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What do electrical grid operators and efficient growth marketers have in common?

11/12/2025

 
🔌 What do electrical grid operators and efficient growth marketers have in common?

Unless you’re a performance marketer and happen to know how supply-and-demand curves work in the energy market, this analogy might be a stretch…

(which means this post will probably get 7 likes, 5 of which will be pity likes from friends 😅, but I digress...)

To keep electricity reliable and cheap, grid operators dispatch power plants from lowest to highest marginal cost to meet demand:
nuclear → hydro → renewables → gas → coal.

And because the U.S. is short on nuclear, and renewables are intermittent, most markets clear at gas, making gas the price-setter. (Very high-level, but accurate enough.)

It turns out: growth marketers do the exact same thing.
We “dispatch” marketing channels based on marginal CAC and reliability:

⚡ Baseload = SEO + AEO
Always-on, zero marginal cost, slow to ramp but incredibly efficient: your nuclear/hydro of demand.

🌱 Renewables = Organic Social
Free but unpredictable…

🔥 Gas Peakers = Your paid media channels (Google + Meta Ads, Influencer…)
Flexible, precise, fast to spin up. Great for hitting numbers or filling gaps, but you pay for the privilege.

🧱 Coal Plants =  Reddit, Quora ads, Affiliates, Niche Inventory, Tradeshows
Useful for incremental lift, sometimes messy, rarely first choice, but they help you close supply gaps when everything else is tapped.

👉 Moral of the story:
Don’t let Google Ads become your CAC setter.
SEO and AEO are a lot easier to build than a nuclear plant, so you have no excuse.

I hope this post will inspire you to start generating the 🌿 cleanest and cheapest pipeline on the market.

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    Benoite Yver

    Serial Tech Chief Marketing Officer

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