Stop Doing Marketing. Start Building a Growth Strategy.

Most small businesses don't grow strategically. They grow randomly, and they call it hustle.

That's not a knock. It's just what happens when you're the expert in your product or service, but nobody ever taught you how to think about growth as a system instead of a scramble.

This is the first part of a series Jen Hamilton is doing with our Fractional CMO, Cindy Skach.  Cindy is the Founder of Customer Growth Solutions and is a Fractional CMO and Growth Strategist to small, medium-sized growing businesses. 

Cindy has spent years watching small and mid-sized businesses do plenty of marketing activity that never quite adds up to revenue, and she built a framework to close that gap.

You're Doing the Tactics. You're Missing the Connection.

Here's the pattern Cindy sees over and over.

A lot of times what they're doing is they're active as far as their marketing goes. There are a lot of doing. There's tactics, but they don't connect the dots between marketing and revenue. - Cindy Skach

Busy is not the same as strategic. You can post every day, run every campaign your competitors run, and still have no idea which of it, if any, is actually building your business.

So sit with this for a second: if someone asked you to draw a straight line from your last marketing effort to the revenue it produced, could you draw it?

Acquisition, Experience, Retention: The Full Circle Most Businesses Skip

Cindy's Growth Essentials Framework breaks the customer journey into three phases:  acquisition, experience, and retention.   Most businesses pour everything into the first phase and quietly forget the other two exist.

Retention to me is a more full circle view of marketing that a lot of marketing tactics, strategies, or even a lot of fractional CMOs aren't bringing it full circle. - Cindy Skach

That gap is costly. Every dollar spent acquiring a client who quietly drifts away because no one built a system for keeping them is a dollar spent once when it could have paid out for years. This is where Client Experience, one of the six pillars our Certifed Fractional COOs use to evaluate a business's health, quietly decides whether growth compounds or resets to zero every quarter.

The Seven Building Blocks Underneath the Tactics

Underneath those three phases, Cindy works from seven building blocks that support every tactic a business runs:

1. Scorecard
2. Brand and messaging
3. Pricing
4. Target markets
5. Competitive differentiation
6. Team
7. Budget

Cindy calls these her seven Building Blocks for Growth, and we'll go deep into each one throughout this series. For now, the important thing to notice is that not one of them is a marketing tactic. They're the strategic foundation marketing tactics are supposed to stand on.

Why This Works Better With an Operational Partner

I'll go into small and growing businesses, even mid-sized businesses, and they grow randomly, not strategically. - Jen Hamilton

A growth strategy this thorough doesn't execute itself. It needs someone watching the operational side, making sure the team, the systems, and the follow-through actually hold up the strategy Cindy is describing.

This works really well when I'm working with an Integrator or a Fractional COO, because there is a good understanding and helps support this all the way through. Otherwise, there tends to be a little bit of a misstep. - Cindy Skach

Let's Make This Personal

If your marketing feels busy but your revenue doesn't seem to notice, that's not a hustle problem. It's a strategy problem, and it's an entirely solvable one once you can see the whole circle instead of just the first phase.

You don't need to work harder at marketing. You need marketing that's actually connected to the rest of your business.

Next Steps

This week, pick one marketing tactic you're currently running and try to trace it all the way to a dollar of revenue. If you can't, that's not a marketing problem. That's a strategy gap.

If you want your own growth power team of Cindy and one of our right-fit Fractional COOs/Integrators to be the leaders who make sure your growth stops being random, reach out to Hamilton COOs and we'll match you.