FAC Marketing: The Framework Most Growth Teams Ignore

FAC marketing stands for Find, Attract, Convert: a sequenced framework that maps marketing activity to the three stages a customer must move through before they buy. Find is about reaching people who do not yet know you exist. Attract is about giving them a reason to care. Convert is about removing the friction that stops them from acting. Most marketing teams claim to do all three. Very few do.

The framework sounds simple because the principle is simple. What makes it hard is that most organisations have a strong bias toward the third stage and a chronic underinvestment in the first two. They optimise the conversion rate on audiences they already have, while the pool of people who have never heard of them stays exactly the same size.

Why FAC Marketing Exists as a Framework

Marketing frameworks tend to proliferate because each new one is invented to solve the problem the previous one created. The funnel gave us stages. The flywheel gave us momentum. Growth loops gave us compounding. FAC is different in that it is not trying to be clever. It is trying to be honest about the sequence a customer must go through, and where marketing has to do real work at each stage.

Early in my career I spent years deep in lower-funnel performance work. Paid search, retargeting, conversion rate testing. I was genuinely good at it and the numbers looked excellent. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was how much of that performance was capturing intent that already existed rather than generating new demand. The person who searched for a brand term was probably going to buy regardless. We were optimising the last yard of a experience we had not influenced at all.

FAC forces you to be honest about that. It asks: are you actually doing marketing across all three stages, or are you just very efficiently processing people who were already going to convert? That is a commercially important question, and most teams do not ask it clearly enough.

If you want to situate FAC within a broader commercial context, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the planning frameworks that sit around it, including how to sequence investment across stages as a business scales.

What the Find Stage Actually Requires

Find is about distribution. It is the question of how people who do not know you exist are going to encounter you. This is where most growth strategies are weakest, because it requires you to go to audiences rather than waiting for audiences to come to you.

The temptation is to treat Find as a media buying problem. Spend more on paid social, extend your reach settings, buy more impressions. That is one version of Find, but it is the most expensive version and the one with the shortest shelf life. The more durable approaches to Find involve building distribution that does not require continuous spend to maintain.

Organic search is one of them. When someone searches for a problem you solve and finds your content, that is Find working without a media budget behind it. Market penetration through organic channels compounds over time in a way that paid reach does not. The same is true of earned media, partnerships, and word of mouth. These are slower to build but they create a Find engine that does not switch off the moment you stop spending.

Creator and influencer partnerships have become a legitimate Find channel for many categories. The reason they work is that they borrow distribution from someone who already has the audience’s trust. Go-to-market strategies built around creators have shown that the introduction effect, being found through a trusted voice rather than a brand ad, changes how receptive audiences are to what comes next.

The diagnostic question for Find is blunt: what percentage of your total addressable market has ever heard of you? For most businesses, that number is lower than anyone wants to admit. And if Find is broken, nothing you do in Attract or Convert will compensate for it.

What the Attract Stage Is Really Doing

Attract is the most misunderstood stage of the three. It is not about being interesting. It is about giving someone who has just discovered you a reason to stay engaged long enough to form a preference. That is a much more specific job than most brand activity is designed to do.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness rather than creativity for its own sake. What separates the work that wins from the work that does not is almost always this: the effective work has a clear picture of who it is trying to attract and what that person needs to believe before they will consider buying. The ineffective work has a clear picture of what the brand wants to say about itself.

Attract is where brand and performance intersect, and it is where the tension between the two disciplines is most visible. Performance teams tend to want to skip Attract and go straight to a conversion message. Brand teams tend to want to stay in Attract indefinitely without ever connecting it to commercial outcomes. Neither is right.

The Attract stage is doing several things simultaneously. It is building familiarity, which reduces the cognitive friction of a purchase decision later. It is communicating a point of difference, which reduces the likelihood that price becomes the only decision variable. And it is qualifying the audience, because good Attract content self-selects the people most likely to convert and filters out the people who were never going to.

When I was running an agency and we were pitching to a new client category, I noticed that the clients who came to us already having read our thinking were far easier to close than those who had found us through a directory listing. The content had done Attract work before the sales conversation started. The conversion rate on the first group was not just higher. The deal size was larger and the relationship lasted longer. That is Attract doing its job properly.

What the Convert Stage Gets Wrong

Convert is where most marketing investment goes. It is also the stage where the most sophisticated measurement lives, which creates a feedback loop: because Convert is easier to measure, it gets more attention, which generates more data, which makes it look even more important. The other two stages suffer by comparison because their contribution is harder to isolate.

The problem is not that Convert is unimportant. It clearly is. Friction in the purchase process costs real money and removing it has genuine commercial value. The problem is that Convert has a ceiling, and that ceiling is set by Find and Attract. You can only convert the people who are in front of you. If Find has not reached enough of the right people, and Attract has not built enough preference among them, then Convert is optimising a small number.

I have seen this play out repeatedly. A business invests heavily in conversion rate optimisation, gets impressive percentage improvements, and then hits a wall because the absolute numbers are too small to matter. They have gone from converting 2% of a thin audience to converting 3% of a thin audience. The percentage improvement is real. The commercial impact is marginal.

The BCG research on commercial transformation has consistently pointed to the same structural issue: companies that over-index on lower-funnel efficiency while neglecting upper-funnel reach tend to hit growth ceilings that cannot be broken by further optimisation. They need to widen the top, not sharpen the bottom.

Convert also suffers from attribution distortion. Last-click models, and even many multi-touch models, overweight the final interaction and underweight the earlier touchpoints that made the conversion possible. A customer who clicked a retargeting ad and then bought was probably influenced by a piece of content they read three weeks earlier. The retargeting ad gets the credit. The content gets cut from the budget.

How FAC Breaks Down in Practice

The most common failure mode is not a complete breakdown of one stage. It is a gradual atrophying of Find and Attract while Convert receives all the investment and all the attention. This happens slowly enough that it is not visible until growth stalls.

A business that is growing will often attribute that growth to its Convert activity because Convert is what they can measure. When growth slows, they double down on Convert because that is where the data lives. What they are not seeing is that the pipeline feeding Convert has been shrinking for two years because Find was underfunded and Attract was producing content that looked good in engagement metrics but was not actually building preference.

The second failure mode is treating FAC as a campaign structure rather than a diagnostic framework. Teams build a “Find campaign,” an “Attract campaign,” and a “Convert campaign,” run them in parallel, and declare the framework implemented. That misses the point. FAC is a way of asking where in the customer experience your pipeline is breaking down, not a media planning template.

Using tools like behavioural feedback loops to understand where users drop off can help identify whether the breakdown is in Attract (people arrive and leave immediately) or Convert (people engage but do not act). That diagnostic precision matters because the fix for each is completely different.

The third failure mode is organisational. Find and Attract tend to be owned by brand or content teams. Convert tends to be owned by performance or growth teams. In most organisations these teams do not talk to each other enough, measure success differently, and compete for the same budget. FAC only works as a system if it is managed as one. That requires someone with commercial authority to hold all three stages accountable to a shared outcome.

FAC Marketing and the Growth Loop Problem

One of the more useful evolutions in growth thinking is the shift from linear funnels to compounding loops. The idea is that growth compounds when the output of one cycle feeds the input of the next. FAC can be mapped onto this: a customer who converts and then advocates creates a Find moment for someone new. The loop closes.

But loops only compound if each stage is working. A loop with a broken Find stage just means you are recycling the same small audience. A loop with a broken Attract stage means you are finding new people but failing to build any preference before asking them to buy. The growth hacking examples that tend to get cited as proof of loop mechanics, Dropbox referrals, Airbnb listing distribution, work because they solved a real Find problem with a mechanism that was native to the product. They did not just add a referral button to an existing flow.

The honest version of FAC as a growth loop requires you to ask: what does a converted customer do that creates a Find or Attract moment for someone else? If the answer is nothing, the loop is not closed and growth is linear at best.

This is also where product quality matters more than most marketing frameworks acknowledge. If a customer converts but the product disappoints, they will not advocate. They may actively detract. I have worked with companies that were spending heavily on Find and Attract while the product was generating enough negative word of mouth to counteract both. Marketing cannot fix that. It can only delay the reckoning.

Applying FAC to a Real Commercial Situation

When I was building out the growth strategy for an agency that had been loss-making, the instinct from the board was to focus on conversion: better sales process, tighter proposals, faster follow-up. All of that was true and we did it. But the more important intervention was in Find.

The agency was invisible to most of the clients it wanted to work with. It had a strong reputation in a narrow segment and almost no presence outside it. We invested in content that addressed the problems our target clients were actively trying to solve, got that content into channels where those clients were already spending time, and built a speaking and PR programme that put our thinking in front of audiences who had never heard of us.

The conversion rate on inbound enquiries did not change dramatically. What changed was the volume and quality of the pipeline. Within 18 months the agency had gone from 20 people to over 60, and the majority of new client relationships had come through Find channels that had not existed two years earlier. Conversion was fine before. Find was the constraint.

That experience shaped how I think about FAC as a diagnostic. Before you optimise anything, identify which stage is actually the binding constraint. It is almost never the one you think it is, because the one you think it is tends to be the one you are already measuring.

The BCG work on brand and go-to-market alignment makes a similar point: the organisations that grow sustainably are those that treat brand investment and commercial execution as a single system rather than competing priorities. FAC is one way of operationalising that principle.

How to Diagnose Which Stage Is Failing

The diagnostic process for FAC is not complicated but it requires honest data rather than comfortable data. Start with the numbers that most teams already have and ask different questions of them.

For Find: what percentage of your total addressable market is aware of you? How is that number changing? What proportion of your new customer acquisition comes from people who had never encountered your brand before the campaign or channel that brought them in? If you cannot answer these questions, Find is almost certainly underperforming and undermeasured.

For Attract: of the people who encounter your brand for the first time, what percentage engage with more than one piece of content or touchpoint before converting? What is the average time between first encounter and first purchase, and is that changing? Are you building preference or just building awareness? Awareness without preference is expensive and fragile.

For Convert: what is your conversion rate by acquisition source, and does it vary significantly? If people who came through organic content convert at three times the rate of people who came through paid display, that is not just a Convert insight. It is an Attract insight about which channels are doing the preference-building work and which are not.

The Forrester analysis of go-to-market struggles in complex categories identifies a recurring pattern: organisations that cannot articulate why they are losing deals tend to have a Find or Attract problem they are diagnosing as a Convert problem. They keep refining the pitch when the issue is that they are not reaching the right people early enough, or not building sufficient credibility before the sales conversation starts.

More of the thinking on how to structure this kind of commercial diagnostic sits within the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, which covers how to sequence investment and build accountability across the full customer experience.

FAC Is a System, Not a Checklist

The reason FAC marketing is worth taking seriously is not that it introduces new concepts. Find, Attract, and Convert describe things marketing has always done. What FAC does is make the sequencing and the interdependency explicit, which forces a different kind of commercial conversation.

When a growth team presents results, FAC asks: which stage did that investment serve? When a budget is being allocated, FAC asks: are we investing proportionally across all three stages, or are we concentrating in one and hoping the others take care of themselves? When growth stalls, FAC asks: which stage is the binding constraint, and what would it take to fix it?

These are not sophisticated questions. They are obvious questions. The problem is that most organisations do not ask them systematically because the structure of their teams, their measurement systems, and their budget processes are all designed around channels and campaigns rather than customer experience stages. FAC is a way of cutting across that structure and asking the commercially important question: are we actually moving enough of the right people through all three stages, or are we just getting very good at the last one?

In my experience, the answer is almost always the latter. And the fix is almost always to invest earlier in the experience than feels comfortable, measure differently than you currently do, and resist the pull of the metrics that are easiest to report.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions