Barri Coen | Nov 21 | 5 min read

Growth Marketing: The Complete Guide to Building a Scalable, Sustainable Growth Engine

Growth Marketing: The Complete Guide to Building a Scalable, Sustainable Growth Engine

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 Marketing Swat — 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 Marketing Swat 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.

Want help choosing the right channels for your business? 👉 Next