Alyssa will present again at the Best of TechTO on February 24 at City Hall. Together, we will be celebrating the amazing accomplishments of the Toronto technology community. Join her and other leaders from Uber, Drop, Proof, and Vena Solutions: http://bit.ly/alyssa-best-of-techto
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How does psychological health relate to marketing? Alyssa Atkins, former VP of Marketing at CareGuide shared how she used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to blow past $5 million ARR.
Most of us are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
Alyssa adapted it to create a hierarchy of marketing and this is what she used at CareGuide to approach growth:
1. Exist
Before you start thinking about branding exercises or scaling your marketing channels, you have to validate your business model by finding a proven problem and people who are willing to pay for a solution. The strongest indicator that you should exist is people signing up on your site and opening up their wallets.
2. Survival
The next element is survival, which corresponds to Maslow’s hierarchy of safety. To survive, you need to think about external threats, like your competitors or market forces, and anything else that will try to kill you at this stage.
CareGuide navigated through the survival stage by infiltrating existing markets. To do the same, ask yourself “where are people currently filling this need that I am looking to replace with my solution?” and then figure out how to penetrate those channels.
3. Explore
Next, start exploring new marketing channels that you can eventually scale reliably. You can do this through rapid-fire experimentation and scientific testing:
- Create a hypothesis
- Draw out an expected result
- Decide on an acceptable cost per acquisition over a certain period of time
- Kill underperforming experiments really quickly
At this stage, you are still focused on performance marketing. You’re not A/B testing messaging, but rather looking for a lucrative marketing channel that you can roll out and eventually scale.
4. Scale
You can scale your business either by investing directly in a paid channel that you know is working or by hiring someone to take a channel to its logical extreme. CareGuide scaled their marketing spend to $200,000 per month in paid channels that were working and when they noticed their email marketing was working, they hired someone to take it to full fruition.
5. Maturity
Finally, when you reach maturity, you can start exploring marketing channels that are more difficult to measure, for example, TV, Magazines, or Radio. During this stage, you also risk getting comfortable and slowing down your experimentation and that path leads you away from explosive growth. As per Alyssa’s advice, aim to consistently self-disrupt.
Alyssa’s hierarchy of marketing can be used for each new marketing channel you experiment with, for each new product you launch, and even for a startup that you want to build.
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Alyssa will present again at the Best of TechTO on February 24 at City Hall. Together, we will be celebrating the amazing accomplishments of the Toronto technology community. Join her and other leaders from Uber, Drop, Proof, and Vena Solutions: http://bit.ly/alyssa-best-of-techto
