The baseline is the History of previous marketing activities and their perfomance. History is the best indication of what works and what doesn’t. Absent history, you have to try many different things to conclude what will work for your business. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prioritize based on a logical set of hypotheses – just that you shouldn’t reject ideas outright until they are proven
A baseline definition helps us to:
Be realistic about our resources: time, money, people – paid search takes money, social media takes time, and mobile app development takes expertise. Figure out what you have in-house and what you can afford before investing too much energy in that particular channel.
Write down what you KNOW and what you HAVE – this is the crux of setting your baseline. What’s your current web traffic? How many email addresses do you have? What’s your social presence?
What’s been the historical mix (if any) by marketing channel. Take a clear inventory of what you know so that you can effectively measure the impact of your marketing.
Identify low-hanging fruit – obvious, but still folks don’t do it. If your goal is building an audience and you have 5,000 email addresses and 20 social media followers, we should start with email. Your audience is there. Get leverage where you can before you start the more difficult long-term Growth Hacking work.
