Three Growth Marketing Pillars That Scale Any Business
Growth marketing used to feel like pushing a boulder uphill.
I was doing the things everyone tells you to do: creating content, spending money to boost visibility, and sending cold messages en masse. And each one worked...kind of.
But then I noticed a connection. The content I created made my outreach warmer. That outreach brought in customers who created content for me and generated new leads from their networks. And suddenly the boulder wasn’t so heavy anymore.
That connection became the marketing system I used to grow and eventually sell my last company. I call it the growth marketing flywheel, and it has three pillars:
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Content: Organic and paid.
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Outreach: Cold email sequences, LinkedIn DMs, etc.
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Community: Your customers and audience.
Most people treat these as three separate strategies with three separate budgets (if they focus on any of the three at all). But they’re actually one loop, and once you connect them, growth starts compounding.
I’m going to break down each pillar individually, show you how I connected them for Flyletter, and give you the exact playbook so you can do the same. Let’s get started.
Why Your Growth Marketing Never Seems to Work
Most people I talk to don’t have much of a growth marketing strategy. They may be doing at least one of these three things: creating content (organic and paid), doing outreach (email, social, etc), or building some kind of community. Sometimes all three.
And yet they’re still exhausted, because nothing seems to work. But don’t worry, I’m going to get you off that never-ending growth marketing treadmill that doesn’t take you anywhere.
The problem isn’t effort. It’s that you’re treating each component of your growth marketing plan as a completely separate job with its own strategy, its own budget, and its own weekly to-do list. All isolated systems, with none of them talking to each other.
The blog post you published doesn’t help your outreach. The outreach you did doesn’t result in a growing community of customers. The community you’re building doesn’t generate new content or referrals.
Instead, you need to think of your growth marketing plan as a three pillar system, with each pillar feeding the next. The three pillars are content, outreach, and community.
Content builds credibility for your outreach. Outreach brings in customers who become your community. Community generates new content and new referrals. The loop closes, and every rotation makes the next one compound until you reach escape velocity.
Let me walk through each one individually, then show you how to connect them.
Pillar 1: Content
Content is where your flywheel starts spinning.
Not content for content’s sake (please, not that). I’m talking about consistently creating and distributing valuable material across the channels where your customers actually spend time. Organic social posts, newsletters, guides, videos, paid promotion when it makes sense. The format matters less than two things: consistency and distribution.
The real shift is thinking about every piece of content as an asset, not a post. When you write a guide, that guide doesn’t just sit on your blog collecting dust. It becomes something you can hand to a potential customer. It becomes proof that you know what you’re talking about. And crucially, it becomes the foundation for your outreach strategy.
For Flyletter, I wrote a guide on the newsletter framework that successful businesses use. That guide wasn’t just content marketing that could generate organic traffic to my website (or something I could put paid budget behind), it became an asset that powered the next pillar.
Most people stop right there. They create content, maybe even good content, and then wait for it to do the work on its own. Content sitting on a page is just a knowledge base, though. What turns it into a true growth engine is using it to start conversations with your potential customers.
Pillar 2: Outreach
There are really two ways to do outreach.
The first way is what most people do: Cold pitches. “Hey, I have this product, want to buy it?” You’re starting from zero trust with every single message. Most people ignore you, and the ones who don’t are skeptical at best.
The second way is what happens when Pillar 1 is already working: You lead with value instead of an ask.
Remember that Flyletter guide I wrote on the newsletter flywheel that successful companies use? I used that guide when reaching out to founders and creators on LinkedIn, not with a pitch, but offering the resource for free (no email required).
The result? A response rate north of 30%, kicking off an engaging conversation I could use to eventually pitch Flyletter. From there, I offered a free 20-minute strategy session to discuss the flywheel and how it can apply to their business. On the call, I showed them in real-time how Flyletter could help them manage the entire newsletter flywheel.
And here’s what made this strategy really work:
While I was doing outreach, I was also posting content organically on LinkedIn. Articles, insights, takes on newsletters and growth marketing. So when someone got my outreach message and clicked on my profile, they didn’t see an empty page with a sales pitch in their DMs. They saw weeks of relevant, valuable content.
The credibility was already built, and the content made the outreach warm before I ever sent a message.
That’s the connection between Pillar 1 and Pillar 2. Your content creates credibility, your outreach is yet another distribution channel that delivers it to the right people and starts an actual conversation, all leading to higher conversions.
Which matters a lot for what comes next, because those customers don’t just buy. They become your best marketing channel.
Pillar 3: Community
Your customers are your most valuable marketing asset, and they cost almost nothing to activate.
Every happy customer is a potential source of:
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Testimonials and case studies that become new content.
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Referrals that function as warm outreach you didn’t have to do yourself.
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User-generated content where they share their experience with your product in their own words, to their own audiences.
For example: A customer generates a testimonial or case study that becomes a piece of content, that content powers outreach to new prospects, where each conversion results in referrals from that new customer. Each node in your community creates new nodes, resulting in a compounding network that helps you achieve escape velocity.
Connecting the Pillars: The Flywheel in Motion
When content feeds outreach, outreach builds community, and community generates content and referrals, your growth marketing stops being independent activities but becomes one system that actually grows itself.
Let’s map the specific connections:
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Content → Outreach. Every guide, article, or resource you create becomes an outreach asset. You’re not pitching. You’re delivering value. Your organic content builds the credibility that makes outreach recipients trust you before you ever ask for anything.
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Outreach → Community. The customers who come in through value-first outreach already trust you. They’re primed to engage, share feedback, and participate. They become your community, not just your revenue.
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Community → Content. Customer testimonials, case studies, and user-generated posts become new content. That content powers your next round of outreach. The loop closes, and each rotation generates more material.
If this feels overwhelming, don’t try to build all three pillars at once. Start with content, and use that content to power your outreach. As you begin to acquire customers through your content-powered outreach, create an incentivized referral program and offer customers the opportunity to be interviewed about their experiences.
Turn those customer interviews into new content pieces that you share yourself, but also ask your customers to share as part of your referral program. As new leads come in through the content that your existing customers are sharing, they’re compensated and encouraged to create more content that brings in more leads.
Bottom Line
Your growth marketing problem was never effort. It was connection.
When you run separate growth systems, everything feels disconnected, and nothing seems to work. But when you focus on the three core growth marketing pillars and connect them together as one strategy, the boulder you were pushing uphill starts rolling on its own.
Writer, founder, and AI builder. Currently building Flyletter, previously sold Selling Signals (100k+ subscribers). 1 sold, 2 failed, 1 active. This post started as an issue of my weekly newsletter.