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Growth Marketing for Startups
Jaime: I agree. You bring up a good point on all of this. Once again, back to the domino concept. These things are set up in a certain sequence. You start knocking these things down, there’s a snowball effect where it swells up as it’s gaining momentum, and it keeps building. All the way from, not just the way you execute your channels, but the way you ideate and execute new tactics. There’s a whole process that allows this muscle to repeatedly build. It’s a wash-rinse-repeat process. The process is actually more important. Because once you get past the initial tactics that everyone’s doing, where do you go from there? It’s about understanding the levers that you can pull, and the processes that you apply to any one of those levers that you can repeatedly execute tests, gain insights, and scale.
Patrick: I agree. I see what you’re saying. So that was acquisition.
Jaime: Correct. That’s just acquisition. You know, when a company gets their product-market fit, especially in these more enterprise types of companies or like SAS, they look at it and say, “Okay. Product-market fit is here. We know it’s working. We know people like it.” There’s this group of advocates, your early adopters that come in. And that’s one type of group that you get, which is more representative of getting to product-market fit. When you start growing, you have to move outside those early adopters and advocates, to gain attention from people who may not know the problem is there or more casual users as I call them, or casual prospects. This audience tends to discover you through channels that they’re absorbing content from. Or they’ll see an ad that comes across and that initiates the discovery process. These are people you start reaching earlier in the consideration cycle. This is when scale can happen. In content marketing alone, there’s different types of content that gets developed for different parts of that consideration cycle to shepherd the prospect through.
Growth Marketing and Content Marketing
Patrick: Growth marketing and content marketing, those are two terms that I tend to use less and less. Because it’s like, when people ask you, “How do you breathe?” I say “Oh, I do air breathing.” “What else are you going to breathe?” I’m like “Exactly!” Without content, there is no marketing. And here’s why I continue to rebel against that word ‘growth’. There’s growth marketing, performance marketing and all those monikers on it. You just alluded to it in terms of the muscle. Because there are the growth of the company, the growth of the talent, the growth of the product, the growth of your trust and respect. So, there’s a lot of growth outside of just revenue and client count, and I think it all comes from thinking about this as an ecosystem to grow in. All growth, I think, starts with understanding. We talk about ideation and iteration. And those are key elements to a growth marketer’s approach. You need a continual flow of ideas and a process for prioritizing the ideas. And with executing these ideas, if you’re not measuring and iterating to improve, you’re not appropriately applying the term growth to everything you do. And this is why I think now, in 2021, growth marketing is a mindset about a continual improvement process. It’s about continually improving your processes, outputs, and outcomes.
Jaime: Yeah. I’d have to agree. Because this is the repeatable mechanism that you want to continuously optimize.
Patrick: Yes. It is a mechanism. You’re right. And it is a foundation. An example would be gears. When you take apart a car axle and you see these gears. Some spin one way, and others spin another way. But one has to rotate the other. And then that rotates the wheels, and then the wheels move the car. What we’re talking about is that foundational gears that takes the energy from the analytics that we get and analysis we conduct. So as we get movement, it creates energy for us to rotate.
Jaime: Yeah, and I think, to your point, it’s all these gears working together in accordance that build the machine. And the machine runs well on clean fuel, being maintained, and then improved on. It just runs more efficiently and gets you further. It’s also less costly because you’re not scrambling to repair the engine all of the time.
Growth Marketing Ecosystem
Patrick: We talked about acquisition. We also have activation, retention, and referral. In all of these chunks we discuss, in a growth ecosystem, it’s always about content. In the case of referrals, you want to equip your clients with an incentive to refer, which needs content. You need content to send to people. You need content for people to return. They need to know they were referred. There’s always the context around the content but content is so key and it crosses over. People say “What is email marketing categorized as?” “Oh, that’s an acquisition channel.” But it’s definitely also in retention depending on its purpose and how it’s used. And it’s beyond being about simply retaining your client. It contributes to the lifetime value of that client which can contribute to creating more clients for you.
Jaime: Yeah, and it’s not uncommon to see some of these channels per se, like you said, fall under different parts of that funnel. If we’re looking at the AARRR funnel—the Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue model—for example, social doesn’t just sit in referral. Social can be an acquisition channel. Email may not just be an acquisition channel but also retention. And once again, it reinforces the idea of this interconnectedness.
Patrick: You’re leading backwards, which is great, to how the interconnectedness of email works to other things in your marketing model. And that’s why, to go back to growth, when you talk about it as an ecosystem, it is a system. And this is what I think is key for people to start with and making sure that people understand there is a starting point. Where do you start? What are your fundamentals? Where is your foundation? How do you get that first gear in place? And how do you build all the other gears around it so that they interconnect in the right way?
Jaime: I’ll even go one step further to your example. What gear actually gets added next? And then, what other gears start working with both of those gears? It’s a layering of those gears.
Patrick: That’s very good! Let me jump in on this, too. I like this. People will come to us and say “Hey, we need SEM.” And I’ll say “Oh, that may not be the gear you want to put in right now. Do you have any content?” “No, we don’t.” “Well, then don’t do SEM.” There’s no landing pages for them to go to that helps sell your product. SEO. “Oh, we need SEO.” I’m saying “Well, do you have any content?” “Uh, no.” “Well, you better build some content.” You know, “We’re going to do PR! We’re going to send out this announcement!” “That’s great! Do you have a link in that PR? Are you taking people back to a page that you can track so that you can run a retargeting campaign with them?” So, your point about which gear is prioritized when is really important. And, going back to foundations, what you and I like to do is to look beyond the first wheel that’s going to be turned or the turning of the wheels. But where are the wheels going to take us once they start turning? What direction are we going in? How do we put the gears in place so that we can change direction? Can we modify the speed? So, there’s a lot of things that go into the gear selection and prioritization.
Jaime: The good news is that we’ve got enough of a process that we know the initial gears to assemble to get the fly-wheel going.
Patrick: Yeah. To get the cog moving in the right direction.
Jaime: In the beginning, I think you hit on something key, and this is a pain. If, for example, someone just became the first marketer in at a start-up, and they’re trying to figure out “Okay. I know I need to do a bunch of these things. There’s only one or two of me. What should I focus on first and why?” As you know, there tends to be a lot of nuance inside of each of those channels. Example, SEM. Basically straightforward. You build the keywords. You build the campaigns, the ads, etc. You let it fly. You extract insights. Optimize. Now, in SEO, there’s different nuances you have to be aware of. Is it programmatic SEO? Are you starting with a new site with no kind of traction with Google? That’s a whole different type of SEO, right? Obviously, you don’t have content yet. In a programmatic SEO type of environment, you have a lot of content, and in some cases, the content is actually your product, like Pinterest or user-generated content sites. Because now it becomes about getting the content template right and optimizing technical aspects of the site, more so than it is about content development. In a new start-up, you’re like “Okay. How do I start getting traction?” Well, first of all, you’ve got to start building content. “Okay. What types of content should I build?” Well, now you’ve got to do some research. Based on what? How are you going to figure that out? And then, what’s the strategy? You can’t just say “I’m going to rank for yellow cabs,” or something. Or black cars. I’m going to go against some of these key players that are dominating in that. And plus, the competition is fierce in those phrases. You’re not going to get any traction. You’re not going to make it up to the first page. This takes a different strategy and approach.
Patrick: How do you do that intelligently?
Jaime: Correct. What is the entry point to start moving up in the Google results, for example, and start building your footprint broader? Because if you go in at the top, it’s like trying to say “I’m going to go try out for the Warriors.” Well, okay. Maybe you should think about playing high school basketball first. Be good enough to play college basketball, and then maybe you try out for the D-league, and then go into the NBA. It’s a progression of things that happen before you can start hitting your stride at the top level.
Patrick: Right. There is doing, and there is achieving. And most people spend a lot of time just doing.
Jaime: A good point to bring up is: It can’t be all strategy and it can’t be all just tactical execution. There has to be a point where strategy and execution meet in the middle.
Patrick: Strategy and execution should definitely never lose sight of each other.
Jaime: The reason why I bring this up is I’ve been in meetings where I hear a lot of the strategic things. “Well, we can just do that. So and so is doing this.” Well, they’re doing that because it fits their model. They’re also doing it because they’ve built out the resources to be able to handle that. There’s a lot of nuance based on the specific situation.
Patrick: Okay. So that’s what I was hoping you’d get to. Because, yeah, the other stuff is right. “We do this, so we’re going to do this. We have this, so we’ll do this.” They self-limit themselves. So, it’s not that they’re limited by the measurements of what they do. They’re usually limited by how they’ve set up their processes or their resources because they don’t understand the potential of all the movements you can create within everything.
Jaime: And another example that I hear this from is: “We should just do influencer marketing.” And I reply, “Okay. That’s a thought.”
Patrick: See, that’s the first problem that I think everybody has, is the response to that is “Okay,” instead of “Why?” Why should we do that? Why should we do SEM? Why should we do SEO? Why should we do anything? And how are we going to do it to achieve the ‘why’? And then everything answers itself. Everything will figure itself out if you just ask the question why and those with experience as to what will happen based on the answer. And that’s why I think a lot of marketing technologists or writers or designers don’t know how to answer the question of why they’re doing something. They may know what they want as an outcome, but they don’t necessarily know why what they’re about to do will actually impact their particular outcomes, because they’re not going to objectively answer the question why. They’re going to talk about why something works in general as opposed to why it may work for them in particular. And this goes back to the glue, the cohesiveness, of what your product, your service, your team, and your resources can achieve, and prioritizing that little matrix or framework to be lean so that you have a lean marketing system that enables you to grow!
Jaime: I think people jump immediately to the ‘what’, and that’s your point. There’s first the ‘why’ and then, once you’ve answered the ‘why’s, then it’s the ‘what’. But also importantly, they don’t address the ‘how’ clearly enough.
Patrick: Yeah, you’re right. What’s the end? They go from ‘what’ to ‘done’?
Jaime: I think they picture it. My example that I lead to is influencer marketing. Someone will make the suggestion, “We should do influencer marketing.” Okay. “So, let’s map it out. Why? Why should we do that?” Then, everyone agrees. “Okay. We do know why. Now we have to do it.” What is actual influencer marketing? What does it mean for us?
Patrick: There you go. What does it mean for us? And you’re right. It starts to lead to how you’re going to do it. And then all the little impact issues start to come up—how it impacts resources, how it impacts content development, how content impacts everything else.
Jaime: So whereas someone is thinking, “Okay. Well, we’ll go after influencers.” But someone who’s thinking about the ‘how’ already is saying, “Well, are you going for macro? Micro influencers?” and the strategy behind that. So, for example, if we go for macro, no one’s going to answer you, especially if you’re an unknown brand. So we target, for example, micro influencers that have 10,000 followers. Because they’re smaller, they’re reachable. Let’s contact them. Let’s build the list that we can contact those, and see what comes out. Make them an offer because we may get more traction with them than we do with bigger influencers that have 500,000 followers. And then, you’re actually talking to the person who is the influencer. Whereas if they have 500,000 to a million followers, you start talking to an agent who represents them. So now you’re talking very differently ‘how to get to this. It’s just an example of this whole ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ being answered correctly.
Patrick: I know you bring this up in other discussions we’ve had about asking the questions and you know I love that. But it’s: How do you formulate the initial set of questions so that you manage expectations in a very appropriately optimistic way but a realistic way as well? So that people can see that there’s a lot that goes into producing output for marketing that will hopefully lead to positive outcomes. And the weird thing about marketing in general and, I think, with growth marketing is when you speak with people who are making decisions about budgets and about the composition of your marketing approach, they want it to be predictable. But if you do look at marketing as growth, you can say “Yeah, there may be a predictable trend line that we can predict will move up.” But up over time. And how we get to those time points is going to be dependent on the approach that we establish initially, in terms of developing a lean marketing framework, to go after everything we’re going to do in marketing, which we look at from a growth standpoint, which we understand therefore is it’s important to connect to other aspects of the business that affect the outcome of the product and the customer service as well.
Jaime: Yeah. Agreed. I’m sure we’ll have more conversations to come on this.
Growth Marketing for Startups
Jaime: I agree. You bring up a good point on all of this. Once again, back to the domino concept. These things are set up in a certain sequence. You start knocking these things down, there’s a snowball effect where it swells up as it’s gaining momentum, and it keeps building. All the way from, not just the way you execute your channels, but the way you ideate and execute new tactics. There’s a whole process that allows this muscle to repeatedly build. It’s a wash-rinse-repeat process. The process is actually more important. Because once you get past the initial tactics that everyone’s doing, where do you go from there? It’s about understanding the levers that you can pull, and the processes that you apply to any one of those levers that you can repeatedly execute tests, gain insights, and scale.
Patrick: I agree. I see what you’re saying. So that was acquisition.
Jaime: Correct. That’s just acquisition. You know, when a company gets their product-market fit, especially in these more enterprise types of companies or like SAS, they look at it and say, “Okay. Product-market fit is here. We know it’s working. We know people like it.” There’s this group of advocates, your early adopters that come in. And that’s one type of group that you get, which is more representative of getting to product-market fit. When you start growing, you have to move outside those early adopters and advocates, to gain attention from people who may not know the problem is there or more casual users as I call them, or casual prospects. This audience tends to discover you through channels that they’re absorbing content from. Or they’ll see an ad that comes across and that initiates the discovery process. These are people you start reaching earlier in the consideration cycle. This is when scale can happen. In content marketing alone, there’s different types of content that gets developed for different parts of that consideration cycle to shepherd the prospect through.
Growth Marketing and Content Marketing
Patrick: Growth marketing and content marketing, those are two terms that I tend to use less and less. Because it’s like, when people ask you, “How do you breathe?” I say “Oh, I do air breathing.” “What else are you going to breathe?” I’m like “Exactly!” Without content, there is no marketing. And here’s why I continue to rebel against that word ‘growth’. There’s growth marketing, performance marketing and all those monikers on it. You just alluded to it in terms of the muscle. Because there are the growth of the company, the growth of the talent, the growth of the product, the growth of your trust and respect. So, there’s a lot of growth outside of just revenue and client count, and I think it all comes from thinking about this as an ecosystem to grow in. All growth, I think, starts with understanding. We talk about ideation and iteration. And those are key elements to a growth marketer’s approach. You need a continual flow of ideas and a process for prioritizing the ideas. And with executing these ideas, if you’re not measuring and iterating to improve, you’re not appropriately applying the term growth to everything you do. And this is why I think now, in 2021, growth marketing is a mindset about a continual improvement process. It’s about continually improving your processes, outputs, and outcomes.
Jaime: Yeah. I’d have to agree. Because this is the repeatable mechanism that you want to continuously optimize.
Patrick: Yes. It is a mechanism. You’re right. And it is a foundation. An example would be gears. When you take apart a car axle and you see these gears. Some spin one way, and others spin another way. But one has to rotate the other. And then that rotates the wheels, and then the wheels move the car. What we’re talking about is that foundational gears that takes the energy from the analytics that we get and analysis we conduct. So as we get movement, it creates energy for us to rotate.
Jaime: Yeah, and I think, to your point, it’s all these gears working together in accordance that build the machine. And the machine runs well on clean fuel, being maintained, and then improved on. It just runs more efficiently and gets you further. It’s also less costly because you’re not scrambling to repair the engine all of the time.
Growth Marketing Ecosystem
Patrick: We talked about acquisition. We also have activation, retention, and referral. In all of these chunks we discuss, in a growth ecosystem, it’s always about content. In the case of referrals, you want to equip your clients with an incentive to refer, which needs content. You need content to send to people. You need content for people to return. They need to know they were referred. There’s always the context around the content but content is so key and it crosses over. People say “What is email marketing categorized as?” “Oh, that’s an acquisition channel.” But it’s definitely also in retention depending on its purpose and how it’s used. And it’s beyond being about simply retaining your client. It contributes to the lifetime value of that client which can contribute to creating more clients for you.
Jaime: Yeah, and it’s not uncommon to see some of these channels per se, like you said, fall under different parts of that funnel. If we’re looking at the AARRR funnel—the Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue model—for example, social doesn’t just sit in referral. Social can be an acquisition channel. Email may not just be an acquisition channel but also retention. And once again, it reinforces the idea of this interconnectedness.
Patrick: You’re leading backwards, which is great, to how the interconnectedness of email works to other things in your marketing model. And that’s why, to go back to growth, when you talk about it as an ecosystem, it is a system. And this is what I think is key for people to start with and making sure that people understand there is a starting point. Where do you start? What are your fundamentals? Where is your foundation? How do you get that first gear in place? And how do you build all the other gears around it so that they interconnect in the right way?
Jaime: I’ll even go one step further to your example. What gear actually gets added next? And then, what other gears start working with both of those gears? It’s a layering of those gears.
Patrick: That’s very good! Let me jump in on this, too. I like this. People will come to us and say “Hey, we need SEM.” And I’ll say “Oh, that may not be the gear you want to put in right now. Do you have any content?” “No, we don’t.” “Well, then don’t do SEM.” There’s no landing pages for them to go to that helps sell your product. SEO. “Oh, we need SEO.” I’m saying “Well, do you have any content?” “Uh, no.” “Well, you better build some content.” You know, “We’re going to do PR! We’re going to send out this announcement!” “That’s great! Do you have a link in that PR? Are you taking people back to a page that you can track so that you can run a retargeting campaign with them?” So, your point about which gear is prioritized when is really important. And, going back to foundations, what you and I like to do is to look beyond the first wheel that’s going to be turned or the turning of the wheels. But where are the wheels going to take us once they start turning? What direction are we going in? How do we put the gears in place so that we can change direction? Can we modify the speed? So, there’s a lot of things that go into the gear selection and prioritization.
Jaime: The good news is that we’ve got enough of a process that we know the initial gears to assemble to get the fly-wheel going.
Patrick: Yeah. To get the cog moving in the right direction.
Jaime: In the beginning, I think you hit on something key, and this is a pain. If, for example, someone just became the first marketer in at a start-up, and they’re trying to figure out “Okay. I know I need to do a bunch of these things. There’s only one or two of me. What should I focus on first and why?” As you know, there tends to be a lot of nuance inside of each of those channels. Example, SEM. Basically straightforward. You build the keywords. You build the campaigns, the ads, etc. You let it fly. You extract insights. Optimize. Now, in SEO, there’s different nuances you have to be aware of. Is it programmatic SEO? Are you starting with a new site with no kind of traction with Google? That’s a whole different type of SEO, right? Obviously, you don’t have content yet. In a programmatic SEO type of environment, you have a lot of content, and in some cases, the content is actually your product, like Pinterest or user-generated content sites. Because now it becomes about getting the content template right and optimizing technical aspects of the site, more so than it is about content development. In a new start-up, you’re like “Okay. How do I start getting traction?” Well, first of all, you’ve got to start building content. “Okay. What types of content should I build?” Well, now you’ve got to do some research. Based on what? How are you going to figure that out? And then, what’s the strategy? You can’t just say “I’m going to rank for yellow cabs,” or something. Or black cars. I’m going to go against some of these key players that are dominating in that. And plus, the competition is fierce in those phrases. You’re not going to get any traction. You’re not going to make it up to the first page. This takes a different strategy and approach.
Patrick: How do you do that intelligently?
Jaime: Correct. What is the entry point to start moving up in the Google results, for example, and start building your footprint broader? Because if you go in at the top, it’s like trying to say “I’m going to go try out for the Warriors.” Well, okay. Maybe you should think about playing high school basketball first. Be good enough to play college basketball, and then maybe you try out for the D-league, and then go into the NBA. It’s a progression of things that happen before you can start hitting your stride at the top level.
Patrick: Right. There is doing, and there is achieving. And most people spend a lot of time just doing.
Jaime: A good point to bring up is: It can’t be all strategy and it can’t be all just tactical execution. There has to be a point where strategy and execution meet in the middle.
Patrick: Strategy and execution should definitely never lose sight of each other.
Jaime: The reason why I bring this up is I’ve been in meetings where I hear a lot of the strategic things. “Well, we can just do that. So and so is doing this.” Well, they’re doing that because it fits their model. They’re also doing it because they’ve built out the resources to be able to handle that. There’s a lot of nuance based on the specific situation.
Patrick: Okay. So that’s what I was hoping you’d get to. Because, yeah, the other stuff is right. “We do this, so we’re going to do this. We have this, so we’ll do this.” They self-limit themselves. So, it’s not that they’re limited by the measurements of what they do. They’re usually limited by how they’ve set up their processes or their resources because they don’t understand the potential of all the movements you can create within everything.
Jaime: And another example that I hear this from is: “We should just do influencer marketing.” And I reply, “Okay. That’s a thought.”
Patrick: See, that’s the first problem that I think everybody has, is the response to that is “Okay,” instead of “Why?” Why should we do that? Why should we do SEM? Why should we do SEO? Why should we do anything? And how are we going to do it to achieve the ‘why’? And then everything answers itself. Everything will figure itself out if you just ask the question why and those with experience as to what will happen based on the answer. And that’s why I think a lot of marketing technologists or writers or designers don’t know how to answer the question of why they’re doing something. They may know what they want as an outcome, but they don’t necessarily know why what they’re about to do will actually impact their particular outcomes, because they’re not going to objectively answer the question why. They’re going to talk about why something works in general as opposed to why it may work for them in particular. And this goes back to the glue, the cohesiveness, of what your product, your service, your team, and your resources can achieve, and prioritizing that little matrix or framework to be lean so that you have a lean marketing system that enables you to grow!
Jaime: I think people jump immediately to the ‘what’, and that’s your point. There’s first the ‘why’ and then, once you’ve answered the ‘why’s, then it’s the ‘what’. But also importantly, they don’t address the ‘how’ clearly enough.
Patrick: Yeah, you’re right. What’s the end? They go from ‘what’ to ‘done’?
Jaime: I think they picture it. My example that I lead to is influencer marketing. Someone will make the suggestion, “We should do influencer marketing.” Okay. “So, let’s map it out. Why? Why should we do that?” Then, everyone agrees. “Okay. We do know why. Now we have to do it.” What is actual influencer marketing? What does it mean for us?
Patrick: There you go. What does it mean for us? And you’re right. It starts to lead to how you’re going to do it. And then all the little impact issues start to come up—how it impacts resources, how it impacts content development, how content impacts everything else.
Jaime: So whereas someone is thinking, “Okay. Well, we’ll go after influencers.” But someone who’s thinking about the ‘how’ already is saying, “Well, are you going for macro? Micro influencers?” and the strategy behind that. So, for example, if we go for macro, no one’s going to answer you, especially if you’re an unknown brand. So we target, for example, micro influencers that have 10,000 followers. Because they’re smaller, they’re reachable. Let’s contact them. Let’s build the list that we can contact those, and see what comes out. Make them an offer because we may get more traction with them than we do with bigger influencers that have 500,000 followers. And then, you’re actually talking to the person who is the influencer. Whereas if they have 500,000 to a million followers, you start talking to an agent who represents them. So now you’re talking very differently ‘how to get to this. It’s just an example of this whole ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ being answered correctly.
Patrick: I know you bring this up in other discussions we’ve had about asking the questions and you know I love that. But it’s: How do you formulate the initial set of questions so that you manage expectations in a very appropriately optimistic way but a realistic way as well? So that people can see that there’s a lot that goes into producing output for marketing that will hopefully lead to positive outcomes. And the weird thing about marketing in general and, I think, with growth marketing is when you speak with people who are making decisions about budgets and about the composition of your marketing approach, they want it to be predictable. But if you do look at marketing as growth, you can say “Yeah, there may be a predictable trend line that we can predict will move up.” But up over time. And how we get to those time points is going to be dependent on the approach that we establish initially, in terms of developing a lean marketing framework, to go after everything we’re going to do in marketing, which we look at from a growth standpoint, which we understand therefore is it’s important to connect to other aspects of the business that affect the outcome of the product and the customer service as well.
Jaime: Yeah. Agreed. I’m sure we’ll have more conversations to come on this.