- Growth Hacking, Growth Marketing
Rank your ideas using the ICE Method
Hugo van den Hurk
Inbound Marketer
What do you want to achieve?
Before you start brainstorming, it's important to clarify your goals. For example, you might aim to convert anonymous website visitors into leads by having them submit their email addresses through a form, or you may want to increase the number of organic visitors to a landing page. It’s often helpful to first explore the data to identify which step in the customer journey offers the greatest opportunity for achieving the quickest results.
Determine Your One Metric That Matters
In the world of growth hacking, we refer to your objective as the "One Metric That Matters" (OMTM). Simply put, it’s a specific metric that your entire team works toward. All marketing actions you develop should contribute to this one objective. The next step is to make your OMTM "SMART"—that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, you might aim to increase the number of organic visitors by 10% within two months or boost the number of orders per customer to 2 per week within 3 months. Once you have a clear idea of the OMTM you want to focus on, you can move forward.
All out in the brainstorm
As a team, you'll then brainstorm suitable ideas—creative marketing actions that will help achieve your OMTM. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box; you never know what innovative ideas you might uncover. All ideas, no matter how wild or mundane, deserve a spot on the longlist. Once your longlist is filled with ideas that align with your OMTM, you can move on to the next step.
Time to rank the ideas with the ICE method
Of course, you can't implement all the ideas on your longlist. So, how do you choose the best one?
To help with this, we have a handy tool: the ICE method post-its. Each participant in the brainstorming session rates each idea on a scale of 1 to 10 in the following areas:
– Impact, is it going to contribute much to your OMTM?
– Confidence, how much confidence do you have in it?
– Ease, how easy is it to test?
During the brainstorming session, everyone present gives their assessment of each idea on the corresponding ICE post-it. For example, if you have an idea to improve conversion, you might rate it as follows: an 8 for Impact, a 6 for Confidence, and a 9 for Ease. To calculate the score for this idea, you multiply these numbers: 8 × 6 × 9 = 432. Your colleagues will do the same for the same idea, and then you calculate the average score for that idea.
This process will naturally highlight the winning idea with the highest score. This is the idea that you expect to have the most impact, feel most confident about, and see the greatest opportunities for testing. Once you've identified the top idea, you can move forward with testing it. That’s the essence of real growth hacking—data-driven, iterative, and focused on continuous improvement.
