![Ladder Growth Blueprint: The Most Important Document In Marketing Strategy [Interactive Template]](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6098e41066be8b2b7cb437cd/6143b64889aa86cef9887de2_Ladder%20Growth%20Blueprint%20The%20Most%20Important%20Document%20In%20Marketing%20Strategy%20%5BInteractive%20Template%5D.jpg)
Welcome to Ladder’s Growth Blueprint Template 1.0….it will help ensure your growth strategy hits its ROI targets.
This growth strategy template is designed to accomplish three goals:
If this document teaches you a little bit more about growth/marketing strategy and increases the odds of success for achieving your growth targets, then it will have done its job.
INDEX
You can’t plan a battle without a map of the territory, yet every day marketers fumble through planning their growth strategy without building a real map of their businesses’ marketing funnel and growth channels.
Maps were pretty useful at the battle of Thermopylae (source)
Marketing is getting more measure-able every day, but we’re still dealing with imperfect information and having to make the right bets with limited time, money and other resources.
Growth is an imperfect science, and even the best of us can be struck down by analysis paralysis by either too much or too little information.
On a related note, you might have heard of the ICE framework… well, ICE Scoring Tactics Would Get You Killed On The Battlefield.
In an ideal world, we’d have all the information we need to make a decision when we need to make one. In reality, it costs time, effort and resources to generate information – you have to explore the fog of war if you want to know what’s there.
The fog of war can be a blessing or a curse (source).
The smartest marketers can ask the right questions and build a model of the business in their head, then get to work solving problem after problem, until one day they’ve solved enough problems and the flywheel is turning from its own momentum.
The alternative is going out of business, which is, unfortunately, the fate of 9/10 startups – all of which were absolutely sure that once they built their product, customers would be banging down their door.
Most of the reasons startups fail are related to marketing (source).
But it never happens that way – even successful startups relied on a lot of luck and hard work, toiling away making smart, data-driven and creative decisions over 5-10 years before the tech press recognizes their ‘overnight’ success.
To grow a company and make it successful takes a lot of guesswork, which isn’t easy to do for the 99% of marketers who don’t have a depth of experience to rely on when making these judgment calls. They can’t rely on guessing right again and again on instinct.
Enrico Fermi, the Godfather of back-of-the-napkin math (source).
This Growth Blueprint is designed to solve that problem by taking the guesswork out of successful strategy.
This growth strategy framework is a system of simple inputs and intentionally simplistic rules of thumb built off the best in growth marketing theory and experience from 9 years and $40m in marketing spend, to make it easy to plan your strategy like a world-class growth expert.
Funnel mapping, one of the essential exercises this Growth Strategy Blueprint does for you (source).
By answering just a few simple questions, like what share of your traffic is driven by Facebook ads? What is the conversion rate at each stage of your funnel? …we’re able to build a model of your business and then reverse engineer what the next best focus point is to maximize your chances of success.
Once you have the funnel and channels mapped out, and you have run the numbers on what needs to happen, then it’s time to get creative. Choose a brand archetype to inform your ad-copy, add images that match your brand to a mood board and research your competitor’s ads too.
Pulling all of this information together in one place, your growth team, internal and/or external, will have the information they need to make lightning-fast decisions on what you need to do to grow. That’s what makes this growth strategy framework so effective!
Growth Blueprint was designed for cross-functional agile teams, for whom transparency is a job requirement (source).
Keep this growth/marketing blueprint as a living document, with notes, new tactic ideas and the latest plan submitted for approval. That’ll help you stay on track to hit your performance goals every quarter, always revisiting and rebuilding the map of your business that informs your strategy.
This is the most important document in our marketing agency – and Coda makes it easy to work out all of the math for you.
Don’t get me wrong, Coda is truly awesome – and I’m geeking out right now about what I’ve managed to build here… but it’s easy to forget the tech doesn’t matter – the principles behind the tech are what matters. Don’t be afraid to make edits for your own use, or even use a different tool entirely.
We should be careful of technology porn: using advanced tech when a simpler tool can get the job done (source).
I know we’re in the technology business but don’t get hung up on the tech. A good growth strategist can write this out on a whiteboard or the back of a napkin and be far more impactful than someone wasting a weekend tinkering with whatever the latest ‘Coda’ is.
Focus on output and process, not theory and technology – the latter two should support the former, not the other way round. So always be shipping ? new tests, default to transparency ? with your assumptions and be persistently helpful ? to your clients and colleagues, and you’ll go far!
The key is to use this template and framework to understand the levers you can pull to grow a business and to become a better strategist in the process.
I wish you the best of luck and all the growth in the world! ?
– Michael Taylor, Co-Founder @ Ladder.
Once you’ve added your inputs to the interactive template, whether estimates or actuals, you’ll find a plethora of super valuable information about your business automatically calculated and translated to help you direct your growth/marketing strategy.
Let’s take a peek…
You won’t need to touch anything in this section – it’s all calculated for you based on what you entered in the inputs! This is where the real strategy starts to happen, so read through each section in the template and see what you can find out about your business.
^ Starting to see why this is the most important document for your business? You can grab it here .
The interactive template will also automatically calculate:
e.g.
[Facebook Ads] is your biggest spending channel, spending 79.17% of total budget with a CPA of £1.72 which is -50.41% undertarget CPA.
Your worst performing channel is [Twitter Ads] with a CPA of £132.65 which is 3728.13% overtarget CPA.
e.g.
From a total of 1,866 conversions, 1,730 or 92.7% were driven by paid marketing.
Conversion rate for organic channels is 36%, which is -41.67% worse than paid conversion rate.
e.g.
You would be generating 88% more sales per month with the funnel benchmark metrics vs your existing funnel.
The [Visit App Store] funnel stage is your biggest opportunity with the benchmark performing 88% worse than your current funnel.
e.g.
The [Install Mobile App] funnel stage volume will allow the most experimentation, with [8] statistically significant tests every month.
Optimizing to [Install Mobile App] (vs CTR) as the conversion event allows [4] (vs 8) statistically significant tests per month.
The Ladder Growth Blueprint will even give you a data-driven forecast of how many tests you can run per channel, how much you can expect to grow, and what it’ll mean for your bottom-line.
e.g
Aside from your funnel economics, the Ladder Growth Blueprint will also help you map out your marketing objectives and key results (OKRs).
As well as help you build a tactical plan.
…plus organization space for competitor research and customer personas.
So, what are you waiting for?
We should probably be charging for this ?
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