A
growth hacker is not a replacement for a marketer. A growth hacker is not
better than marketer. A growth hacker is just different than a marketer.
Every decision that a
growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and
every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing.
Marketers felt that they had to consider
budgets, expenses, conversions, etc.
A growth hacker does not care about any of these things.
Overview:
Growth hacking can potentially be done offline. For
example, McDonald’s popping up at every interstate highway
exit in the 1950’s might be considered growth hacking.
They realized that interstate
highways were gonna be big, so they showed up where they knew customers would
be in large quantities.
Yet, this fairly new concept is
mostly applied in the world of startups. They don’t have big marketing budgets,
so they can’t rely on Super Bowl
ads or Times Square billboards.
That’s why they must find
cheaper ways to market themselves.
What they often do have is a very scalable product.
Consider Dropbox, for example. What their cloud storage service provides is
basically just disk space on servers, accessible via the internet.
They can always buy or rent
more servers to provide more space for new users.
Or Uber. The taxi replacement
service relies on regular people, using their own cars, to pick up others at
location A and bring them safely to location B – with the payment is funneled
through the app
With over 250 million cars on the road in the United States, this is also very scalable. They provide the app, which can be
downloaded an infinite number of times and used, via the web. The users
provide the rest.
A traditional product, like
soap, is not very scalable. Every time you run out of soap, you have to buy new
soap.
But, every time another user
signs up to Facebook, your experience gets better.
Plus, the way that the product
works allows it to market itself. If you use an Uber to go to your friend’s
house on Friday night and they ask you how you got there, you say: “I took an
Uber.”
Naturally, the word spreads. If
you like the idea and have friends who could benefit from using the service (in
addition to you benefiting from your friends being on the platform), you’re
very likely to suggest it.
That’s how growth hacking uses word-of-mouth on a big scale, in order to achieve the exponential growth rates that we’ve seen.
Alright, time to look at some
examples of startups that have done growth hacking the right way.
Step
1: Make sure you create a product people actually want
There is following
Two Steps that you must take to
ensure that your product hits the target:
1. Start by asking and answering questions, not
by developing a product that has awesome product-market fit.
2. As soon as you have an idea, start getting feedback.
Don’t hide in your basement,
develop something for 6 months and then come out, wave it and ask: “What do
y’all think?”
Ask for feedback right away.
Imagine that a friend tells you
about a problem with her company, over dinner. Together, you sketch out a solution
to it on a napkin.
The moment you have that
sketch, you can show it to other
people.
Put out free content if you have no
idea:
If you don’t have an idea, just
start for free.
Create a blog or YouTube
channel and provide
content around the niche that you want to build your business in. Share
your content on social media.
This is the simplest way to
learn what people like and dislike, what they want and need and it’s a great
channel to get feedback on your ideas.
What’s more, as you’ve seen, if
you collect email addresses, you can even build an audience of eager and loyal
followers, who can’t wait until you actually launch a product.
You can do so by giving away an
ebook, developing a quiz or coming up with an email series or a set of cool
videos.
Give people the chance to get
access to some of your best content, in exchange for their email address and
you’ll instantly start building an audience.
This is by far the easiest and
absolutely risk-free way to start a business today.
Conclusion :
1.
Putting out free content in
your niche and sharing it on social media
2.
Asking and answering questions
to get good ideas
3.
Instantly collecting feedback
around your ideas
4.
Validating your ideas by
getting customers before fully building the solution
Step
2: Don’t target everybody
how do you get this right?
Target the small minority of
people who gets the most out of your product:
You should create a customer
profile. Consider all aspects of your product. Then ask yourself:
Who would get the maximum
benefit from our product?
Be specific. Describe a real
person, as best as possible.
Their much
smarter move was to make the service
invite-only after the launch.
Keeping the ‘ask to share’ within their system, they made sure that they hit
the right target group.
For
example People looking to join the
service needed an invite from current users to get in. Since everyone wanted to
know what instagram was about and how it worked.
Step
3: Go viral:
It’s time to pull out the big
guns. Going viral is different than targeting everyone, though.
This step just means tapping
into bigger systems, bigger user bases and leveraging the reach of fellow
products, to really penetrate the majority of the market.
You’re still targeting your
ideal customers, but you’re expanding to platforms where everyone is present.
Want another example?
WordPress is not only powering 25% of all websites online, but it’s also free. The free version has a catch, though.
Your domain will always show up
as wordpress.yourdomain.com.
Everyone who visits your free
WordPress blog will instantly know that it’s a WordPress website.
But, let’s talk about an even
more powerful growth hack.
The power of integrations and
embeds:
Everyone’s darling, Facebook,
used embeds as an early growth hack, to make sure that they hit their target of acquiring 200 million new users in one year.
They gave users the option to show that they’re on Facebook in other places, like their blogs, websites and in
forums, by creating different badges for them to embed.
Ever tried to share a YouTube
video on your blog?
They make embedding videos
super easy, so lots of people do it.
This works, not only because
they create the entire code and highlight it for you, so you just have to press
Cmd+C (or Ctrl+C, if you’re on Windows) and then paste it into your editor, but
also because YouTube videos are very shareable.
Pro tip: Give people a reason to dig deeper into your embeds. The YouTube
player automatically plays the next video, or gives you a selection of related
videos, at the end of each video, which makes it highly likely you’ll actually
switch to YouTube after watching an embedded video.
When you decide on whether you
want to make your product embeddable or not, be sure that customers have a reason to embed, that it’s easy to do and that you entice
them to dig deeper into your embed.
There is something that’s even
more powerful than embeds, though, especially if you get it right: integrations.
Integrating
your service to work seamlessly with another can give you very easy access to
millions of potential customers.
Like
facebook login options on website..
Integrations
work just as well today. Only
now, companies like Facebook and PayPal are the ones you want to integrate
with.
Conclusion :
o
Incentivizing the sharing of
your product (it should become better with more users)
o
Letting your product advertise
itself
o
Tapping into other companies’
existing customers, with integrations, embeds and badges. Like facebook , wordpress
Step
4: Improve your product continuously:
Facebook is great example of adding all features of Instagram and whatsapp features through messenger..
Uber constantly improves its
service, as well. Here are some
of the experiments that they have already run:
·
Uber Ice Cream on demand
·
roses for Valentine’s day on demand
·
barbecue in Texas on demand
·
rides in a DeLorean in San Francisco
·
UberCHOPPER helicopter rides to the Hamptons
·
partnership with the NFL to promote safe rides
for NFL players
Once
you’ve gotten big, user experience is a huge part of your product’s success.
That’s why companies, like Apple and Facebook, spend hours discussing fonts,
colors and button sizes.
Never stop improving. (orkut stopped improving features & facebook still adding more and more features )
Conclusion :
o Constantly iterating and
releasing updates
o Testing every detail
o Optimizing the onboarding process
(familiarizing a new customer or client with one's products or services.)