The 4 P’s of Growth
I’ve been trying to devise a thought framework for Growth that blends Growth Hacking, Digital Marketing, and Foundational Marketing together into some clarity.
What came out is a categorization along 4 approaches to think about, related to growth. You might initially focus on one or the other, but eventually, you will have to pull all these levers so you can hit on all the proverbial cylinders.
1. Peer-to-Peer
Growth comes from peer-to-peer referrals and user-to-user communicated interactions. It’s typically Organic or Viral growth. This can happen either via a user incentive where you help them (or trick them), or via an emotion where you elicit a voluntary action to share. Don’t forget to also focus on the upper echelon of your users/customesr who are your Advocates. That segment will do a lot more for you than the average loyal user. As the Bruno Mars song goes, they “would die for you”, and you should do the same for them. A lot of the Growth Hacking techniques fall in that category, although there is Growth Hacking that is outside of peer-to-peer.
2. Paid
You pay to either promote or place your service within social, online or a physical space, hopefully close to the context of intent to purchase or to click. This part is the easiest way to measure your results, so you can optimize accordingly. Most of the services in this category will give you a Dashboard, but don’t focus on that Dashboard. Rather, focus on the optimization tools they provide you or help you with. It is more important to be able to instrument the cause and effect of a number, than to stare at it.
3. Pulled
We’re in the thick of Inbound Marketing effectiveness, as a method of communications. Inbound Marketing is a great way of pulling-in your customers, users or prospects to find you. The goal is to keep appearing on search results, but also to make your content experience so pleasurable for your users, that they will come back for more, on their own. You can measure traffic, clicks, replies, social gestures, conversions, commenting, emails, etc. In addition, you need to complement inbound marketing with other Communications activities oriented towards influencers or media channel who will also contribute to pull interest towards your product or service.
4. Pushed
Even if your customers love you, they will have a tendency to forget about you, over time. That’s why you need to continue to communicate with them on a regular basis, so don’t forget about Email Marketing as another Communications weapon. I’m seeing some companies totally ignore even emailing their users when they are releasing new products or new features. If the user gave you permission to communicate with them, then use that permission. Email is an effective re-engagement method. Twitter does it very well, and it’s part of their growth hacking arsenal. Remember, Email (and Search) deliver more customers than social media. Direct selling (or via distribution methods) is also in this category, because you are “pushing” yourself in front of customers, and you are asking for an interaction. Event marketing is also another form of push marketing, because you place yourself in front of your prospects to get attention.
The purpose of this framework is to force you to think more holistically about having activities in each one of these categories, both online and offline.
What do you think of this framework? Do most growth activities fall into one of them?
This is a nice framework to remember it. I like the layout. The question I have is, is Pull/Push two sides of he same coin? Traditionally, we view inbound marketing as including things like content generation (blogs, videos, etc.) that naturally pull people in. But we use social media and email to push the information out to people. Are they just one and the same?
We should discuss sometime William.
i have a philosophical difference here and a natural dislike of all frameworks that are based on tactics not intent.
Marketing has just too many people who think that it is about making lists of things to do.
Smart marketers never start with how to do anything. They start with intent.
That’s a good question. Maybe that example is a soft push, not in your face. What I meant to include in the push side is mostly about being face to face with a customer or highly targeted email campaign.
I don’t think we’d argue on the intent or objectives parts of marketing. One could say that this list’s objectives is customer acquisition via the various techniques.
But you know, for young marketers, lists are useful because it makes them realize what they are not doing.
The goal is not to tell people what they aren’t doing, it is to to make them think about what they trying to accomplish.
Painters are not about brushes, they are about what they see.
Interesting post William.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about how I would teach startups to build a marketing engine. I’m with Arnold in that I think starting with tactics is what gets folks in trouble. I like to think of marketing as a system (I’m a systems engineer so I’m wired that way). There are 3 inputs to that system – an understanding of the target customers, an understanding of the market and an understanding of how customers buy. Only after you have this figured out can you build a marketing plan that makes sense for your target, your solution, your market.
I gave a talk on this at StartupFest and did a workshop at Communitech on it as well. If anyone is interested the slides are here http://www.slideshare.net/Rocketscope/marketing-workshop-communitech and the video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKdgCMnG5bM
I’m with you on principles. But based on my direct experience doing it for 5 years and seeing others really close, startups don’t have all these answers well defined at the beginning. So, it becomes hard to pin them down on it, while they are still iterating their models, targets, products, value prop, etc.
Over time, things stabilize and become clearer, and that’s when they can apply more rigorous, systematic thinking, but until then, a bottoms-up approach is helpful to get things moving.
So, I think it’s a question of maturity and timing.
I totally agree with you. The key to what I’m saying is that you are tracking the inputs even if they are assumptions so that at least you know what you are testing and trying to find out. If you aren’t doing that then you really are just randomly throwing tactics out there and even if something works , you won’t really know why.
It is assumed that these activities are being measured, of course. They will inform the marketer on what works, what doesn’t, and what to optimize. I found some startups lack imagination in terms of what to do beyond what seems to be obvious, and what others are doing.
Brilliant article — really validates many of our recent experiences.
I also really benefited from the video and the slides that April shared in the comments above.
After these two, I actually feel that marketing makes some sense as a potentially repeatable, predicable process.
It was just so uselessly amorphous two hours ago 🙂
I would also recommend the video of the MARSDD workshop that April presented @ http://www.youtube.com/v/ZKdgCMnG5bM&hl=en_US&fs=1&