Growth Marketing Strategy: How to Plan, Prioritise and Execute
- Barri Coen
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Most businesses don’t have a growth problem — they have a prioritisation problem.Too many channels. Too many ideas. Too many disconnected tactics. Not enough clarity.
A proper growth marketing strategy solves this by giving you:
A clear direction
A focused set of priorities
A 90-day plan you can actually execute
A way to measure what’s working
A repeatable growth engine, not a list of tasks
This guide walks through how to build a growth strategy the way we do it at Rise — structured, honest, lean, and focused on what genuinely moves the business forward.
What Is a Growth Marketing Strategy?
A growth marketing strategy is a structured plan for how you will acquire, activate, retain and grow customers across your entire funnel.
It’s not a calendar of content. It’s not a list of "marketing ideas."It’s not a channel-first approach.
A real growth strategy answers three core questions:
Where are the biggest opportunities for growth?
Which actions will have the highest impact?
How do we execute them in a repeatable way?
Why You Need a Growth Marketing Strategy
A strong strategy gives you clarity on:
What to do
What not to do
What to measure
Where to allocate budget
What to prioritise each quarter
How to decide when an experiment is working
Without it, companies fall into the “everything, everywhere, all at once” trap — and end up burning time, money, talent, and energy.
The Rise Framework for Building a Growth Marketing Strategy
We use a four-stage process:
Audit and Insights – Understand your funnel and find opportunities
Forecasting & Modelling – Predict impact and allocate resources
Growth Roadmap – Prioritise and plan your next 90 days
Execution & Experimentation – Run tests, learn, scale, repeat
Below is the full breakdown.
1. Audit and Insights
Before you plan, you need clarity. The audit helps you understand:
Who your ICP really is
What messaging resonates
Where people drop off in your funnel
Which channels work (and which don’t)
What the data really says
Where you’re leaking revenue
Outputs include:
Funnel map
Channel performance review
Website and CRO analysis
Retention and lifecycle analysis
ICP and segmentation clarity
Messaging strengths/weaknesses
Your biggest growth blockers and opportunities
This gives you your “growth truth” — an objective look at where you are today.
2. Forecasting & Opportunity Modelling
This is where we decide:
Which levers will move revenue fastest
What each lever is worth
How to balance quick wins with long-term wins
What your next milestones should be
We model different scenarios:
What happens if the website conversion rate increases by 0.5%?
What happens if email retention improves by 10%?
How much does CAC drop if activation improves?
Which channels give the highest ROI?
You end up with a clear, mathematically defensible list of priorities.
3. Build Your 90-Day Growth Roadmap
This is your operating system. It focuses on:
Your top 3–5 strategic priorities
Examples:
Improve website conversion
Build a repeatable paid acquisition model
Increase activation rate
Reduce churn in the first 30 days
Your experiments
Short, testable sprints that validate what works.
Examples:
New onboarding sequence
Landing page refresh
TikTok experiment
Personalised homepage variation
Authority-building content series
Your optimisations
Smaller improvements that support the core priorities.
Your measurement plan
How you will monitor performance weekly and monthly.
This roadmap is deliberately 90 days — long enough to see real results, short enough to stay agile.
4. Execution and Experimentation
This is where the strategy becomes traction.
We use a clean operating rhythm:
1. Test
Launch small, fast experiments.
2. Learn
Review outcomes weekly.
3. Scale
Double down on what works.
4. Kill
Cut what doesn’t — no ego, no attachment.
5. Repeat
Iterate continuously.
Most companies fail because they do too much at once.A great growth strategy succeeds because it does fewer things — more intentionally.
How to Prioritise: The ICE Framework
You’ll always have more ideas than resources, so prioritisation is essential.
ICE = Impact, Confidence, Ease
Score each idea from 1–10 on:
Impact – How big could the result be?
Confidence – How likely is it to work?
Ease – How simple/quick is it to execute?
Your highest ICE scores become your first experiments.
What a Good Growth Marketing Strategy Looks Like (Examples)
Example 1: A startup with low conversion rates
Priorities might be:
New landing pages
Improve messaging
CRO experiments
Better activation email flows
Example 2: A business with declining paid performance
Priorities might be:
ICP refinement
Creative testing
Personalised landing pages
Product-led acquisition loop
Example 3: A business with low retention
Priorities might be:
Onboarding improvements
Lifecycle flows
Customer journey redesign
Messaging repositioning
Every strategy is different — but the framework is the same.
Common Mistakes in Growth Strategy (and how to avoid them)
1. Jumping into tactics too early
Strategy first, channels second.
2. No prioritisation
If everything is important, nothing is.
3. Measuring too many metrics
Focus on your North Star and supporting metrics.
4. Not validating assumptions
Assumptions are expensive. Experiments are cheap.
5. Chasing “shiny objects”
New channels, new tools, new trends — only useful if they solve a real problem.
FAQs
What is a growth marketing strategy?
A structured approach to identifying, prioritising and executing the actions that will drive scalable, sustainable business growth.
How long does a growth strategy last?
Typically 90 days at a time — long enough to make progress, short enough to adapt.
What channels should I include in my strategy?
Only the channels that will genuinely move your metrics. No channel should ever be included “because we feel we should.”
How do I know if my growth strategy is working?
You should see movement in your North Star Metric and your primary supporting metrics within 2–6 weeks.
How often should I review it?
Weekly for execution, monthly for insights, quarterly for strategic review.
Want a growth strategy built for your business?
If you’d like help building your Growth Audit, Forecast and 90-Day Roadmap, you can get in touch with us here.
Comments