GACCS brief

Why use the GACCS?

• If OKRs help you define your goals, GACCS helps you hit your goals.
• Before you start the marketing project, write out a GACCS to give your work focus, set context for reviewers, and ensure that you have a plan for driving results.‍
• Writing the GACCs will become the most valuable 10+ minutes you spend on a project or task—and save you hours of time on back-and-forth later.

How to write a GACCS

• Fill out the GACCS template when you are brainstorming a campaign, writing a blog post, planning an event, or creating anything longer than a tweet.
• For smaller campaigns you can spend a few minutes and circulate with a colleague or two.
• For large campaigns, get more detailed and share with a larger group of cross-functional stakeholders.
• We recommend creating the GACCS in a project management tool or wherever your work is getting done and including approval of the GACCS in your project management process.

Access our GACCs brief template here.

Goals: Why should I do this now?

• Marketing is a game of prioritization. To determine what to create next, you need to consider the potential impact. The best way to do that is to make sure the work ladders up to a higher-level goal or OKR and to have a clear sense of what you are trying to achieve.
• It’s also helpful to think through and share non-goals. This helps prevent scope creep, especially when work is reviewed by others.
• Including goals on all projects helps you connect the dots between day-to-day work and the annual and quarterly goals you likely spent so much time setting.‍
• 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; Support our overall story that we have the best benchmarks for people teams

For more on goal setting, read this article.

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—and 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

For more on understanding your audience, read this article.

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. Both pieces are important to creating something impactful—much like a product needs to be differentiated, so does your marketing product. ‍
• Marketing should always add value for your audience. If you don’t have anything unique to say or can’t make a piece of content that is better than what already exists on the topic, don’t make it.‍
• 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.

For more on developing a point of view, read this article.

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—you need to get channel/message fit.
• For more time-consuming work, just having a distribution plan isn’t enough. You need to make sure you can get “mileage” out of your ideas and work. Mileage is my term for taking one content idea or marketing asset and expanding upon it, repurposing it to various formats, and/or using the same research to create a new piece of content.
• In short, if you have no distribution plan, maybe wait on creating it.‍
• 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”

For more on content distribution, read this article.

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 and also lets people know who isn’t involved.
• It’s a waste of time to get feedback from reviewers if it’s too late in the process or they don’t have the necessary context. So share the GACCS with key stakeholders before you do the work so they can provide feedback before you’ve gone too far in the wrong direction.‍
• Example: DRI: Emily; reviewers: Lenny, Kathleen; contributors: Nico (design), Keenan (web)

GACCS Examples

Your GACCS will look different depending on your company and the type of campaign.

The examples below showcase a few different types of GACCS for varying project types and using different platforms (eg. word doc, project management tool, slack).

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For more on launch planning and how the GACCs fits in, read this article.