Your Growth Marketing Strategy Made Easy! [Free Canvas]
Are you struggling to grow your business?
You’ve put money and efforts to promote your business but have no clue (or an unclear) what worked and what didn’t.
Or you’re even stuck with a great idea but no traffic.
You need a plan!

How the Growth Marketing Canvas can help you grow your Business?
The Growth Marketing Canvas (GMC) helps you grow your business by building, mapping and maintaining a coherent growth marketing strategy that strongly relies on your customers’ needs.
It helps you avoid the improvised and fuzziness work.
The canvas is composed of 7 elements:
- Customer Pain
- Keywords
- Value proposition
- Unfair advantage
- Offer
- Channels
- Goals & KPI’s
Each of those 7 elements much be developed over 2 main dimensions:
- A specific Buyer’s Persona
- His Buyer’s Journey
Together, dimensions and elements provide a pretty accurate view of your growth marketing strategy.
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Now let’s get into more details about dimensions and elements:
The 2 dimensions of the GMC
1. Buyer’s Personas
A persona is a detailed description of who your ideal customer is.
Gender, age, what’s his job, interests…
Referring to the well known and used Business Model Canvas, you may have several personas to tackle. (i.e. multi-sided market unlike marketplaces).
Make sure you draw a growth marketing strategy for homogeneous groups of customers.
Let me give you a simple example to illustrate the interest of personas:
- Let’s say you figured out Facebook ads is a good channel to reach your persona
- At the time you’ll set up your ad campaign, the more you know about your ideal customer, the more you’ll be able to target your ads audience
And that’s what you want to achieve: targeting the relevant people to get the best conversion and optimize your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
See available Facebook criteria to segment your ads on Figure 1, it’s pretty much follow the questions answered in personas.

How to get started
- Questions that you should answer to better know your personas by Hubspot
2. Buyer’s Journey
At what step of their buying process your customer stands?
Let’s take an example to explain the Buyer’s journey principle:
- 2 different persons with the same characteristics (woman, 35 years old, living in the city, executives…) => they belong to the same initial persona
- One is searching for “cheap flight New York”
- The other one is searching for “travel destination ideas”
The one that is searching for “cheap flight New York” is far more advanced, mature in his buying process than the other one.
She already made up her mind on the destination and she’s now in the process of booking a flight.
She has more buying intent than the other person that still needs inspiration.
Nailing down what your customers need at each step of their buying process is key to grow your business.
You must adapt to their specific needs. It’s the main purpose of the Growth Marketing Canvas.
The notion of buyer’s Journey is a very common material in inbound marketing.
There are 4 steps in the Buyer’s Journey:
- Discovery: Have realized and expressed symptoms of a potential problem or opportunity (want to escape for a week-end). They’re researching neutral information around it.
- Consideration: Have clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity (want to visit New-York for the week-end). They’re committed to researching and understanding all the available approaches/methods to solving their defined problem or opportunity.
- Decision: Have defined their solution, method or approach (looking for the cheapest flight to New-York for the given week-end). They’re researching supporting document, data, benchmarks or endorsements to make a final decision.
- Advocacy: Have selected one option that answered their problem or opportunity. They are your customers now. They’re willing to be satisfied with your product and go beyond expectations (this is all about user experience here. How they feel about booking a flight on you website? Will they go back?). They may also recommend the product to peers (creating referrals, your Holy Grail!).
How to get started
The 7 elements of the GMC
1. Customer Pain
“We Hire Products To Do Jobs For Us” — Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School
Identifying your customers’ pain is all about framing the job they need to be done and how you can give the best answer to it.
You also need to spot the pains and the gains associated to this job.
How to get started
- For what job do you hire milkshakes? A video that explains the case study by Clayton Christensen
- A video that simply explains the benefits and differences that the Jobs-to-be-done process makes in understanding your customers’ needs.
- Use the Empathy Map to understand your ideal customers’ needs
2. Keywords
Today, when a customer wants to solve his pain/problem, the first thing he will do is to browse the web.
He will express his need into a keyword phrase and search for answers on Google, Facebook….
Every customer pain, opportunity goes down to keywords.
Your job is to figure out what words, jargon prospects think of to express their needs.
3 groups of keywords, 3 different buying intents:
- Keywords can be single-word (Head keywords) so very generic. The searcher intent is unclear
Someone searching for “insurance” might be looking for a car insurance quote, a list of life insurance companies or a definition of the word
- A 2–3 word phrase (Body keywords)
They’re more specific than head keywords: “life insurance” or “order vitamins online”
- 4+ word phrase (Long tail keywords)
Phrases like “affordable life insurance for senior citizens” and “order vitamin D capsules online”.
The more detailed the keyword phrase is, the more mature the customer might be in his Buyer’s journey.
In social media, keywords are more often named hashtags (#keyword).
Nailing down the keywords that your prospects will search to solve their pain will bring you 2 key elements to your growth strategy:
- What keywords to use in your assets (value proposition, ad messages, landing page…) to echo your prospects pain
- Where they search for solutions (See Channels section). Basically, where you should go to take part in the discussion.
How to get started
- Great article from Content Marketing Institute that explains how keywords and personas tie together
- To help you identify those keywords, I strongly advise you to read and follow The Keyword Research Guide by Bryan Dean, an internationally recognized SEO expert
3. Value proposition
Why and how are you helping to solve your customer’s pain?
What value do you deliver to the customer?
Bear in mind that your product value proposition should only come when the customer reached the decision stage.
Before he reaches this maturity stage, any communication effort on your product may be perceived as spam. He is not ready yet to listen to your sales pitch.
Instead, educate him! Your value proposition is then different.
How to get started
- This video explains how your Product Value Proposition should fit with your persona’s job, pains and gains — The Value Proposition Canvas Explained — Strategyzer
4. Unfair advantage
What makes you stand out? Why you do what you do?
You probably know what product (features) you provide and how you provide it (software, hardware…). But you might not be very clear on why you do it. However, your “why” is the most differentiating asset to make a difference in the market.
“Features tell, benefits sell”
- In-depth knowledge or skills (You’re passionate about the topic, You’re THE expert)
- Or you partner with top-notch experts
- You have strong Social proof
- …
Whatever makes you stand out for the competition?
How to get started
- To help you figure your “why” out, watch this video about The Golden Circle by Simon Sinek.
- Great article to spot your unfair advantage by John Cohen
5. Offer
Community, content, features, demo, events, discount… Offers are various.
If you’re a SaaS company, your software is certainly the most advanced offer you can provide to your customers. But the best tool won’t help if the customer is not ready to by.
However, valuable content that help your prospects mature their need and make a decision is a great offer.
Your offers must be perfectly synchronised with your Buyer’s Journey Stage (Refer to Buyer’s Journey section).
Coming up with a discount while your prospect is not ready to buy yet is not the best offer you can make.
Or a product demo if your prospect has no idea what his problem is.
Instead, ask you the question what is missing to your prospect so that he is ready to buy from you (better frame his own need, social proof…).
Educate rather than sell!
How to get started
- Social selling is the art of using social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects. It’s the modern way to develop meaningful relationships with potential customers that keep you — and your brand — front of mind, so you’re the natural first point of contact when a prospect is ready to buy.
- Read more about Social Selling with this article from Hootsuite
6. Channels
There is no miracle recipe for promoting your business. There are hundred ways you can use to promote your business.
Your job is to figure out the ones that work for your business.
“Marketing is about being where the customers are”
Previous research on your personas will provide you with keywords and places where to start the discussion.
How to get started
- Hard to list all the channels but here is a list of 100+ channels to promote your business
7. Goals & KPI’s
For each step of the buyer’s journey, ask you the question what is the main action I want my customer to take that is key to grow my business (Download a piece of content, subscribe to the newsletter, ask for a demo…).
Do they take the action you want them to take? Engagement is key.
You’ll then be able to know if you’ve reach your product/market fit.
Based on your knowledge of the market and your capacities, define S.M.A.R.T goals.
And make sure you properly track the action so that you’ll be able to measure your efforts and progress.
Don’t focus only on quantitative data (Google Analytics, Mixpanel…).
Add qualitative data to your analysis (Hotjar to record video user sessions, feedback surveys…).
How to get started
- What is product/market fit
- Define M.A.R.T goals
- Analytics tools list
Congratulations, now you have a plan to get your business grow!
But you might feel overwhelmed with the massive amount of work it requires. That’s normal. Especially if you’re early stage with a very limited team and budget, you won’t be able to set up all your growth strategy at the same time (Unless you’re Superman!).
So you have to prioritize actions.
A good and simple way of prioritizing your growth actions is by using the I.C.E Framework from Sean Ellis, the man that nailed down “growth hacking”.
Using the I.C.E framework, you’ll list and score every action from your growth strategy.
I.C.E stands for:
- Impact: If this idea works, will it have a big impact? Is this action reaching 100% of your audience or a tiny segment? Is this A/B test intending to improve the landing page main call-to-action conversion or a secondary action?
- Confidence: How confident are you that this idea will work?
- Ease: Is this idea something that will be easy to test, or will it take weeks of product development to figure out?
How to get started
- Listen more about the I.C.E framework in this interview with Sean Ellis
- Detailed article about the I.C.E framework from Dave Gerhardt, Director of Marketing @Drift
- Software to manage growth on a daily from Growthhackers.com, a community raised by Sean Ellis
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Guillaume @The Growth Marketing Canvas
TheGrowthMarketingCanvas.com

