This is a re-blogged post that is written by Corey Eastman and the original link to the article is here.

What’s the DNA of a growth strategy?

When Jeff Bezos first started Amazon he drew what’s now known as Amazon’s Growth Flywheel on a napkin.

Similar to how nature has patterns that repeat or reproduce, businesses do as well. Whether firms realize it or not, these underlying forces have the ability to create momentum that can either drive success or failure.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience (CX) is at the core of Amazon’s flywheel. They believe that if they provide remarkable CX, the result will be an increase in traffic to their website. Creating CX should be the main driver of growth for any business, regardless of whether you operate on or offline. The question then becomes, what IS customer experience? Forrester’s definition is probably one of the best:

“How customers perceive their interactions with your company.”

At the heart of this definition is providing something useful and interactive for your customers or potential customers. Where this leaves many firms is creating content (text, image, video etc), with an emphasis placed on digital content. The oversight is thinking that if you create it they will come. That is, the content companies create will be discovered and consumed by their target audience. In this, lies the great challenge.

Customer Experience drives more customer traffic, which in turn drives more sellers to come on-board and then in turn these sellers bring in more selection that again adds to the customer experience. This cycle drives growth and as the business grows costs too start coming down because of economies of scale and hence this can be transferred as low prices to the customer, enhancing the customer experience again.

TRANSPORTATION BUSINESS

Every business is in the transportation business. If you’re creating content you need to distribute that content.

As with traditional transportation, which consists of moving goods from one location to another and is essential for the development of civilization; the content you create is essential for the development of new business. Everybody knows, content creation has crushed cold calling.

Most companies understand and are creating digital content for a target audience, however at the same time, seem to struggle with the appropriate channels necessary to get it in front of their audience.

Before you go out and start leveraging different channels to generate traffic, you need to take into consideration 2 fundamentally important sales metrics.

1. CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost, in it’s simplest terms, is all the money you spend on marketing and sales to acquire a customer.

2. LTV: Life Time Value, is both the tangible and intangible value you receive from your customer.

Which then leads us to the equation that will ultimately determine your success for sustainable biz dev growth:

CAC < LTV

Explained in words: The value you receive from the customer should be greater than what you paid to acquire them. One way to improve this equation is by lowering your CAC. There are many different ways to accomplish this task such as focusing on inbound marketing, strategic partnerships, customer satisfaction, etc. The one aspect I would like to focus on here, to help reduce your CAC, is a leveraging earned online channels.

SOCIAL MEDIA CEILING

Your social channels can only do so much.

Syndicating your content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, etc are effective, however, that’s not enough. What you need to start considering is both your pull and push strategies to set you up for distribution and traffic success.

Pull strategies will seduce your customer to come to you while push strategiesforce them to come to you. Both are important in channel distribution. However, since pushing is often associated with interrupting your consumer and cost money (raising your CAC), I prefer focusing on pull strategies.

Your Homework: I’ve done the dirty work for you here, by providing a VERY HIGH LEVEL checklist of pull strategy examples and resources that you MUST start using today to help you generate new business activity. I’m sure there’s many good ones that are not included so please add any I’ve omitted in the comments below.

START NOW

STEP 1: Print this post out

STEP 2: Sit down with your team responsible for customer acquisition (Sales, Marketing, PR, etc)

STEP 3: Check off which activities you’re actively participating in

STEP 4: Gather any data or metrics you have around these activities

STEP 5: Highlight which activities you should start focusing on

STEP 6: Make a list of companies you respect and look at the activities they focus on

STEP 7: Report back on your results in either the comments below or send me a tweet

Best of luck!

NEW BUSINESS CHANNEL CHECKLIST

Discovery Sites
[ ] HackerNews            [ ] Inbound.org     [ ] GrowthHackers     [ ] Medium
[ ] #USVconversation  [ ] Quibb                [ ] Svbtle                     [ ] ShareBloc

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[ ] Guest Blogging     [ ] Interviews
[ ] Q&A (Quora)        [ ] SEO (MOZ)

Podcasting
[ ] Guest Podcasting     [ ] Sponsorship Outreach     [ ] SoundCloud

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[ ] Guest Features          [ ] Interviews

Webinars
[ ] Guest Presenter/Interview     [ ] YouTube Channel     [ ] SlideShare

Offline Events/Presentations
[ ] Audio/Visual Assets     [ ] SlideShare     [ ] Instagram
[ ] Vine                               [ ] Twitter           [ ] Facebook

Contests
[ ] Give-a-ways     [ ] Social Media Awareness

Complementary Audiences
[ ] Meetup     [ ] Eventbrite     [ ] Uniiverse

Email Newsletter
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PR
[ ] HARO