Brands often come to a crossroads with their marketing strategy: keeping their current agency or finding one who can do it better. In the middle of that crossroads is the marketing budget.
It's a terrible situation when an agency delivers results that are a far cry from what they promised. No one wants to throw money away on bad marketing. They're just looking for the best vehicle to do that.
At Lean Labs, we build a custom blueprint for every brand we work with and deliver results, not a service. How fast we implement those results is up to the brands that hire us. So, how much will it cost to adopt a growth marketing framework for your business? That's what we'll answer in this post.
Is a Growth Strategy Framework Expensive?
A great quote comes from the entrepreneur and creator of Click Funnels, Russell Brunson, about setting a marketing budget. He says: “If you put in 1 dollar and got out 2 dollars, how much would you put in?” With that formula, you’d invest an endless amount. That’s his point.
On the surface, a growth strategy framework can appear more expensive than traditional marketing. Why? To say it’s “better” is an underestimate. Let’s start with some price points to see how growth marketing will level up your company.
3 Pillars of a Growth Strategy
There are three pillars to a successful growth strategy framework:
- Platform: Comprehensive view of all activity in your company, including sales, marketing, and service.
- Website: User-driven, continuously optimized, and evolving.
- Marketing: Sprint-based, driving short and long-term business decisions on a monthly and quarterly basis.
Let’s cover pillar one: Growth Platform.
1. HubSpot Growth Platform ($300 - $1390 /mo)
The first pillar for a growth business is to invest in a tool stack that helps scale operations. Too many brands work inefficiently by building a Frankenstein system: using a separate tool for client and marketing emails, customer management, website content, and analytics, to name a few. Each tool can be exceptional on its own, but what gives your team power is to see all the data in one place.
Using an integrated system tells the complete story of customer engagement. This clarity helps your sales, marketing, and sales team increase productivity and plan the best action for a customer. That’s why using HubSpot is a smart move. At Lean Labs, it’s typically a prerequisite to work with us.
HubSpot offers a myriad of options for a business to get started. We’ll cover the most common path.
HubSpot CMS
A Content Management System (CMS) is what gives you the ability to manage all of your website content. The HubSpot CMS comes with different themes that you can choose, all with varying degrees of functionality and polish.
HubSpot offers two CMS options:
- Professional - $300/mo
- Enterprise - $800/mo
Most brands start with HubSpot Professional CMS. This gets them into the world of HubSpot and they scale as they grow. Enterprise is for very organizations and isn’t that common.
HubSpot Marketing Pro
HubSpot Marketing Pro allows powerful tools such as marketing automation, custom reporting, and A/B testing. You can build landing pages using Marketing Pro.
HubSpot Marketing Pro Options:
- Starter: $50/mo
- Professional: $890/mo
- Enterprise: $3,200/mo
HubSpot Sales Hub
Does your team make outbound calls with leads? What about creating a deal pipeline, sales forecasts, and tracking deals? If these apply, consider adding Sales Hub to your growth platform.
HubSpot Sales Hub Options:
- Starter: $50/mo
- Professional: $500/mo
- Enterprise: $1,200/mo
HubSpot Growth Platform Estimates
When we work with a brand, we make platform recommendations based on their budget and goals. It starts at $300 a month and can go well-beyond $1390 if you choose Marketing Pro and Sale Hub. Ultimately, the company decides which starting point is right for them.
The range of options that HubSpot provides can be confusing for some brands. What’s common is to start with HubSpot CMS and scale as you go.
That would include:
- CMS -$300 /mo
- Sales Hub Professional - $500 /mo
Total Monthly for Growth Platform: $800 /mo
2. Growth Website
One essential principle of building a growth strategy is system first, marketing second. What is that system? Your website. Part of growth marketing is building monthly organic traffic by increasing website authority. There’s no scammy way to do this, only quality content and data-driven research and experimentation—It’s a long-term game.
Building Websites that Continuously Improve
A company needs a way to streamline its website improvement process. Building new pages frequently and using data to guide website updates is essential. Too many companies rely on outsourced web developers, which creates a bottleneck. Even worse, they create a brochure website and don’t make any changes after it’s launched. Then they repeat the process.
To solve this dilemma, we’ve developed a modular-based website application called Sprocket Rocket. It integrates directly in HubSpot and makes it easy to create high-converting pages. We use it for our website and all of our clients.
Growth Website Estimates
Every brand requires a unique website strategy. Two sites on the same plan won’t necessarily be the same price. On average, prices start at $12K and go up from there. It all depends on the size of the sitemap and the complexity of the design.
We offer three website levels:
- Foundation
- Impress
- Inspire
Everyone comes in with a different history, which is why we evaluate the website’s performance history, then draft a plan around data. To build a growth website correctly, it’s not one metric that will solve all the issues. That’s why it’s key to base decisions on actual performance data, not guesses.
3. Growth Marketing (Avg $12K/mo)
Creating a system that delivers monthly organic traffic snowballs once it gets going. The issue with some marketing strategies that rely solely on ads is that when the budget runs out, so does the pipeline. Organic traffic that builds, month after month, makes long-term wins.
The search intent of potential customers reveals how to market to them appropriately. No matter how much advertising budget a brand can muster, organic traffic ensures long-term growth for a business. There will always be someone searching for a solution. The aim is to be on the other end of that search.
- Growth Blueprint: The biggest mistake brands make is rushing to market. Taking the time to create a 12 week and 12-month strategy built around data-driven benchmarks allows the greatest chance of success. That includes planning the sitemap for the website and a content strategy for each page.
- Growth Metrics: Traditional marketing focuses on building top-of-funnel awareness and turning prospects into leads. Growth marketing focuses on the complete picture—awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referrals. Hitting monthly goals in each of these areas ensures long-term growth for the entire brand, not just one side of it.
- Growth Team: Developing a successful growth strategy framework requires an agile approach to doing the work. The team works together to achieve daily and weekly goals and holds themselves accountable for delivering results.
- Growth Leader: In an organization, anyone can be a growth leader. They have expert knowledge in their industry and help their team reach their goals. They’re proactive, take accountability, and help remove blocks for their team.
Growth Speed Estimates
Any growth marketing company worth doing business with will be able to give you a range of pricing based on how fast you want to grow.
At Lean Labs, we use speed to grade the effort required for each task. As we scale up, so do our clients. The question that many brands have to ask is how fast do they want to go?
Here are the speeds that we offer:
- ½ Growth Velocity - $9,000 a month
- ⅔ Growth Velocity - $12,000 a month
- Full Growth Velocity - $18,000 a month
Growth Strategy Framework Totals
We start marketing after we compile the website to ensure that we have the foundation in place. From idea, launch, and marketing, companies average $14K/mo plus what they decide for their platform needs.
How Much are You Willing to Pay for Bad Marketing?
Is adopting a growth strategy framework “too expensive?” Well, how much does lousy marketing cost? No matter how reasonable, paying for bad marketing will cost more to your business in the long run.
Many companies found out the hard way that once they run out of money, the leads stop coming in.
The bottom line is this: good marketing pays for itself. Going back to Russell Brunson’s question—how much should you invest in marketing if you got $2 for every $1 you put in? You decide.
Ready to start developing a growth strategy framework for your business? Check this out.
