This “Marvel’s” concept will help you priorit-ICE the right offerings and marketing for the right audience! [Monday: Marketing Marvels]
Miles Everson’s Business Builder Daily speaks to the heart of what great marketers, business leaders, and other professionals need to succeed in advertising, communications, managing their investments, career strategy, and more.
A Note from Miles Everson:
Hello, everyone!
We’re excited to kickstart an awesome week. We hope you are, too!
Let’s talk about our “Marketing Marvel” for today. Every Monday, we highlight outstanding individuals and discuss their experiences, insights, and contributions to their respective industries.
Ready to know more about today’s feature?
Keep reading the article below.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Marketing Marvels
Have you heard the term, “growth hacking?”
For those of you who haven’t yet, this is a sub-field of marketing focused on the rapid growth of a company. Growth hacking consists of both a process and a set of cross-disciplinary skills.
A growth hacker is someone who uses low-cost, creative strategies to help businesses acquire and retain customers. These professionals are sometimes called growth marketers, although they aren’t simply marketers.
Anyone involved in the planning and creation of a product or service, including a product manager or engineer, can be a growth hacker. They know how to set growth priorities, identify channels for customer acquisition, measure success, and scale growth.
Today, let’s take a look at one of the iconic growth hackers in town…
Sean Ellis was one of the first marketers at cloud service software Dropbox and is now the founder and CEO of growth marketing platform GrowthHackers.com. He coined the term, “growth hacking” 7 years ago to describe a new way of marketing: Clearing the clutter and figuring out a framework that is “both testable and scalable.”
Photo from Foundr
Aside from founding GrowthHackers.com, Ellis is an author, angel investor, and startup advisor. He is the author of the book, “Hacking Growth,” host of the “Breakout Growth” podcast, and a professor at leading business schools such as Harvard, UC Berkeley Haas, CKGSB (Beijing), Imperial College BS (London), and INSEAD (France).
Ellis is also credited with introducing the ICE Prioritization Framework and the Product/Market Fit Test. His works have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, Fast Company, Forbes, The Sydney Morning Herald, and on the MSNBC Television Network.
The ICE Scoring Model
Photo from FourWeekMBA
Ellis created the ICE Scoring Model as an agile prioritization tool to help businesses assess the RIGHT projects, ideas, and product features via 3-set measurements: Impact, Confidence, and Ease. This method is ideal for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.
Let’s dive deeper into the 3 metrics in which projects or ideas are scored:
Impact – This refers to the potential of a project or idea to support your main business objectives. For instance: If your focus is on getting more people to subscribe to your newsletter, anything that could boost sign-ups would garner a high impact score.
Confidence – This affects the impact score a little by making you consider how confident you are that your target market would realize the impact or value of your offering.
Ease – This pertains to the ease of making, testing, and completing your offering.
How is the ICE score computed?
To arrive at the ICE score, you must rate your project or idea based on the metrics above through a scale of 1 to 10. Once you have the exact numbers for each parameter, multiply them together and the final output will be the score.
A higher score means a project or idea should be prioritized, and a lower score means a project or idea should be set aside for the meantime or eliminated from the table completely.
Example:
Project 1 has an impact score of 7, a confidence score of 6, and an ease score of 5. Multiply all these numbers together and you’ll get an ICE score of 210.
Meanwhile, project 2 has an impact score of 9, a confidence score of 7, and an ease score of 2. Multiply the numbers and you’ll have an ICE score of 126.
Based on these outputs, project 1 will take the top spot in the prioritization hierarchy. While project 2 has higher impact and confidence scores, its low ease score weighed it down.
This shows in the ICE Scoring Model, all 3 metrics are treated EQUALLY, unlike other weighted scoring models. This is because for Ellis, all the involved parameters are essential in creating the RIGHT offerings for the RIGHT consumers.
Try this method on your next brainstorming session with your team! According to Ellis, the ICE Scoring Model highlights speed and simplicity and helps management teams avoid analysis paralysis.
What’s more?
It lets teams prioritize tasks rapidly, move forward with momentum and purpose, and avoid becoming over-preoccupied with details.
Product + Impact = Growth
Ellis believes when a company thinks about the importance of impact, it will be easier for the entire team to rally around growth… and growth happens when the team starts to innovate or experiment.
To see the value in experimentation, Ellis says firms should not only question the way things are done but also prove that long-time successful systems can only take them so far. In his words:
“If you’re not running experiments, you’re probably not growing. You have to break a model in order to reach higher goals.”
For him, businesses, especially startups, should think about their products and the growth of those products all the time. How?
By identifying the right customers, acquiring those customers, getting them to use the product in the right way, and figuring out how to do that many times. Just because an offering is undeniably great, that doesn’t mean marketing is unnecessary.
We hope you learned a lot from today’s “Marvel!”
Always remember that growth hacking actually works to bridge the gap between product creation and marketing.
With the help of the ICE Scoring model, you’ll not only know the projects or ideas you need to prioritize for your brand, but also enable you to run experiments and innovations that will hack your way to growth and success.
Have an awesome start to the week!
(This article is from The Business Builder Daily, a newsletter by The I Institute in collaboration with MBO Partners.)
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Monday Marketing Marvels”
Too often, industry experts and the marketing press sing the praises of some brand or company’s marketing strategy.
… only for the audience to later find out that its product was a flop, or worse, that the brand or company went bankrupt.
The true ROI in marketing can’t be separated from the business as a whole.
What good is a marketing case study if one can’t prove that the company’s efforts actually paid off?
At the end of the day, either the entire business is successful or it isn’t. And the roles of marketing and communication are always paramount to that success.
Every Monday, we publish a case study that highlights the world’s greatest marketing strategies, marketers, and communicators.
However, the difference between our articles and the numerous ones out there is that we will always make certain that the firm really did generate and demonstrate earning power worthy of study in the first place (compliments of Valens Research’s finance group) in keeping with a person’s leadership skills in the area of marketing and/or communication.
We’ll also study the greatest marketing fails and analyze what they did wrong, or what they needed to improve. We all make our mistakes, but better we learn from others’ mistakes—and earlier, rather than later.
Hope you found this week’s marketing marvel interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next week’s Monday Marketing Marvels!
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
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