Shifting from Marketing-Led Growth to Community-Led Growth

At INBOUND,? Dharmesh Shah talked about the evolution he’s seen in the way a company grows. Not so many years ago, it was sales-led growth, followed by marketing-led growth, then product-led growth, and today, its community-led growth.

He was spot on! At IMPACT, we’ve felt this shift, and we’re leaning into it.

First, why the shift? For markets that are competitive/saturated (like agencies, SaaS, consulting, etc), customers are constantly bombarded with sales outreaches and marketing messages that more and more are just coming off as noise. Tactics such as good messaging, storytelling, SEO, and CRO are becoming much more difficult to be effective on their own. Plus, the market is becoming increasingly more cynical remembering past experiences where they’ve been burned wasting time and money on products and services that had great marketing but failed to meet expectations.

So, how do we succeed when marketing is becoming so much more difficult? Well, as Dharmesh suggested, the next phase was product-led growth - making your product competitively superior and consistently exceeding customer expectations. This is very hard for most founders/CEOs to do who never want to admit that their baby is ugly. But you really need to zoom out and in an unbiased way, understand if your products/services really matter. Are you exceeding expectations 95% of the time? Are your customers looking to spend more with you or are you fighting to keep them? Would anyone miss your company if it closed its doors tomorrow?

I’ll be the first to admit, IMPACT was not special, and we were struggling to provide great services as an inbound marketing agency. That’s why I made the decision to shift our services from being a typical HubSpot solutions partner to a company that coaches/trains businesses in implementing They Ask, You Answer, a sales and marketing framework created by Marcus Sheridan . It was not easy and it took a lot of time to get right. Today, I’m really proud of the dramatic sales and marketing results our clients are achieving with the help of our coaches and trainers, and the lifetime value of a customer has more than 5x’ed.

But still, having great products and services is not enough. As Jim Collins and? Brian Halligan ?have stated, we need to “crank the flywheel”, and that means customers raving about our companies, generating more customers. Hopefully, this happens passively through unsolicited referrals. But don’t stop there, lean into it. Bring customers together through online and offline communities, events, mastermind groups, etc - and make it really easy for customers to invite their peers into your community.

A couple of ways we’re doing this with IMPACT+, our online learning community, and the They Ask, You Answer Summit , coming up in May ‘23 in Chicago.

With product and community being so critical, does this make content marketing less important? Absolutely not! Creating content and videos that educate the market, build trust, clarify who your products/services are (and are not) a good fit for, and empower customers to share your company with their peers is still incredibly necessary. But content marketing alone is no longer a viable strategy to grow your business. It’s harder today to succeed, you have to be better, and you need a community championing your products/services if we really want to scale.