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Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

One of the most valuable and satisfying experiences a performance marketer can have in their career is scaling a growth operation from scratch. At Matrix, we went from spending $0 to a number that represented positive, baseline growth for PowerWatch. As head of marketing, I can attest to how rewarding that experience was and how important the phase was in building foundational growth for our company.

There are all kinds of shortcuts on the road to growth. Shortcuts are by no means fatal, but they do step around the critical early stages where investment in performance marketing is key.

Companies will outsource marketing to an agency, or buy cheap traffic from non-core markets to prove out vanity metrics. They’ll hire a brand-focused CMO to build out a massive marketing team – and discount performance marketing completely. Again, these things aren’t fatal, but long-term growth ultimately means investing in a combination of areas that function together in order to scale a product to its maximum potential.

The growth trajectory for a startup typically looks something like this:

Over time, it looks more like this:

In the beginning, performance marketing acts as a flywheel to push the business from one stage to the next. Later, brand marketing comes in to serve the goals of the company as it begins to grow and mature. (for example, when LTV becomes equally important as conversion.)

Read More »The Battle Of Brand Awareness & Performance Marketing