A quick-n-dirty 20 minute talk on Growth Hacking. After some debate the group arrived at the consensus that perhaps "marketing innovation" is a better term.
2. About Me!
• A “software guy” - at one point.
• CEO of an online travel agent (alpharooms.com), grew
business to £100m t/o, exited 2014.
• Now growth hacking a skincare business called
facetheory.com
• And occasional consultancy.
3. Growth Hacking – Two definitions
Wikipedia says:
Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and
product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business.
Growth hackers are marketers, engineers and product managers that specifically focus
on building and engaging the user base of a business
An alternative definition
Use time, and engineer your product, to build growth (not media)
4. Pros & Cons
• Growth hacking strategies are often short-term, not long-term.
• More often than not employed in small businesses and start-ups
rather than large ones.
• Growth hacking usually serves two purposes: getting customers,
and validating product-market fit.
• Growth hacking rarely gets a lot of customers in a short-space of
time. For that – media is more than like your answer.
5. The viral growth coefficient
• If each customer introduces two additional customers – your
viral coefficient is two.
• Great – your business will grow exponentially on its own! You
just need one customer to begin (and zero churn!)
• Not realistic. However – a zero viral coefficient indicates an
average product at best. Most successful businesses probably
have a viral coefficient between 0 and 1. What’s yours?
6. Companies that Growth Hacked
Dropbox – refer a friend and get extra storage
Dietchef – competitor brand-bidding against weight watchers
AirBnB – piggy-back craigslist for initial customers
Virtually ever big e-commerce retailer – “secret” voucher codes
7. Growth hacking process
• Create KPIs (e.g. sales, leads, conversions, email sign ups) and
record them
• Do stuff
• Measure results
• Optimize (e.g. change audience, landing page tests, creative tests)
or STOP WASTING TIME
• Repeat
9. Tactic 1 – Use domain experts
Give product / service to domain experts / “voices of authority” for
FREE.
A good expert gives you:
• Product feedback – they can give you detailed feedback about how good
your product or service is compared to competitors.
• Credibility – they can give you testimonial.
• Initial traction – they will blog, retweet etc about your product.
• SEO
10. Tactic 2 – Be an expert
Do you have knowledge about a “domain”? Become an online expert!
• Update your company or personal blog
• Follow and engage with other experts on twitter
• Provide expert advice on quora
Being an expert provides product credibility to use on landing pages and
allows you to use your social following to promote other products or
brands (see Neil Patel)
11. Tactic 3 – Partner
• Find a non-competitive product or service you can partner
with.
• For Facetheory, this worked brilliantly. Packaging insert with
e-commerce company with the same demographic.
• People don’t always look for new skincare – but are open to
persuasion if something is presented to them.
12. Tactic 4 – Email email email email
• Whatever your business is YOU MUST HAVE AN EMAIL LIST, it’s
the cheapest, most effective form of marketing.
• Build email automation queues to educate customers about
your product or service. Keep building your automation queues,
stop sending BLAST emails.
• Is every customer touch point offered the opportunity to opt in to
your list?
13. Tactic 5 – Friend-get-friend
• Have customers?
• ASK them to refer. You don’t even have to offer an incentive.
Build on the small guy narrative.
• Think viral co-efficient. It chips away at getting to 1.
• Got good margin in your product? Offer customers an incentive
to refer. This works well for B2B too where personal
recommendation matters more.
14. Tactic 6 – Landing pages - “split the
ask”
• Don’t try and ask for everything you want in one go (the email,
the sale, the repeat business, the referring a friend).
• It takes time for people to trust a brand or product or service.
• Instead – lower the barrier for what you want. Just ask for an
email address, give some content away, ask for customers to
engage with the brand.
15. Tactic 7 – Bake in growth
• Highly suited to software products.
• Brilliant example – Salesforce – receive an email from
someone using salesforce (check the signature – “sent with
salesforce.com” – imagine the virality!). It’s FREE marketing.
• If you can engineer “natural virality” into your product or
service, it’s a great way to improve your growth co-efficient
16. Tactic 8 – Competitor brand bidding
• Do you have a direct competitor for your product and service? Is yours
better?
• Then bid on their search term on google!
• Example: Dietchef vs Weight Watchers diet meals.
• Usually cheap – and if the ad is created properly, it may persuade people to
jump ship and try something new.
• AND IF THEY DON’T TRY IT AT FIRST SPLIT THE ASK – AND GET THEM TO
SIGN UP TO YOUR LIST AND EDUCATE THEM.
17. Tactic 9 – Be on the ground floor!
• Get in early on new social networks.
• Facebook is now a media platform – difficult to generate virality –
very competitive. Requires paying for media or brilliant creative.
• Other platforms are less competitive – e.g snapchat, vine, you can
gain influencers more easily because there is less content.
18. Tactic 10 – Internationalize
• One of my consulting clients always buys French software products.
• Not because they are better, or patriotic, but because the sites are in
French… and they search in French.
• Their tendering process is – “can it speak French”.
• Take-away: customers can be lazier than you think when it comes to
comparing the market. It’s easy to “overthink” yourself out of the
market.
19. That’s it!
For discussion:
Is growth rate the most important business KPI?
Is growth hacking scalable?
Is growth hacking actually necessary for established, successful, growing businesses?
