Growth Hacking

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.)

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Written by OM MAURYA SIR

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