# Growth, Performance, and Lifecycle Marketing

## 1. Growth model

Map the constraint before choosing a channel:

- Acquisition: qualified reach and traffic.
- Activation: first valuable action.
- Conversion: purchase or qualified lead.
- Retention: repeat use or engagement.
- Revenue: margin and lifetime value.
- Referral: recommendation and advocacy.

State whether the task is demand creation, demand capture, conversion, or retention. Do not use paid media to hide weak product, price, proof, landing, or fulfillment.

## 2. Paid media portfolio

Separate budgets by job:

- Learning budget: audience, message, creative, and offer tests.
- Scale budget: proven combinations within marginal economics.
- Brand demand budget: reach, salience, and future search.
- Retention budget: existing customer value.
- Reserve: controlled response to opportunity or volatility.

For each plan define objective, audience, creative input, destination, spend cap, attribution window, primary metric, guardrail, stop rule, scale rule, and learning owner.

## 3. Marginal economics

Average ROI does not justify scale. Monitor marginal acquisition cost, marginal conversion, refund loss, inventory, fulfillment, audience saturation, creative fatigue, and channel cannibalization.

Commercial Strategy owns the break-even threshold. Growth owns the experiment and response to marginal performance.

## 4. Search and conversion

Connect brand, category, scenario, problem, comparison, and competitor terms to the right content and commerce landing. Separate organic search assets from paid search capture.

Conversion analysis should include message match, trust, proof, price consistency, reviews, Q&A, detail clarity, availability, delivery, service, and refund risk.

## 5. Experimentation

Use one primary hypothesis and isolate decisive variables. Record:

- Baseline and expected mechanism.
- Audience and eligibility.
- Creative, offer, placement, or landing variable.
- Duration, budget, sample limits, and seasonality.
- Primary metric and guardrail metrics.
- Attribution or holdout design.
- Stop, scale, and inconclusive rules.

Do not claim incrementality from platform attribution alone.

## 6. CRM and lifecycle

Build lifecycle states such as prospect, new buyer, activated buyer, repeat-ready, loyal, high-value, at-risk, dormant, and churned.

For each state define customer need, allowed contact, message, offer, channel, frequency, next state, success metric, fatigue guardrail, and opt-out/privacy requirement.

Prioritize useful service, education, replenishment, membership value, and relevant cross-sell over indiscriminate coupons.

## 7. Review cadence

- Daily: spend, delivery, conversion, anomalies, inventory, refunds.
- Weekly: marginal economics, audience, creative, search, lifecycle movement, and experiments.
- Monthly: media portfolio, incrementality, cohort value, brand demand, saturation, and budget reallocation.

Every review ends with continue, scale, modify, stop, or investigate, plus an owner and next evidence window.