Engine of Growth is your long-term strategy to get new customers. Not a single campaign but the main thing your growth depends on.

You should acknowledge what is your main engine of growth and learn to improve it. A single company can utilize multiple engines but you should mainly focus on improving one of them.

There are a few engine types:

• Brute Force Engine: Direct cold call sales is a brute force engine. You get users by calling them and selling your product. Does not scale as well as the other engines. For example: traditional business-to-business.
• Sticky Engine: Your growth depends on hardness of switching to other product. If new customers count is greater than leaving customer count, growth is good. Keep the focus on you at all costs. For example: database software, enterprise resource planning services.
• Viral Engine: Your growth depends on person-to-person referrals. It is important to keep quality high and make sharing as easy as possible. For example: Facebook, Twitter, casual mobile games.
• Paid Engine: Your growth depends on broad advertising and increasing revenue per customer. You should focus on increasing monetary value of each customer and driving down cost to get new customers. For example: online shops.
• Saviour Engine: Your growth depends on your ability to solve problems that your potential customers search answers for. You need to have a solid search engine presence. For example: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow.

Sources

• Startup = Growth
• The Lean Startup
• Ultimate Guide to Funnel Optimization
• 21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics
• How We Acquired 100K Early Bird Signups with Zero Marketing Budget
• Guide to Growth Hacking
• There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list