2 Hours to Growth: The Simple Strategy to Supercharge Your Marketing

A 2-Hour Growth Plan Every Quarter—No More Weeks of Uncertainty

When it comes to growing your business, time is often the most valuable resource. Yet, many CMOs and marketers spend weeks, if not months, trying to develop an effective strategy. What if I told you that you could plan an effective growth strategy in just two hours per quarter? Sounds too good to be true, right?

But it’s possible—and I’m going to explain how.

The key to rapid, effective growth planning lies in focus, structure, and smart decision-making. In the next few minutes, we’ll dive into how to use a method called the ICE score—a system that’s helped some of the most successful growth hackers double their revenue, turn companies around, and skyrocket profits in record time. Am I the only one humming, Ice Ice, Baby? By the end of this post, you'll have a system in place that allows you to quickly assess and execute your marketing ideas, ultimately driving growth with less effort.

The Power of Focus

Before diving into tactics, let's talk about focus. It's easy to get lost in a sea of marketing ideas, especially in a world flooded with endless options for reaching your audience. But to grow effectively, you need to focus on one or two tactics at a time—and ideally, tactics that will have the highest return on investment (ROI).

How do you determine which tactics to prioritize? That’s where the ICE score comes in.

The ICE Score: A Simple, Powerful Tool for Ranking Marketing Ideas

Sean Ellis, the man often credited with coining the term “growth hacking" and perhaps the OG growth hacker, developed a system to evaluate marketing ideas that’s both simple and highly effective. It's called the ICE score.

The idea is to rate each marketing tactic based on three key criteria:

• Expected Impact (I): How likely is this tactic to move the needle on your revenue or business goals? The bigger the impact, the better the score.

• Confidence (C): How confident are you (or your team) that this idea will work based on data, experience, or research?

• Effort Required (E): How much time, money, and resources will this tactic take to implement? The lower the effort, the better the score.
  

Each tactic gets a score from 1-5 across these three categories. The total of these three gives you an ICE score (Impact + Confidence + Effort = ICE).

For example, if you’re considering running a new email campaign, you’d evaluate:

• Impact: If this campaign leads to even a small increase in sales, it could have a huge impact on overall revenue, so you might give it a 4.

• Confidence: You have solid data from previous campaigns that show this will work, so you might give it a 5.

• Effort: Setting up the campaign will take some time, but it's not a heavy lift—maybe a 3.
  

So, your ICE score would be 4+5+3 = 12. The higher the score, the higher the priority.

This system isn’t just theoretical—it’s practical and actionable. Top growth hackers like Nemo Chu (Kissmetrics), Josh Pigford (Bare Metrics), and others use similar strategies to decide where to focus their efforts. And it’s the system I used to grow businesses from $0 to $1 million in the first year and turn struggling brands I work with around fast.

Hour 1: Brainstorm Your Marketing Ideas

Now that you know about the ICE score, let’s put it to work. Here’s the first part of your two-hour growth strategy:

Step 1: Brainstorm your marketing ideas.

Gather your team or do this individually, but the key is to get every idea down on paper.

• Use Post-it notes, a whiteboard, or a digital tool like FigJam (obsessed) to jot down all the marketing tactics you're considering.

• Don’t overthink it—just get all the ideas out of your head and onto the board.
  

Once you have your list, group the ideas into one of three categories, based on the Three Multipliers I often talk about: AOV (Average Order Value), F (Frequency), or C (Customer Acquisition). These categories are key because they represent the areas of your business that will drive the most growth.

• AOV: Focus on increasing the average value of each order.

• F: Focus on driving repeat purchases and customer loyalty.

• C: Focus on acquiring new customers.
  

Download my Nerd Marketing Organizer (it’s free!) to help guide this process and structure your ideas.

Hour 2: Score Your Ideas and Find Your Focus

Now it’s time for the fun part: scoring each idea.

Step 2: Have each team member (or you) score each idea on the ICE scale.

• Impact (I): How much will this move the needle?

• Confidence (C): How confident are you that this will succeed?

• Effort (E): How much effort will this take?

Give each idea a score from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Afterward, calculate the average score for each idea.

Don’t just focus on the ideas with the highest scores! Instead, start by focusing on the highest-scoring idea that falls under AOV or F.

Here’s why:

• By focusing on AOV or F, you’re optimizing for current customers before worrying about acquisition.

• Why? Because increasing AOV (Average Order Value) and F (Frequency) has a multiplier effect on your business. Every dollar you spend on improving these metrics will increase the value and retention of your existing customers. When you do turn to acquisition, your marketing campaigns will already perform better because of these improvements.

The Shortcut to Growth: Maximize Before You Multiply

So, you’ve brainstormed, scored, and identified your top priorities. Here’s a powerful shortcut: maximize first, then multiply.

What does that mean?

• Maximize your existing customer base by focusing on improving AOV and frequency.

• Multiply by acquiring new customers once your retention and customer value are solid.

It’s much more efficient to increase AOV and F before you go all-in on customer acquisition because the changes you make will have a compounding effect. You’ll see a higher ROI when you work on retention and increasing customer value first.

2 Hours to Growth. Let's Go!

In just two hours per quarter, you can create a focused, actionable growth strategy. Using the ICE score, you’ll prioritize your marketing ideas and focus on the tactics that will bring the most impact with the least effort. And by focusing on AOV and frequency before acquisition, you’ll create a stable foundation that will make all of your marketing efforts more effective.

Start small. Focus on a couple of high-leverage tactics, and watch your growth skyrocket—without wasting time on weeks of strategy planning.

Ready to put this into action? Start building your two-hour growth strategy today!