Simple Strategy: Your Secret Weapon for Smarter Growth

Most founders waste time trying to fix the wrong thing. It’s not their fault. When you’re in the thick of it, balancing stock issues, sales pressure, and Slack notifications — it’s easy to chase shiny metrics or get sucked into growth tactics that look good in a deck but don’t move the dial.

Simple Strategy flips that on its head. It’s about getting laser-focused on the one metric that unlocks disproportionate impact right now

There are a few principles to Simple Strategy 

Get very clear on the single most important metric you can influence

This might not be the easiest metric, and definitely won’t be your ultimate, North Star metric. Instead, it’s the one number that will have disproportionate returns. Let me walk you through an example that I use a lot. 

Imagine there is an owner of a kombucha brand - we’ll call him Dave, and his brand is Dave’s Booch. 

Dave wants to be as big as CocaCola, so he is focused on building household awareness. 

But the reality is that Dave today is only stocked in 2x stores, and he doesn’t have access to lots more stock. 

Someone finding out about Dave’s Booch, who lives more than 500 meters from one of the two stockists, isn’t valuable to him at all. 

So, the single most important metric for Dave short-term is the rate of sale in those 2x stockists, as driving that will give him data to take to other local retailers to expand his range slowly, until he can hit minimum order quantities with his supplier and handle bigger demand. 

Dave could waste a lot of time and money on metrics that will matter one day, but right now are irrelevant - even unhelpful. 

The single most important metric is normally connected to your future funding. It might be what a single customer thinks of you, as one deal could unlock financial security. Or, it might be how you’re perceived by and investor, as their secondaries are what will keep your business alive to worry about future challenges. 

You can only move metrics if you really understand them 

A marketer's job is to be curious. Relentless, persistent and unwavering in their curiosity. 

Let’s imagine the metric that matters is how potential customers feel about your brand and range when they reach the checkout page, so that you can improve conversion at this stage in the journey. You can’t change how they feel without:

1. a deep understanding of their current views 

2. a very clear view of what you want them to think in the future.

There is a wealth of data that can tell the detective marketer what’s really going on: how do they move around the page? What can they tell you in an exit survey pop-up? When they do convert, what can they tell you in a post-purchase survey? Can you segment your database to focus on just those customers and interview them? This work takes time, but it’s 80% of the challenge. When you can accurately diagnose what’s going wrong, the solution is normally straightforward. 

Next up, imagine the metric that matters is how a supermarket buyer feels about your brand. You can’t change how they feel without:

1. a deep understanding of their current views 

2. a very clear view of what you want them to think in the future. 

While it might not be possible to interview the buyer (we wish), it is possible to learn a lot - the commercial agenda of the supermarket, what their boss thinks, what others who have met them have experienced. 

The Marketing Funnel is your lifeline 

You can throw most of the geometric shapes that marketing text-books give you out the window. You don’t need pyramids or pillars etc. The funnel is different - it makes a lot of sense and is the backbone of Simple Strategy. 

Now, let me explain how to use the funnel and why it helps. 

You have to read a Marketing Funnel from bottom to top. As you move from bottom to top, you’re going to ask yourself two questions at each stage… 

• If this stage of the funnel was really healthy in my business, how would customers behave?

• What are the metrics I can use to measure the stage? 

Advocacy - do customers tell other customers about your brand?

Loyalty - do customers come back in healthy numbers, regularly?

Conversion - do potential customers go ahead and buy from you when they are considering it?

Consideration - do potential customers who know about you, really consider buying from you? 

Awareness - do potential customers who would consider buying from you, know about you?

When you hit an unhealthy part of the funnel, you have to stop and fix it. If you don’t fix the “leak”, you’re going to haemorrhage money and time. 

We’ve seen Founders and marketing leaders make this mistake so many times. It’s very easy to do when you are in the weeds and under pressure. Pressure to “deliver” can make us all into busy fools, where we don’t take time to assess what really needs to happen first to move the needle. Here’s a few simple examples I’ve seen in my time;

• A sportswear brand that had a big problem with conversion didn’t increase their range fast enough, so they ran out of cash, getting the attention of prospective customers who were excited by the concept, but just didn’t want what was available. 

• A drinks brand briefed us to improve and improve their email communication to improve loyalty, but the customer feedback was clear that the problem was the product wasn’t delicious, not that the comms weren't compelling. 

• A gym chain we supported had good awareness in the area, but no one wanted to try it out as they didn’t understand why it was right for them.  The urgent directive to increase conversions meant the work on the proposition was skipped, and consideration of the brand was really poor. 

Strategy is Simple, if you know what you’re trying to fix

Most marketing is like a surgeon taking a machete into theatre. They slash around, hoping to get to the right answer. 

Good marketing is like a surgeon with a scalpel and a game plan. It’s incisive and effective. 

Fancy hearing how we do simple strategy in more detail? Why not book a call and we can chat it over!