What if you can build an asset that works for you even while you sleep and provide predictable revenues for the next 5 years?
What if you could build a machine that would consistently generate traffic, leads and revenue for you over a sustained period of time without you doing the grunt work every day. What if you spent 6-12 months of your time building something that produced these results consistently for 5 years.
We’ve done just that at Pixelmattic. We built something without realizing it but recently we’ve been looking at what we did right and what would we have liked to know when we first started that would help us do it better and faster.
We were doing many of the things right, we had positioned ourselves well, productized some of our services, had clear workflows and processes for servicing clients and generated new business consistently.
As with any business looking to grow, we wondered what it would take to do what we were doing, but do it better and more efficiently. Karan and me also have been discussing the idea of not getting involved in the nitty gritty of each project. With a team in place and processes to support them, we want to step back from operational details. We want to spend our time growing our business and working on problems that provide the most value to our clients.
So the idea of designing a growth system came from the need for personal productivity and freedom from the daily chores of running a business. What if we could take this idea of personal productivity across to the business and build better habits and also free up our time executing tasks to focus on identifying growth opportunities or even do personal projects.
Here’s me talking about this at WordCamp India 2021
Systems we’ve built
One of our earlier experiments with building a system was around hiring. I spent time writing the job description, posting the job, sharing it on social media, and reviewing candidates every other day. There was a natural time it took for this process to be completed, but this time was being spent by me when I could have been doing other things.
So over a period of time, I began documenting the steps that were being repeated, we built a quiz and added an assignment to our interview process. And when the opportunity presented itself, we hired a part-time recruiter, who was trained on this hiring workflow for a week and given access to the instructions and tools we were using to manage to hire.
Today, I only get involved at the latter stages of the hiring process with the recruiter doing the bulk of the work, to do final rounds of interview and signing the offer letter and employee contract.
This saved us a ton of time over the last two years and not just that it also now gives me the confidence that we can hire good people consistently through a reliable process that works without my involvement for the most part.
What if we could take this approach and apply it to different functions of our business?
In fact, a rudimentary version of this had been implemented unconsciously from day 1. Our content marketing efforts began at the same time when we launched Pixelmattic as a WordPress focused agency. I worked with interns and junior content writers over a 2 year period creating templates and documents refining them along the way.
I never connected the dots or looked at it as a system. You can only connect the dots in hindsight.
Early last year when these different dots came together, we decided to put all of these prior experiences together to create a digital growth system, for ourselves and for our clients.
Often growth plans are too long term or too short term. So we created ours as a combination of long term thinking, medium-term planning and short term execution implemented as 2-week sprints.
So how do you design a growth system?
We’ll need to explore the definition of growth, systems thinking, components of a growth system, how do you build one for marketing, what role does WordPress play and finally look at some examples.
What is Growth?
Growth could mean more top-line revenue or bottom-line. Growth could be rapid and short-term focused or long-term. It can be achieved through acquisition, improvements to your existing practices, scaling your efforts or innovation.
Growth mindset
A mindset that wants to build long-term value through an easily repeatable system with predictable outcomes. Quite often we look for that one-hit wonder, or to somehow make the content go viral and so the need for growth hacking.
I’m talking of a different kind of growth, one that might take time to build, but once established, it becomes an asset that generates returns with lesser effort every time.
That’s the kind of growth I’m interested in.
If you’re a freelancer, you would like a portfolio of retainer clients that can provide a stable income. An agency would eventually realize that it needs recurring revenue to sustain itself and grow. A business not married to quarterly results will want it too.
This long term thinking is like investing in stocks. The day trader is very different from a long term value investor. Both require different mindsets and approaches.
Growth mindset = Build assets
When you look at building assets, assets that help you generate revenue, you build defensive structures for yourself. Assets can depreciate but they generally tend to occur over a period of time and not suddenly, giving you time to make adjustments or further investments in it.
Let’s apply this mindset to marketing.
Many are lured to the short-term boosts and benefits that some tactics provide. For well-funded businesses, they can continue to operate this way spending their way through marketing and advertising to grab attention.
But if the high spending tactics stop, so does the growth because no effort has been spent on building marketing assets. Assets that can generate traffic, leads and revenue passively.
Marketing and product teams
The focus in the mid 20th century was on the products. Because there was less competition, you could market yourself on the strength of your product and its features. The marketing was driven by the product’s features. And the marketing’s job was to push the message out that the product team wanted. That is a legacy that can still be seen in many companies that are product focussed.
However, over the last decade or so we’ve seen the lines blur between product and marketing. Features built into the product have driven marketing leading to user acquisition through referrals, invites and word of mouth. Or app notifications to keep pulling you back for user retention. Marketing is now integrated with the product and vice versa.
There is a need for product and marketing teams to work and collaborate with each other much more than before. In fact, the old structure of having two separate teams each with different objectives and responsibilities doesn’t lend well to tight collaboration
Growth teams
Businesses need to look at their marketing team as a growth team. Not a silo that is responsible for coming up with creative campaigns when the business or product teams demand it. This might require cultural and structural changes in how the company operates.
A growth team could include business analysts, product managers, marketers and designers.
Companies tend to adopt different approaches to building growth teams. A growth team can be incorporated inside each business unit making them responsible for growth, or a separate function carved out to do R&D and incorporating them into an existing business unit later or fork them into a new business unit.
Pharma companies for example set up dedicated R&D centres and handover the products to sales/marketing teams. Large companies like IBM setup business excellence centres in-house to come up with new growth initiatives. These teams are then incorporated into existing business units or spun off as new business units. Retail food chain companies treat each outlet as a growth unit responsible for managing and driving growth on their own.
A balancing act – Growth v/s status quo
Growth by its very nature brings ambiguity, uncertainty and requires exploration and experimentation. It requires doing things you’ve never done before and exploring the unknown.
On the other hand, you also have your current state (which can include servicing your existing clients, maintaining your current product etc). This needs you to focus on execution, efficiency and productivity.
As a freelancer or a business owner, you will need to learn to balance your time between growth and execution.
A growth system helps you manage the ambiguity and uncertainty of growth through a scientific process-driven approach.
Controlled chaos.
A mental model from Michael Gerber’s E-Myth that helps with this is the following: An entrepreneur has 3 roles to fulfil and they start with one role and eventually graduate to incorporating all 3 roles.
A freelancer or business owner starts off being the technician or the artist, doing the work themselves. As you get a few customers and are ready to hire your first employee, you transition from doing all the work to delegating some of it and managing an employee or a team.
Eventually, you should transition from being a manager of employees to a leader with a vision charting the future growth path for your business.
If at this stage, you find yourself constantly involved in the technical areas so much so that you’re unable to allocate time to manage or lead, you will notice issues with the quality of the team’s output.
Focusing only on the manager role or technical role will result in a lack of direction and slowing down of growth. So be conscious of how you evolve and divide your time between these three.
Start with identifying what are your responsibilities or skills that add the most value to your client? Is it design, writing, coding? Do you want to do it every day and for all clients? Or you want to hire someone else to do it so that you can focus on growing your business?
If you want to continue to grow your business, you also need time and space to think about new opportunities and areas for growth. But you can’t do that if you’re busy with execution and management all the time.
A template for delegating
One of our lessons has been to learn to delegate responsibilities as your business starts to grow and you have a team in place. But simply delegating isn’t enough.
To set your team up for success and free up your time from operational or administrative work, you need to do more. You rely on processes, tools to automate, the right team and a clear vision of what you want to achieve and the outcomes you expect.
Once you prioritize areas that you don’t want to do every day, hire an employee and or automate it.
David Perell succinctly articulated this in one of his tweet threads.
If you’ve made a good hire, the above document can ensure they are well set up to succeed and take that responsibility off your plate.
There are many of these tasks which can be automated too using tools like Zapier, Notion, Trello, Airtable etc.
Building a growth system
With a mental model of the different roles in mind and a system to delegate tasks you no longer need to do yourself, we can now look at how to build a growth system.
A growth system is a framework for setting a direction, delegating responsibilities, automating tasks, documenting the processes, periodically measuring progress and course-correcting along the way.
Everything I’ve mentioned up to this point but put together in a coherent way towards achieving your clearly defined growth goals.
Principles + Processes + People + Experiments
What are the principles of a growth system?
- You focus on opportunities, not ideas. (Idea + Value = Opportunity)
- Emphasis on impact and not on activities. (But the process is as important as the outcome)
- Reflection on lessons learned from growth experiments. Not dashboard addiction.
- Self-sustaining, repeatable and scalable.
- Produce long term value. (Growth mindset)
Here’s an excellent piece by Brian Balfour, the former VP of Growth at Hubspot, on growth principles: https://brianbalfour.com/growth-machine/principles-process-team-tactics
From ideas to growth experiments
If you look at your notes or inside your own head, you will find a graveyard of ideas that never saw the light of day. For most of us, the idea-to-execution route is a highly inefficient one.
We either choose the wrong ones or take on too many or don’t stop to reflect on the ideas we implemented.
One way to find reliable and focused ideas is to look at the intersection of your users, product and channels.
Here’s an overview of the design thinking driven idea generation process from ‘The Designing for Growth Field Book‘ by Jeanne Liedtka.
(Book notes coming soon. Be the first to know.)
A system for generating and managing ideas:
- Generate ideas through journey mapping and mind maps.
- Brainstorm and develop the best ideas into concepts using tools like the Napkin pitch.
- Assess the idea for its emotional appeal, apply constraints, reframe the problem, connect the dots from another area, challenge the accepted norm, visualize the idea or look for synergies in collaboration.
We usually rush through these steps or skip them entirely because of our belief that we know what the customer wants or the urge to build something quickly because we have the technical and design skills.
It’s crucial to test these shortlist of developed ideas using these 3 tools:
- Talking to the customers and conducting interviews
- Looking at data that confirms or disproves your hypotheses
- Building an MVP to test
To keep a steady flow of growth experiments running, building a pipeline of ideas that feed into your growth system is important.
What are the processes that make up the growth system?
Since we are talking about long-term, repeatable growth, we will focus on SEO and content marketing as key pillars around which we need to develop repeatable and scalable processes.
Let me take you through some of the workflows and processes we ended up creating for our content marketing. These are not perfect and are always updated when we something better or missing.
Content Ideation
A headline writing and content ideation tool taken from Ann Handley’s book ‘Everybody Writes’ with some additional bits added. This document helps us with prompts for headlines and quick reference of power words to use.
SEO Keyword Research
A step by step workflow of listing seed keywords, generating additional keyword ideas, finding search data and then shortlisting them through filters like search intent, keyword difficulty and so on.
Content Publishing
This seems boring, but when you add a new member to your team or even outsource your work, a documented workflow reduces your back and forth significantly. It also ensures that you maintain a consistent quality in the output.
Content Promotion
Once a piece of content is published, promoting it is the next big challenge. We have a list of channels and tactics we’ve collected in a document. Not all of them are used for every content piece that is published, but its good to have a central repository of promotion tactics.
If you remember the growth principles, the goals and expected outcomes from these processes is growth that can be measured through leads, subscribers, lead conversion rates and revenue generated.
Pageviews, number of users, followers etc are vanity metrics. You should keep an eye on them, but don’t stop there, see if they add up to something meaningful and impactful for the business.
What kind of people do you need for the growth system?
In the beginning, it’s usually one person bootstrapping and doing many things in parallel. But as you grow and hire a team, in house or freelancers, you need to keep a few things in mind, because the mindset and skills required in your execution or product teams are different to what is needed in the growth team.
Growth teams don’t necessarily work on anything too complex, so pick people motivated by impact they can create than those who want to be challenged.
Measure and incentivize this team on the number of growth ideas generated, the number of growth experiments run, the number of processes documented, the number of processes automated and most importantly the financial impact of the improvements and the time spent with the costumes. Make it a habit to spend time with your customers, measure it and incentivize it.
Growth experiments
This is where your growth tactics, growth hacking tips and SEO tricks you may have read about come into play. Quite often, we jump to this stage because we are excited to try something and want to see the impact of it quickly. But when your tactics don’t add up, it doesn’t take you far in the long run.
So run your tactics as experiments in the system, measure the impact and learn from them systematically. Doing this systematically until you achieve a level of success and automation which can then be scaled or self-driven will help you turn them into sustained, revenue-generating assets.
We run 2 week sprints, track the progress and measure the impact of it over a period of time.
If you’ve done the groundwork and rigorously filtered through your ideas, your growth experiments will have a higher chance of success.
The testing and measurement through analytics and other data points should be converted into lessons that you can learn. These lessons will help you make the next growth experiment better.
Marketing Flywheel
These growth experiments are aimed at top of the funnel users usually. But as we’ve seen in recent years, the bottom of the funnel user action can trigger new users to enter at the top of the funnel. This makes the funnel analogy a bit dated.
Consider a marketing flywheel analogy, where you need a few tactics to get the attention to achieve the initial push. Then focus on sustainable steps which requires lesser effort on every subsequent run but continue to produce a steady flow of results.
Once this flywheel is in motion, it runs efficiently and produces repeatable successes. This marketing flywheel is at the core of your growth system.
Rand Fishkin has a lucid explanation of what a marketing flywheel is and how it helps. Take a look:
So when you combine the principles of growth, convert ideas into testable growth experiments and put them in motion through the marketing flywheel with the right team and processes, you build your growth system.
Contrast this with jumping into SEO tactics or creating campaigns that in most cases only provide a temporary boost.
Every growth system is unique to the business. It depends on the industry, the users and the channels you use, but the principles remain the same.
In our case, we’ve built a 12-month plan that focuses on first building a strong digital foundation, creating a content strategy, optimizing and fine-tuning it over 4 phases.
We deploy the same practice now for Pixelmattic and for our clients with some minor modifications based on their business and industry. So we are the customers of our own service and consumers of our content.
Here’s Tim Soulo, the CMO at Ahrefs (a leading SEO tool), talking about the Ahrefs Marketing Flywheel:
(If you don’t follow them, they have one of the best content marketing strategies that educate audiences and also converts a good portion of them into their customers.)
“I was stuck in a cycle of receiving the instant gratification of small gains in exchange for the delayed gratification of consistent and perpetual streams of new leads.
Were there moments when I thought progress was slow? Yeah, but I stuck with it. Things only started to pick-up 6 months in and totally blew up after 2 years of hard work:
Ahrefs’ Marketing Flywheel
Here’s how our blogging strategy works:
- Determine what customers are searching for in Google, as related to a problem we solve. Yep, we use our own SEO toolkit for this.
- Publish an article on how to solve the particular problem, while demonstrating our product as the ideal solution.
- Promote that article until it begins ranking on Google for the topic.
- Receive a perpetual stream of visitors from Google; all of whom may, potentially, become customers after reading about our product.
- Enjoy word-of-mouth publicity, as our “educated” customers tell others how our product solved their problems.
- Lather, rinse and repeat.“
Source: How to generate customers 24/7 with “The Marketing Flywheel”
How does WordPress help in building a growth system?
Even if your user acquisition and engagement happens primarily on YouTube or Instagram, having a home on the internet that you own which is not susceptible to platform policies and algorithm changes is vitally important.
There have been many instances of people losing their audience when the platform took arbitrary decisions, made policy changes or tweaked the algo.
But if your growth system is built on SEO and blog content, then WordPress becomes a natural fit.
Recommended WordPress Stack
Managed WordPress hosting, lightweight WordPress theme like 2021 or others, plugins for SEO, performance and backups.
Start with these and add only what is needed as you go along. Avoid adding more than one plugin for achieving a similar purpose. Get a WordPress developer if you’re not comfortable with coding, but follow these practices of keeping things simple and light.
Once you’ve built the WordPress stack, you can now look at creating landing pages, CRM integrations, chatbots and opt-in forms to implement your growth experiments.
Here’s a digital marketer’s playbook for WordPress that explains some of the best practices, suggested plugins and options you can consider when setting up the website for your growth system.
Read this tweet thread for a quick summary.
Final thought: Do it longer, accept initial failures and learn to find flywheels in every channel or tactic.
