Sustainable Growth "minus Advertising Spend" - A CASE STUDY

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Recent times has seen a shift in marketing strategy fueled by orgs. practicing PLG in making the approach more dynamic & sustainable. But does an org. get to that stage without spending a "fortune $$$" on advertising? #prodmgmt #marketing #PLG #growth #growthengine 1/

Firstly, this thread 🧵 takes off my recent article "Growth Engines" which talks about few popular methods orgs. follow to onboard themselves on to a growth bandwagon & explores what it takes to get to sustainable growth. Here's the link: mgmtinc.substack.com/p/growth-engines 2/

And this thread aims to explore a few of the: - decisions - strategies - channels that ought to be considered as a MUST if you're thinking about making growth more sustainable sans advertising spend. Ain't no better way to understand it than a case study. So let's dive in. 3/

CASE STUDY: - An early stage B2C fintech startup has big ambitions of scaling - the have 1000-odd regular paying users - their most recent product release has 1 feature - the problem it solves is: "providing investment advice curtailed to the duration / horizon of the users" 4/

So, from here let's say the org. needs the growth cycle to take-off to 5x for the forthcoming quarter & grow at a minimum of 3x every quarter thereof. And the constraints for them are: - Near zero marketing spend - NO PAID Advertising Here are a few measures that'd help. 5/

1. Focus on Content Consider the user's journey (aka "journey map") as to how they are finding the website, how they get to the landing page. It is through these 2 prominent sources: - content posted on social media channels - referrals / word of mouth 6/

As is evident, the thing to pin on for improvement ought to be the quality of content floated on social media. Also it makes sense to study the analytics on existing content to identify buckets with the highest conversion rates. That done, also focus on these points: 7/

2. Build Key Partnerships Though it's the age of SaaS products, there is no discounting the effectiveness of key partnerships. In fact, this ought to be sorted at the stage of framing the strategy itself. Also, for investments trust factor does play a critical role. 8/

The "referrals" seem to be healthy given the no. of new users finding their way to the website via existing user's suggestions. But, it does impede conversion as one can't avoid a high TTV - time it takes for users to understand the value. Here are ways to sort that out: 9/

3. Co-marketing Opportunities The other channel that'd be worthy of exploring is user personae operating across your product's value chain. In this case, CA, CS, CFA fit the bill perfectly. This works more on the lines of: - "I scratch your back & you scratch mine" 10/

Many individual customers (B2C, B2B) are in touch with their CAs for working out their taxes on a regular cadence. Also, CAs do advise people on investments as well from time to time to help them maximize returns assessing their risk portfolio. This is how it could work: 11/

4. Old is Gold - E-mail Marketing Direct E-mail is still king. In spite of all advancements of Tech & people changing from bulky desktops with CRT monitors to laptops & smartphones, they do check their mails at a regular cadence which is why it can't be ignored. /12

Properly curated content ought to include: - visuals, graphics, presentation & - text, framing, relevance, problem statement & solution The e-mail sent ought to convert to that all-important CTR taking users to the website. But, relevant e-mails could also do this: 13/

5. Affiliate Programs (Payback) With your users coming in, signing-up & using the product to reap an advantage out of it, to tell the others in the market could be quite a cycle of time for you to look at it practically. No doubt that'll work but you need to speed it up. 14/

Users aren't mutt enough to not understand how referrals happen to fetch you annual subscriptions, setting you up for more thereof. But the thoughts that'd kill them are: I pay for the product -> use it but -> what do I gain from referrals? Think affiliate programs over: 15/

That's it folks! If you enjoyed reading this, please: 1. Retweet the first tweet - it'd help me greatly! 2. Follow me @bgpinv for more on #productmanagement, #leadership & #culture. 3. Check out & subscribe to my Newsletter - mgmtinc.substack.com/ Thanks for reading 🙏

SUMMARY: So, the next time your leadership tightens the screws on the budget over advertising, these points could come in handy. 1. Focus on Content 2. Build Key Partnerships 3. Co-marketing Opportunities 4. Old is Gold - E-mail Marketing 5. Affiliate Programs (Payback)