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Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

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Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

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Highlights & Notes

The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph… … . The entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers.

Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project.

A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.

Growth hackers believe that products—even whole businesses and business models—can and should be changed until they are primed to generate explosive reactions from the first people who see them. In other words, the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people—no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.

Isolating who your customers are, figuring out their needs, designing a product that will blow their minds—these are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.

“people [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.”

But the most effective method is simply the Socratic method. We must simply and repeatedly question every assumption. Who is this product for? Why would they use it? Why do I use it?

What is it that brought you to this product? What is holding you back from referring other people to it? What’s missing? What’s golden?

With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we can be confident we have a product worth marketing. Only then do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine. Without this jump, even the best-designed products and greatest ideas go nowhere.

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriately, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible.

To kick off and reach your first group of users, you have many options: 1. You can reach out to the sites you know your potential customers read with a pitch e-mail: “This is who we are, this is what we’re doing, and this is why you should write about us.”* 2. You can upload a post to Hacker News, Quora, or Reddit yourself. 3. You can start writing blog posts about popular topics that get traffic and indirectly pimp your product. 4. You can use the Kickstarter platform for exposure and bribe your first users with cool prizes (and get some online chatter at the same time). 5. You can use a service like Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com) to find reporters who are looking for people to include in stories they are already writing about your space. 6. You can literally find your potential customers one by one and invite them to your service for free or with some special incentive (that’s how small we’re talking).

“The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”10 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as Reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 5. You can bring on influential advisers and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many startups have emulated). 6. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to promote your book (OK, those two were me).

“Focusing on customer acquisition over ‘awareness’ takes discipline… . At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money.”12

Only a specific type of product or business or piece of content will go viral—it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it. Until

Virality isn’t something that comes after the fact. Instead, the product must be inherently worth sharing—and then on top of that, you must facilitate and encourage the spreading you’d like to see by adding tools and campaigns that enable virality.

You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would. —Steve Wozniak

According to Bain & Company, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company. And according to Market Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70 percent, while to a new prospect it’s just 5–20 percent.18 Bronson Taylor, host of Growth Hacker TV, puts it in a phrase: “Retention trumps acquisition.”19

they merged marketing into their product development; they kicked off growth with early adopters; they added viral elements; and then they relentlessly repeated these cycles, always guided by the data, with an eye toward optimization.

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