Growth Hacker Marketing

Goodreads

https://www.amazon.in/Growth-Hacker-Marketing-Primer-Advertising/dp/1591847389

Growth Hacker Marketing: Key Takeaways

Part 1: The Growth Hacking Mindset

This section defines what a growth hacker is and the fluid, data-driven mindset they adopt, which differs from traditional marketing.

1. 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.
2. The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.
3. It was only a matter of time before someone smart came along and said, “It doesn’t have to be this way. The tools of the Internet and social media have made it possible to track, test, iterate, and improve marketing to the point where these enormous gambles are not only unnecessary, but insanely counterproductive.” That person was the first growth hacker.
4. 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 relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.
5. Marketing has always been about the same thing—who your customers are and where they are.
6. What growth hackers do is focus on the “who” and “where” more scientifically, in a more measurable way. Whereas marketing was once brand based, with growth hacking it becomes metric and ROI driven.
7. They are data scientists meets design fiends meets marketers.
8. growth hacking is more of a mind-set than a tool kit.
9. Growth hacking is not a 1-2-3 sequence, but instead a fluid process.

Part 2: Product-Market Fit is Everything

Before you can grow, you must have a product people actually want. This section focuses on achieving Product-Market Fit (PMF) by listening to customers and iterating on the product itself.

1. Make stuff people want. —Paul Graham
2. You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.
3. Both of these companies spent a long time trying new iterations until they had achieved what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF).
4. I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers. […] They ask readers what they’d like to see in the book.
5. As Marc Andreessen…explains it, companies need to “do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital—whatever is required.”
6. After hearing customers complain that their bosses were suspicious of employees using their laptops in meetings, the Evernote team produced stickers that said, “I’m not being rude, I’m taking notes in Evernote.”
7. Once we stop thinking of the products we market as static—that our job as marketers is to simply work with what we’ve got instead of working on and improving what we’ve got—the whole game changes.
8. 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?
9. Use tools like SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, or even Google Docs, which make it very easy to offer surveys to some or all of your customers.

Part 3: Acquiring Your First Users

This section covers specific, low-cost tactics for finding your first wave of users by targeting specific communities and creating pull.

1. To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products. —Brian Halligan, founder of Hubspot
2. Aaron realized now that you couldn’t expect people to come to you; you had to pull them in.
3. Knowing the outlets where they intended to post the video (Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit), they filled it with all sorts of allusions and references that those communities would love.
4. A few years later, the e-mail app Mailbox launched with a similar strategy. An incredibly compelling demo video racked up 100,000 views in less than four hours.
5. 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.
6. They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with.
7. 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.”
8. You can upload a post to Hacker News, Quora, or Reddit yourself.
9. You can start writing blog posts about popular topics that get traffic and indirectly pimp your product.
10. You can use the Kickstarter platform for exposure and bribe your first users with cool prizes.
11. 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.
12. You can literally find your potential customers one by one and invite them to your service for free or with some special incentive.
13. The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.
14. For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature. 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is. 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth. 4. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually. 5. You can bring on influential advisers and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money.

Part 4: Engineering Virality

Virality isn’t luck; it’s a feature. These points focus on how to build sharing and social currency directly into the product.

1. A good idea is not enough.
2. Virality isn’t luck. It’s not magic. And it’s not random. There’s a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. —Jonah Berger
3. Look, virality at its core is asking someone spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.
4. One of the simplest and most straightforward examples of this is Groupon and LivingSocial… For Groupon, it’s “Refer a friend” and you get $10 when your friend makes his or her first purchase. For LivingSocial, it says, “Get this deal for free”: if you buy the deal and recommend it to three friends via a special link, it’s free for you.
5. Remember, a growth hacker doesn’t think branding is worthless, just that it’s not worth the premium that traditional marketers pay for it.
6. Instead, a growth hacker will look for ways to get this social currency for free.
7. If you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product.
8. Virality is not an accident. It is engineered.

Part 5: Data, Retention & Optimization

The final loop: using data to understand users, improve retention (which is more important than acquisition), and continuously optimize the entire process.

1. 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
2. Poring over the stats, he and his team noticed that when users manually selected five to ten accounts to “follow” or “friend” on the first day, the user was significantly more likely to stick around.
3. Aaron Ginn explained to me that even the best growth hacker cannot “grow a broken product.”
4. Sean Beausoleil, the engineering lead at Mailbox, put it more bluntly…: “Whatever your current state is, it can be better.”
5. Bronson Taylor, host of Growth Hacker TV, puts it in a phrase: “Retention trumps acquisition.”
6. At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness … to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention … to drive sales. Social media drives communication … to drive sales.
7. Each followed the process I’ve outlined in this book: 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.
8. I noticed that each one had used an almost entirely different set of tactics than the others. Some had relied on viral features; others leaned more heavily on product and optimization. Some were expert e-mail marketers, while others knew how to use platforms to reach equally large amounts of people.