Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy — Reforge

Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy — Reforge

Becoming a marketing leader involves understanding that marketing is more than just growth. It requires integrating three crucial domains of marketing: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. Each of these domains plays a unique role in creating a complete marketing strategy.

Brand marketing is all about sharing the story of why your organization exists. It aims to create meaningful and emotional connections with customers. By increasing awareness and intent, brand marketing captures new customers and reinforces the brand promise at every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. This can be achieved through strategies like brand partnerships and drip campaigns.

On the other hand, product marketing focuses on delivering the brand promise. It involves packaging, pricing, and making product features accessible and understandable to users. Product marketing ensures that the organization is delivering on the promises made through brand marketing.

Growth marketing is responsible for acquiring and retaining customers. It uses triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring customers into the product and keep them engaged. However, it is important to note that if the product does not deliver on the value promised, customers will ultimately churn. This highlights the interconnectedness of growth marketing and brand marketing. The strategies employed in both domains need to be in sync to ensure a seamless customer experience.

One key insight is that changes in one domain will impact the others. For example, if the growth marketing efforts bring in new customers but the product fails to deliver on the brand promise, these customers will eventually churn. Therefore, it is essential to align the strategies of brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing.

Another important point is that sequencing the changes in each domain can have a compounding impact. Marketing teams that are too siloed by domain often struggle to bring these pieces together. By integrating the three domains and ensuring they work together, marketing strategies become less brittle and more effective.

Proactivity is also crucial because changes in each domain happen over different time horizons. While growth marketing performance can be measured quickly, product and brand marketing strategies take time to develop and have a long-term impact. For example, strong brand marketing can have a halo effect on paid channels. Therefore, marketing leaders need to proactively monitor internal and external factors that can trigger a need to revisit their strategies.

To summarize, marketing is more than just growth. It involves integrating brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing to create a complete strategy. By understanding the interconnectedness of these domains and proactively monitoring internal and external factors, marketing leaders can amplify their impact. Here are three actionable pieces of advice:

• 1. Align the strategies of brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing to ensure a seamless customer experience.

• 2. Sequence the changes in each domain to have a compounding impact on overall marketing effectiveness.

• 3. Be proactive and monitor internal and external factors that can trigger a need to revisit marketing strategies.

By following these pieces of advice, marketing leaders can create a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy.

Steelmanning: How to Find the Truth by Helping Your Opponent

John Stuart Mill once said, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." This quote highlights the importance of understanding both sides of an argument to find the truth. Steelmanning is a technique that allows us to do just that. It involves crafting the best possible version of an opponent's argument to gain a deeper understanding of their perspective.

While strawmanning involves misrepresenting a position to make it easier to attack, steelmanning aims to strengthen the opponent's argument. By steelmanning, we challenge ourselves to put our own views aside and focus on our counterpart's arguments. This allows us to gain a better understanding of both sides of the argument.

In addition to understanding the opponent's argument, we can also help our counterpart steelman their own argument. By encouraging them to present their position in the strongest way possible, we enable them to fully explore and articulate their ideas. This not only helps us understand their perspective better but also fosters a more productive and respectful discussion.

Furthermore, we can argue on our counterpart's behalf. This means presenting their argument in its most plausible and persuasive form. By doing so, we can truly grasp the difficulties that the opposing viewpoint faces and challenge our own position. This exercise helps us sharpen our own arguments and enhance our understanding of the subject matter.

In conclusion, steelmanning is a powerful tool for finding the truth and fostering meaningful discussions. By crafting the best version of our opponent's argument, helping them steelman their own position, and arguing on their behalf, we can gain a deeper understanding of both sides of an argument. This not only strengthens our own position but also leads to more productive and insightful conversations.