With 10,000+ hours of startup marketing under my belt, here’s an outline of how I’ve synthesized my own successes with several popular theories into one framework that I like to call GEM Marketing.

GEM Marketing stands for Growth, Engagement & Monetization. For a successful startup, you need all three legs of the marketing stool.

Growth is about getting people to discover your product and work their way through the traditional marketing funnel. By filling and widening the funnel as efficiently as possible, you grow your company faster. The Growth Hacker Funnel looks like this:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue

The trick is to figure out for each step how to continually improve so you’re maximizing your growth. To learn more about growth, read Startup Metrics For Pirate and Growth Hacking Tactics.

Engagement, according to Nir Eyal, is about creating an experience designed to connect a solution to the user’s problems with enough frequency to form a Habit. You do this through the acronym ATARI:

• A hook
• Trigger
• Action
• Reward
• Investment

Here are all of the detail about the Eyal’s Hooked Model for creating high engagement.

Monetization is about making money. This is a must have for most successful businesses. My favorite resource for this is Fred Wilson’s Web & Mobile Revenue Models List.

Ultimately, if you deliver growth, create engagement  and make money you’ve got a good shot at building a successful startup. Most companies that stumble do so because they are missing one of the three legs of the GEM Marketing stool.