from Lenny Rachitsky | by Lenny Rachitsky

Marketing spends too much time on busywork—and other teams notice. But it doesn't have to be that way. In today's post, @emilykramer shares a framework called GACCS that can transform how your marketing team operates. If OKRs help you set your goals, GACCS helps you hit them: t.co/nh5vHTS8Y2

1/ Jump straight into the full post, or keep reading for a brief summary t.co/QbtVBFpSyv

2/ The GACCS is a simple framework for writing a marketing brief. It’s a common language to get buy-in and alignment on marketing work. You can think of GACCS as the 1-pager for marketing. Don’t start a project without it. t.co/yCHmY5AhKS

3/ When you are brainstorming a campaign, writing a blog post, planning an event, or creating anything longer than a tweet, you probably need a GACCS. Use this template—it has examples, too. t.co/L7pg7YTGGt

4/ Goals: Why should I do this now? Examples: Support OKR: Increase free-to-paid conversion from x% to y%; Demo product to 100 leads at event and drive 20% to schedule a meeting.

Audience: Who is it for? Pretty much the number one rule of marketing: Know your audience. If you make something for “everyone,” you are really making it for no one. Including the audience in the GACCS should force you to get specific.

...If you just put “users,” you are about four levels too high. This is a great chance to reference those ideal customer personas you made and maybe forgot about, like “Sales Sam” and “Security Shaq.”

Examples: Heads of people teams at 50+-person venture-backed startups; attendees of “Shop ’Til You Drop” conference; active free-product users

Creative: How will it stand out? There are two main components to this part of the GACCS: the unique point of view, message, or “so what”; and creative requirements for contributors and stakeholders. Much like a product needs to be differentiated, so does your marketing product

Examples: Loom video that shows how our feature is 10x faster than the alternative; reuse Pop-A-Shot branded game, and add a discount as a prize; showcase the level of specificity in our benchmarks with a designed report

Channels: How will you distribute this? Distribution is just as important as, if not more important than, what you are creating. If no one is going to see it, all the time you’ve spent making it is useless. Plus, where work will be distributed impacts what you make.

Examples: Webinar a week after launch of blog post with guest Lenny Rachitsky; email sequence to our existing list of general managers; rank for SEO keywords “work better with marketing”

Stakeholders: Who needs to be involved? The time spent building great relationships with other teams is useless if they feel left out of the loop and alienated from your work—a GACCS is an easy way to loop them in.

...Include the directly responsible individual, aka the DRI (hint: if you’re the DRI, you should be the one writing the GACCS), and also who needs to review or contribute to the work. This makes it easy to remember who needs to be involved at each step of the way.

Example: DRI: Emily; reviewers: Lenny, Kathleen; contributors: Nico (design), Keenan (web)

5/ When to write and share the GACCS t.co/NadExEAqdD

6/ Much more, including many more examples and a bonus template, in the full post t.co/QbtVBFpSyv