The GACC Marketing Brief: The best framework we’ve created
Goals. Audience. Creative. Channels.
👋 This is a monthly free edition of MKT1 Newsletter—a deep dive into a B2B startup marketing topic. Become a paid subscriber to receive an additional newsletter each month, access our archives, post to our job board, use our template library, and attend monthly office hours with Kramer.
Marketers spend too much time on busy work. This is a trap we fall into as marketers when we focus on quantity of work instead of impactful work from the start.
Enter the GACC (not the nickelodeon slime stuff from the 90s—throwback reference for other “old” millennials). The GACC is our version of a (brief) marketing brief. I evolved this framework while leading marketing at Asana and we continue to use it with startups we advise. GACC stands for goals, audience, creative/unique take, and channels/distribution.
When you are planning a campaign, writing a blog post, deciding the focus of an event, or creating anything longer than a Tweet, you probably need a GACC. Writing the GACC in advance helps give your future creation focus, sets context for reviewers, and ensures you have a plan for driving results.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this newsletter:
Why use the GACC and how to use it
Break down of the GACC acronym
The importance of the GACC
We have 2 main principles in marketing we encourage everyone to follow to ensure you are focused on and driving impact:
Everything you create as a marketing team should ladder up to a perception and/or an OKR/goal, otherwise it should be deprioritized—at least for now. There are sometimes exceptions to this rule, but I can’t think of many.
Everything you create should pass the “add value” test. If it doesn’t add value to your audience specifically and is simply duplicative, really ask yourself if it’s worth making at all.
The GACC makes sure you and your team follow these principles, which results in better work, which results in short-term and long-term growth gains. The GACC is the best framework I’ve ever developed. I mean I haven’t developed that many frameworks, but this unverified claim would still stand if I developed 100.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including a GACCS brief template with question prompts and examples.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: The MKT1 Guide to Annual Planning, Perceptions, and Goal setting.
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which explains how to use the GACCS framework.