Turn a growth goal into a marketing plan

The first job is to translate the goal into the specific numbers that produce it. A revenue target becomes a number of new customers. New customers become a number of trials, demos, or orders, depending on how you sell. Those become a number of visitors or leads. Working backward like this shows how far each stage of your funnel has to move.

Here's an example. Say you run a software company and want 60 new customers this quarter, or about 20 a month. Your website gets 12,000 visitors a month. One percent of them start a trial, and one in ten trials becomes a paying customer. That produces 12 customers a month. To reach 20, you could nearly double your traffic to about 20,000 visitors a month. You could also raise the trial-to-paid rate from 10 percent to about 17 percent, or raise the share of visitors who start a trial from 1 percent to about 1.7 percent. Those are three very different plans, and the math alone makes it clear that "post more on LinkedIn" may not be the answer.

Kite reads these numbers from the analytics it runs on websites it hosts, which track visitors, signups, form submissions, and conversion funnels. If your site or your sales data lives somewhere else, Kite reads them through your connected analytics product or CRM. When a number is missing, such as how many sales calls close, Kite asks you for it rather than guessing, and it records your answer in the wiki so later plans can use it.

Once Kite knows which stage of the funnel matters most, it looks for the opportunities that would move it. This is where its research earns its keep. Kite compares your site, content, and search presence with your competitors and looks for places you're losing ground or leaving demand on the table.

For the example above, Kite might find three candidates:

• Your pricing page is losing visitors because it doesn't answer the questions buyers ask, such as how your plans compare with a competitor's.
• A competitor ranks for a set of searches with real volume where your site has no page at all.
• Trial users who never set up an integration rarely become customers, and nothing in your onboarding emails nudges them to do it.

Kite ranks opportunities like these by the effect each is likely to have on your goal and ties each one to the evidence behind it. It keeps what it observed separate from what it inferred, so you can see which recommendations rest on your own data and which rest on its judgment. It also leaves out ideas it can't support. A channel your buyers don't use doesn't make the list just because it's popular.

Channel choices are part of this step. If you're weighing whether to invest in TikTok or Pinterest, or how to rely less on Meta ads, Kite looks at where your competitors advertise, what kind of content works in your category, and where your current customers come from, then recommends where your effort is most likely to pay off.

Kite turns the top-ranked opportunity into a goal you can approve. The goal's title states the outcome in your words, ideally with the number in it, such as "Grow paid customers from 12 to 20 a month by the end of the quarter." The description explains why this goal matters and links to the research behind it in your wiki.

Every proposal comes with the first two to four tasks Kite would start on, each owned by the specialist best suited to it. For the pricing page opportunity, that might look like this:

• Research: Collect the questions prospects ask about pricing from your team's Slack conversations, public reviews, and competitor comparison pages.
• Content: Rewrite the pricing page to answer those questions and add a plan comparison table.
• Design: Redesign the page layout so the comparison and the main call to action are easy to find on a phone.

The proposal also says how success will be measured, because a plan without a measure can't tell you whether it's working. In this case, Kite would track the share of pricing page visitors who start a trial, and the number of paid customers each month. Proposing a goal doesn't start any work. It waits for you to approve, change, or decline it.

Once you approve a goal, Kite treats it as an initiative and starts the tasks it proposed. Its specialists handle research, writing, design, website work, and analysis, and Kite keeps their work focused on the goal. A single initiative often involves several of them in sequence. Research leads to new content, the content leads to website changes, and those lead to distribution and measurement.

You can see every initiative on your team's initiatives board, which shows whether each one is proposed, active, completed, or stopped, along with the tasks that belong to it. Kite records milestones as the work progresses, such as when research is finished, a page ships, or an experiment launches. Each goal also has a dashboard, and when a task produces a chart or table, Kite pins it there so the evidence stays in one place.

The work itself still follows your approval settings. Kite asks before it publishes a page, sends an email, or posts on social media, and you can give it more room to act on its own once you trust its judgment. Your approved goals also guide what Kite does between tasks. If your team uses Slack, Kite reviews new messages every half hour alongside your active goals and tells you when it spots something that bears on one of them.

Every approved goal gets a recurring progress check that measures the goal against your data. Kite picks a schedule that fits the goal, such as weekly for a goal that runs a quarter. Each check records what has moved and what hasn't on the goal's timeline. When the goal is met, Kite marks it completed and writes a short summary of what changed and by how much.

The plan changes as results come in. If the new pricing page lifts trial starts but trial-to-paid stays flat, Kite says so and proposes moving effort to onboarding emails. If a new comparison page starts ranking and bringing in trials, Kite may propose more pages like it. When Kite changes the plan, it tells you what changed since the original proposal and why.

Kite also learns from each round. Results from campaigns and experiments go into your wiki, so the next plan starts with a clearer picture of what works for your business.