thinking is skipped, or replaced with something vague like “lots more sales” or “a massive exit”.

For your growth goals to be more nuanced, understanding the commercial context in full helps you define the right growth goals. There are three questions that you need to answer:

1. What are the economics of every customer?

“Lifetime value” doesn’t go far enough, as it only looks at top line revenue. In assessing when a customer becomes profitable for you there will be a lot of assumptions, but a working estimate is much better than none at all.

2. What needs to be true to unlock the next fundraise?

Often, start ups rely on injections of cash to stay alive long enough to “hit profitability” (the golden moment!). We see businesses get distracted by goals that investors don’t care about, which means they don’t secure the raise and ultimately go under. Cash is absolutely king, and marketing plans should be focused on it too.

3. What are the key milestones that change the game?

In every business model, there will be some inflection points. If you’re a product business, it might be that when you hit a specific order quantity, next time you buy stock the unit price will come down significantly. For a community (like Up World), when you reach a certain number of members, you can unlock other revenue streams like affiliate sales. Hitting these inflection points should be your short-term growth goals.

Then, you need to get into your customers’ heads

We know it’s not exactly radical to counsel brands to “know their customer”, but we see it being done badly... A lot.

Here are the most common and most painful mistakes we see:

1. Customer profiles are really generic:

We’ve been public with our distrust of pen portraits that focus on “Sophie, aged 28, from Clapham”. There are way too many brands going after Sophie. There aren’t that many of them, and they are skint. If the customer segmentation work is lazy, the marketing won’t work: the market could be too small, the messaging won’t resonate or the audience is already saturated.

2. Who you want your customer to be is not who your customer really is:

A common misconception occurs when a brand's ideal customer profile is drastically different from who their customers actually are. You want "Sophie, aged 28, from Clapham", but "Linda, 47, from Chester" is actually the person who has been subscribed the longest with the most brand loyalty. It tends to happen when brands want to be "cool" and therefore have a “cool” customer, or when brands default to customers they assume to have disposable income.

Instead, the focus should be on who needs your proposition, what their alternatives are, and how you focus on providing value for the customer over the cost of product vs household income.

3. While you know your dream customer, there is no clarity on the growth audience:

It’s great to have a dream customer who is aspirational and very specific, as it helps ensure your marketing builds a brand that some people LOVE (and stops you producing work that doesn’t stand out for anyone). The problem arises when there is no definition of the big group of customers who are going to deliver all the volume.

As a rule of thumb, your growth audience should be 10x bigger than your absolute stretch revenue target.

4. You know what your customer does at the weekend, but you don’t know how they shop your category:

Yes you need your pen portraits, yes you need your growth audience, yes you need to know what keeps them up at night... But you also need to know how decisions get made around your product.

When I was Head of Marketing for Proper Snacks, we used to think our competitors were other popcorn brands and crisps. When we did some deep customer research, we realised how wrong we were. Our true competitors? A coffee or calling your mum.

Customers first felt bored. That boredom, often mid afternoon, made them think they needed to do something to shake up their day. Deciding to buy a healthy snack was one of a few different options - the true competitors.We still had to capture a customers’ attention at shelf, but knowing what got them there made this easier. The most important thing the packaging needed to do was reassure that the experience was FUN - after all, they had decided to have a snack because they were bored (not hungry). This pushed us to bright colours, to make them feel packed full of energising flavour and to reassure that we were guilt free, but not focus on health as a key metric.

You might read this in textbooks as the “need state” that drives a customer, and the journey as their “path to purchase”.

COMING SOON... How to Brand Hack customer research

Then, focus on where you’ll find your customer, not what feels comfortable

It’s simply not true that every brand “has to be on Instagram” or even “has to have a website”. These are just myths. Brand Hackers didn’t have a website for a very, very long time, we grew through a link to a Notion board in an email signature. Don’t assume that you have to have every channel, but instead be very specific on the role of each channel in your marketing funnel.

If brands aren't launching channels “because they feel like they should”, they are often launching channels because someone in the team is really good at it, or it’s their agency partners’ speciality. You do need to understand your strengths, but this can really stop a team listening to their customer. The Brand Hackers Way is to be relentlessly focused on where you could really engage a potential customer, and then find the talent or hack to deliver it - NOT the other way around.

Y Combinator preaches that start ups should “do things that don’t scale” and it’s so true (read the full essay here). It's scary and it’s hard work, but we’re inspired by brands using Reddit community management as a strategy to find their first customers, or sampling outside school gates. The irony is that these labour intensive approaches can work for way longer than you think - ButternutBox has a massive direct sales team who reach customers at markets and festivals, and they are huge.

And lastly, know that realism is the only way to stay alive

Early stage brands need unbridled optimism. If you don’t have huge, delusional sense of what’s possible, there would be days you wouldn’t get out of bed and you wouldn’t be able to sell - to acquaintances, to customers, or to investors. The art is knowing when to turn that part of your brain off.

Pitching? Be optimistic. Hyping up your team? Be optimistic. Building your growth strategy? Be realistic.

But optimism won’t serve you in your growth strategy. In fact, it might sink your brand. There is a recent, painful example of work we did with a haircare brand where we were buoyed by the team’s enthusiasm for growth. While we said we thought the steep growth targets were ambitious, we didn’t shout it from the rooftops and when the brand came into financial uncertainty, we had to take our share of the blame.

You need to be as likely to over-deliver your forecast, as you are to under-deliver it. Not everyone will agree with us here - there is a school of thought that crazy targets unlock bold thinking, but what happens in reality is that they lead to bad financial planning. You spend beyond your means, or you don’t think about the next raise early enough…

Sometimes, you can’t deliver the strategy in the order that makes most sense, but in the order that will keep you alive. Tactical, non-strategic revenue streams can be a distraction sometimes and a life-line in others. We recently worked with a founder of a pasta sauce brand whose side line supplying pizzerias was funding DTC test & learn, and who knows, after it all, maybe he’ll pivot entirely.

A reminder to do more of what's working

Any growth strategy should be 80% focused on amplifying what’s already working. 

New agencies or new hires love criticising the work that’s come before. They don’t have any of the context and it makes them look good, quickly. It’s really unhelpful.

Unless things are going very wrong, which calls for a different approach, there’ll be evidence of your Secret Sauce already. This is your unfair advantage - it might be a customer segment who loves you, it might be a channel that’s thriving.

Challenge a new team to unpack what’s great, before they criticise. Challenge them to explain how they are going to remove barriers to make what’s working even more effective, before they recommend new priorities that are potential distractions.

Now that we've dug into setting a growth strategy, let's discuss two key growth drivers: Paid Media and CRM.

How we think about…

Approaching Paid Media

The assumption in most paid digital media plans is that the channels are limited to Meta, Google & TikTok. On the flip side, channels like display, affiliates, LinkedIn or Pinterest rarely get a look in.

This is a tricky one.

It’s a mistake, of course. We advocate for obsessive focus on the customer journey, and if they are browsing X late at night, then that’s where you should be (whatever the macro trends tell you), especially to find your early adopters and deeply embed yourself in their communities.

On the other hand, there is also a reality that these Goliath channels are likely to be your bread and butter at some point in your growth journey.

You need to know the purpose of paid media in your marketing funnel

If you're spending small, paid media is a scalpel not a sledgehammer.

It can drive awareness. It can convert. It can nudge someone who's nearly there. It can even teach you what your messaging should be or which product to lead with. But it can’t do all of that at once unless you’ve got deep pockets and separate budgets for each. If you don’t, you have to choose. Pick one outcome. Track one metric.

There are big issues in businesses when paid media (or organic social actually) gets measured against the wrong metrics. If you’re using paid media for awareness, then ROAS is irrelevant, but if this isn't explained clearly to leadership, they’ll carry on asking the challenging questions.

In practise, we’d advise against performance marketing for awareness, as the quality of the impressions can be so low. Not every impression is equal, and there is no comparison between a quick view of a Meta ad served to someone who isn’t really your core customer (the reality of cheap traffic with low CPMs) and watching a Reel from an influencer you trust presenting a new product. You’d be better off doubling your CPC but having twice the recall rate.

> To understand where in your funnel you should focus, read our thinking on Simple Strategy.

You need a combination of machine + human

Platforms will tell you they’ve “found your best audience” or “optimised for the lowest CPA.” What they’ve actually done is collapse your targeting to the most obvious segment. There is nothing wrong with this, but you really have to understand what’s happening.

Attribution windows can make a complete mess of understanding what’s actually working, and what’s just being credited. Beyond that, Meta will never tell you a complete picture alone. Instead, any change in growth performance is always a result of a full ecosystem. Meta will tell you conversions have gone up, but is it because your ad is more compelling, OR because the pop-up your CRM manager launched was so convincing that email subscribers skyrocketed and conversion increased. These platforms don't work in isolation, so always look at full user journey.

AI campaigns are only as smart as the data they can feed from. Smaller data sets = less smart AI. On smaller spends or newer brands, having more granular control and feedback on performance might be the better choice for achieving your goal.

You should test a lot, but don’t stop thinking

Too often, paid media gets treated like a numbers game. We all know that if you hand enough monkeys enough typewriters, you’ll eventually get Shakespeare, but we also know that’s a really inefficient way to write Shakespeare. Customer insight should drive every single experiment.

Right now, there’s a lot of noise about creative volume, which you need to take with a huge pinch of salt until you’re spending £50k a month, maybe more. Churning out dozens of ad variants when you’re only putting a few hundred quid behind them won’t teach you anything. It’s better to test very selectively, going heavy on the thinking & light on the spend.

Even when you are spending more, testing isn’t just about creative. There are lots of other levers you can pull that get unloved: offer, format, landing page experience, sequencing, timing.

Here is how to structure your creative testing, but note that you definitely don’t need three variables at each stage if you’re just getting started:

We hinted at this above, but too many brands underestimate the relationship between Paid Media and CRM. The two go hand-in-hand, and it's rare that one succeeds without involvement from the other.

So, here's how we think about…

Staying in touch with your audience

Sometimes we have to spell out why “CRM” is so important. It stands for Customer Relationship Management and, in layman’s terms, it’s the difference between ghosting someone you had a great first date with vs sending flowers, nice messages and a great suggestion for the next time you meet up.

If you’re not capturing customer data you have no ability to talk to the same person more than once, which is leaving a huge opportunity on the table.

If you’re not communicating brilliantly with a customer once they have given you their data, you’re not building an emotional connection as well as you could, so again, there is opportunity (£££) left behind.

We all know that purchase decisions are rarely spontaneous. While there are the occasional “novelty mug” or “midnight fake tan” moments, most people don’t buy the first time they see something. They browse, think, forget, come back, and eventually commit. CRM is the mechanism that keeps that journey warm.

So with awareness of this, it's essential to remember:

CRM is a relationship, not a channel. This re-frame reminds us that it can build loyalty, get potential customers talking about your business and increase lifetime value, as well as driving conversion.

CRM is all about the customer. Every single tiny part of it.

To summarise our approach to CRM in a sentence: Beware the industry black hole that stops you thinking like a human.

Your CRM strategy probably looks something like this, and it's a great start.

But to make a real impact on your commercial goals through CRM, we have 5 key principles.

1. Don’t under-invest

CRM is always going to be very cost efficient for you, so don’t try and cut every corner. The ROI is always highest on email, and often is counted as a free channel. Trying to save money by not doing email, or more commonly, by using sub-par tech, will always be detrimental. When you zoom out and look at CRM in the ecosystem, there is revenue to be made. Make the investment by choosing the right ESP, not the cheapest.

2. If you're investing in ad spend, you have to make sure your email is on point first. These two work together and always should go hand in hand. If you're driving paid traffic and you don't have a pop-up that's performing at a 4-10% submit rate (and a welcome flow that converts at 10%) then this is wasted money.

3. Choose your channels wisely

There’s no denying that email remains the foundation of most CRM ecosystems. It’s versatile, measurable and owned. BUT, it’s not everything. The UK is sleeping on WhatsApp as a communication channel where in India it’s how you’d pick up your dry cleaning or ask Zara for a refund. In the days of early growth there is no comparison to a Founder or team member picking up the phone to a customer.

When everyone wants "Sophie from Clapham", they go for email because Sophie checks her emails daily! But someone else might respond better to a long form 'handwritten' direct mail letter.

The channel mix should always follow the customer, not industry norms. If your audience wants to hear from you somewhere else, meet them there.

4. Reflect how your customers actually buy

The biggest mistake we see is brands copying and pasting CRM journeys without thinking about the actual purchase timeline. If it typically takes three weeks and multiple brand interactions before someone buys, one abandoned basket email 45 minutes after browsing isn’t going to cut it. The same goes for repurchase. If customers usually reorder every six weeks but you prompt them after two, it’s not only unhelpful but also irritating.

Before you try to personalise anything, get a clear understanding of who you’re speaking to. Not just what they’ve bought, but what they’ve told you about themselves.

The most effective CRM is grounded in customer insight, with timings, messaging and formats that reflect real behaviour, not best-practice templates.

5. Be clear on what’s actually interesting

The simple question, “would anyone actually care?” is key here. A lot of the time, the obvious answer is “hell no”, so don’t send it.

Your CRM content plan should be divided up by objectives, and the balance between engagement and conversion, and between product information and story-telling, has to be just right. If CRM is a relationship, then it’s obvious that different interactions in that relationship can have different purposes. Some should drive a first purchase, others should build post-purchase confidence, encourage referral, or introduce new categories. Too much of something will put your customer off, so test to strike the right balance.

CRM should feel like a continuation of a conversation someone already wanted to have, not a megaphone blasting updates they didn’t ask for. If this sounds hard, it’s because it really is.

Done right, it’s the quiet engine that powers growth long after the first click.