Thread by @davelocity

0/ When asked for marketing advice, I usually reply w/ some version of the following charts

They’ve been helpful for people who need direction, from startup founders to marketers in a BigCo planning a go-to-market for a new product

Here’s the first chart:

1/ There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing advice. We must diagnose before we prescribe.

So first, we try to broadly categorize the company in terms of their business model

Thankfully, @chrija made this very simple chart to help us do that:

2/ This animal analogy is helpful, but incomplete: it doesn’t describe how marketing should work

So we stretch it to make it actionable - by thinking about how one would “hunt” these animals, given the following tools: Spears, Nets or Seeds.

This gives us:

3/ Let's make this more concrete by switching out animals for companies we recognize

e.g. SFDC got to $100m by hunting Elephants (enterprise) - big, slow, hard to hunt, but once you got one, you were fed for a while

They did this with Spears. What are Spears?

4/ “Spears, Nets and Seeds” comes via @motoceo

Spears = 1:1 targeted efforts. Outbound sales, trade shows, bizdev

Nets = 1:many. efforts that scale. Content marketing, channel partners, PPC

Seeds = 1:very many. Virality, WOM, things that drive C2C interactions

5/ Use the right tool, the right Go-to-market, to hunt your animal:

You could use Spears (outbound) to hunt Mice (SMBs), but it’d be horribly inefficient + expensive

If you're after Elephants (enterprise) it’s unlikely Seeds (growth hacks, virality) will be effective

6/ Focus on the appropriate GTM, and ignore everything else

Salesforce aggressively added bodies to their sales machine (Spears) not building a referral program

Facebook scaled via WOM and loads of free PR (Seeds) not because they had a killer blog

7/ More examples for the other animals and way detail here:

themarketingstudent.com/go-to-market/