4 Phases of Groundswell Marketing

5 min readApr 18, 2020

Growth — its not just about customer acquisition. The touted sales/marketing ‘funnel’ has evolved.. its now an ecosystem. Sustainable thinking and rapid growth is here with what I call Groundswell Marketing — however unlike buying ads its hard work. The results are worth it.

(This was partially written pre-covid)

Listen to my RipCurrent Episode: Build Your Groundswell or

Watch on: Groundswell: Youtube

2 cups of coffee later looking at yet another “Growth Hack” social post you shrug to all the noise. Rubbing your eyes you wonder — is there marketing that actually will exponentially impact my business without burning a hole in my budget? Been there.

To me the industry needs a big whiff of smelling salt and wake the F up and stop trying to take short cuts. Oh but you have a project, client, or some wacked out boss pressing for results and now. Been there too.

Frustration to the fact that everyone around you has no idea how complex and slow qualified audience development can be. Your anxiety is compounded by wondering what your doing wrong when so many “seemingly” rapid growth methods being bragged about all around you.

It’s Not You. Its them. The expectations that are set typically are not in fairness anything like the conditions your dealing with- they hid how much past experiments were done, how much $ advertising they spent or their suppliers did it pro-bono

Sure there are super success stories, and I know a few tricks on how to get some rapid growth. — In the end how do you know your doing the right things and how do you get your boss or cash flow on the same page.

You subscribe to every marketing feed, read all the right books and you seem to not quite hit the mark. I have been there too, frankly even with my own startup businesses (that is now shut down) Swellness.co where I thought I was going to crush it out of the gate- using every growth hacking tool at my disposal.

Eating humble pie and I have realized the marketing game has changed again. We shut down the company dispite using every marketing effort at my fingertips..

What is the biggest tool that needs to be in the new marketers toolbox? Your gonna hate it.

Patience.

The shift has happened where audience attention is hard to grab.

That said I understand that having the right strategy long term — and near term is what you need.. not just quick hacks that get you subscribers.

So let's break down Build, Give, Grow and Transform.

IF you breakdown your strategy in these 4 phases (wish it was three like Don Peppers- Get Grow Keep) But I have to stick with the first one that practically always gets overlooked or its implied that you have this step down.

Build.

Look how many people have heard the phrase shoot, ready, aim? Seems like that is exactly how marketers and anxious entrepreneurs do. Why? Build 10X this and do it now! I get the urgency, but too much is placed on the doing not on the thinking.

Build is basically Think, Map, Execute, Test.

Think, about your end in mind, how you want your clients to feel when interacting with you, think about how to make it frictionless, how are you going to receive aka; monetize your sales?

Map, how to design your marketing programs to map back to sale. It's not just the call to action messaging. This is about figuring out all the programs your working on results in sales. It also speaks to how you are going to Map out ‘desire and demand’ for your content, and products and services.

Execute / Test, this is so important go execute micro versions of what you want to do to baseline your results and test test test. This is critical before you move to the next phase. Before you invest or in most cases waste money on spraying and praying it works — have an idea shift from a hypothesis to having evidence that your system works and there is a positive response to your offering.

Give

It’s a law of the universe. Give before you get.

Now its a law of human interactions in marketing. I foresee a future where any paid ad will have with it something of extreme value so you will interact with it. Why do I think this?

Remember pop up ads? Dead. Hey they worked but they died, but not as fast as everyone wanted. Because it worked and some marketing guy is so obsessed with “getting the clicks” is forgetting to get the humans.

Here is a rule to follow. If you wouldn't like it. Don’t do it.

Seriously, give is the first step to getting customers in this new new reality. Marketers have been brow-beating customers with the same tactics and on mass it worked. sorta and eventually. This is coming to an end.

You need to think of every interaction as an invitation to give and then you need to generate an micro experience and finally reward them for any effort that was in the call to action (or CTA)

I call this Invite / Delight / Reward. — will save doing a deep dive on this process another time. Just know you need to make an invitation that delights them BECAUSE its of value and their reward is on the other side of the CTA. Currently you “get the reward” when you submit your email and that is more of a transactional engagement — its gonna shift where you need to give more.

Yep. Its gonna get harder to simply buy your way into customer acquisition or I rather call Human engagement. Patience. But there is a ‘hack’ build a brand that is KNOWN for going beyond expectations in all interactions and you will skip thru this process go to straight to GROW.

Grow.

Its all about exponential scaling which involves process mastery and the ability to build in a bread crumb trail of value to keep your audience paying attention or paying.

This could be a deep dive and again- will require its own article to breakdown ways to exponentially grow, but its not by adding more ads to your business — the secret is… wait for it. Invest into your customers and their experience and add value to what they have already paid for.

Transform.

The new loyalty is not points,rewards or kickbacks. True loyalty is when you transform the customer. Further — when they are transformed and there is a built in ability for them to share, refer and recommend your company there is something deeper built. TRUST.

This is where the new new reality is going. Towards building trust — something that needs to be earned and can be quickly lost. This is the ultimate rapid and sustainable growth hack.

I aptly call it Groundswell Marketing.