Growth Marketing is like trying to melt an ice cube: do it effectively to raise the temperature
IImagine an ice cube frozen to -10 degrees in a room that’s the same temperature. That’s your brand. Pretty unattractive to a consumer right now, nothing useful in its current form.
Now imagine that each piece of marketing action (i.e., a website article, social media post, YouTube video, pop-up advert) you carry out is like raising the room temperature a little. Some actions raise it by one degree, whilst others barely move the thermometer level. But when you stop raising the temperature, the ice cube chills the room, reversing all the work you put into warming it up.
The slow changes in the ice cube are the almost invisible improvements in your brand perception
So you continue warming. For a long time, your brand is still just a block of ice with no visible difference to when you first started warming the room. But you keep on turning the temperature up with every single marketing investment you make. Some raise it by a lot, others by a little.
But then you get closer to zero and start to notice visible things are happening. The thing is, you’ve only raised the temperature by a little, exactly the same as what you did many times beforehand, so how is this one thing you did had different results?
The truth is it’s not. But when it’s aggregated with all of those other efforts, it has shown a visible result. Like the moment when a lead turns into an actual sale.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that all of those previous actions on their own proved that they were ineffective. After all, why waste time, effort, and money doing something that shows no tangible results most of the time?
But this is until you’d reached zero degrees, and ice melts (where you’re now getting sales). The message here is that if you don’t do any work warming up your brand, don’t ever expect that ice cube to reach zero and turn into sales.
The second lesson is don’t mistakenly place all of the outcome on that one last thing you did (it could be a pop-up advert, so you think that’s always the right action to make your brand attractive). It’s the cumulative effect of all your marketing actions to improve the brand perception.
