The One Growth Marketing Framework That's Always Worked
Few things always work in marketing.
Most marketing tactics work in one circumstance but not another. What may work for one brand falls flat for another.
This leads marketers to falsely believe that nothing works all the time.
The Bullseye Framework by Gabe Weinberg has worked in every circumstance I’ve tried it in so far. It’s worked across B2B and B2C. Startups. Scale-ups. Even old, mature companies. In both boom and bear markets.
So what is the Bullseye Framework? It’s the scientific method for marketing. The Bullseye Framework has three parts (think: three concentric circles): the outer ring, middle ring, and the bullseye.
Each ring plays a critical role, helping you zero in on marketing activities that have the highest likelihood of success.
The Bullseye works because it helps you prioritize the most effective marketing activities based on your best knowledge of your market, combined with experimentation. It emphasizes consistent iteration and learning.
The Outer Ring: Purposeful Brainstorming
The first ring of the Bullseye Framework is the outer one. The outer ring symbolizes possibility. Not just any possibilities though. It’s a list of the marketing activities that are most likely to resonate with your target audience.
Let’s say you’re a marketer selling software. A viable marketing activity that you may include in your list in the outer ring would be outbound sales.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should build a sales team. It just means it could make sense given what you sell and what your audience expects.
Activities that feel plausible to your business belong in the outer ring.
It’s critical to be permissive in what you include in your list but not so permissive that you can find a justification to include every possible marketing activity that exists.
Relying on your knowledge of an industry or your experience as a customer of your product is the best guide for what to include.
You don’t need endless information. You just need enough information to come up with a shortlist of activities that you believe are viable. This step is more art than science.
Eventually, you’ll be testing a subset of activities from your outer ring list so the pressure is low to get the right activities listed.
Just brainstorm using your best judgment, create a list of 10—15 activities that give you direction, and move on to the next phase–the middle ring.
The Middle Ring: Candidate Options
The middle ring is where you start to get selective. In the middle ring, you want to arrive at a shortlist of five candidate marketing activities that you think have the highest probability of succeeding. Naturally, these candidates must be a subset of your outer ring.
A good way to frame this step is to ask a focusing question:
If I had to sell a large amount of my product in a week, or I’d lose my job, what tactics would I use?
Extending the example of the software business from the previous section, you might say Account-based marketing (ABM) is one of the key growth tactics.
For ABM, you’d come up with buying personas for customers. Develop a message to reach them. Aggregate a large list of real people who fit your buying personas. And then do targeted outreach to them. At the end of the week, if your list were large enough, even if your success rate was low, it’s likely that someone took you up on your offer and you were able to sell your product.
This is what the middle ring is all about.
Given limited time and resources, what critical activities would you actually invest in?
A strong understanding of your customer and their unique buying behavior is key in this step. Any information you have about your customer and their interest in your product will help you narrow down your options to the most viable ones.
This is why being a customer of your product is so critical.
It gives you unique insight into the mindset of a buyer by virtue of being one. And of course, you know what messages work for you, what channels you’re drawn to, and what a good product in this category looks like.
If you aren’t a customer of your product, you should talk to people within your company who are. Or this is the perfect time to get outside your office and talk to potential customers about why they would buy.
Once you’ve narrowed down your candidate list to five options, it’s time to move to the bullseye and start to get your hands dirty.
The Bullseye: The One Thing
Now that you’ve considered a wide range of marketing activities, better understood your potential customers, and have a shortlist of viable activities, you should test one activity.
Here’s where most marketers stumble.
Most marketers fall for the multitasking myth. They spread themselves thin across too many tactics. They do the outer ring brainstorm but then treat it as a task list of all the things they have to do.
This shotgun approach rarely works. (It only works if you have a lot of time and a lot of money. Two things most marketers don’t have.)
The Bullseye is for testing one thing. Just one.
Take the focusing question from earlier of what you would do to sell a product within a week and truncate it to a day. What would you do to sell your product in one day or else you’ll be fired?
Luckily, you won’t be fired (more likely promoted if you do this).
The value of this line of thinking is that it’s a forcing function. It immediately clarifies where there is leverage and how you should act.
Testing one thing takes courage.
Most people refuse to stick with one thing because they think it’ll make them look bad. After all, if you’re not boiling the ocean, you’re not trying, right? Obviously that’s wrong but the logic is very tempting and hard to resist.
When you test one thing, you’re isolating the key variables. You’re holding all other activities constant and giving one thing the room to breathe.
If the one thing you test doesn’t work, that’s fine. You’ll learn from it. It’s not the end of the world because you have four more viable candidate options to test from the middle ring waiting in the wings.
When something doesn’t work in the bullseye, move it back to the outer ring list, pull an activity from the outer ring forward to the middle ring, and then push another activity from the middle ring to the bullseye.
Keep repeating this cycle until you find something that works.
Once you find a bright spot, stop. This is where you end the bullseye cycle indefinitely and double down on the marketing activity that is working.
There’s no end to doubling down. The only milestone to tell you to stop is when things stop working for a prolonged period of time.
A final note: if you’re consistently swinging and missing with things you graduate to the bullseye list, you should do two things: 1) talk to customers, and 2) re-evaluate your offer. This is how you find consistent growth.
Sustainable Growth
If you’re getting to the bullseye and you’re not seeing traction, you’re likely missing something nuanced about your customer.
At this point, re-evaluating your priors is critical. You may not have even been wrong when you made the initial decisions you made about what to test. It may just be that the market has moved. This is the case a lot of the time in fast-moving markets.
If you’re confident in your bullseye exercise, then you should consider the offer you’re putting out. Is your messaging off? Is your creative unappealing? Are you priced too high or too low?
Given perceptions are really important in marketing, making sure you’re creating the right perceptions is key.
The Bullseye Framework is an evidence-based marketing framework that helps you find what sustainably grows your business. It works consistently because it’s hypothesis-driven, experimental, and creates a tight feedback loop.
It’s the scientific method for marketing.