A Modern Day Marketer — Growth Hacker
Hey guys, it’s my first blog and I’ll share my views on Growth Hacking, Growth Hackers, What they do? and so on. So, I’ll start with a question.
Who is a Growth Hacker?
A Growth Hacker is somebody who has tossed out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with just what is testable, traceable, and scaleable.
Their apparatuses are messages, pay-per-click advertisements, sites, and stage APIs rather than plugs, exposure, and cash. Growth Hacker constantly seeks users after users and growth — and when they do it right, those users generate more user, who beget more user. They are the designers, administrators, and mechanics of their own self-continuing and self-engendering growth machine that can take a beginning up from nothing to something.
What is Growth Hacking?
The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. — Aron Ginn
What Growth Hackers do?
What growth hackers do is focus around the “who” and “where” all the more deductively, in a progressively quantifiable way. While marketing was once brand-based, with growth hacking it gets metric and ROI driven. Out of nowhere, discovering clients and standing out enough to be noticed for your product turns into not, at this point a speculating game. Be that as it may, this is something other than marketing with better metrics.
How do they start? or how they start working on something? or What are the first steps? So, I’ll wrap this up in 3steps —
- Product Market Fit
- Growth Hack for your Product
- Turn 1 into 2 and 2 into 4 — Going Viral
1. Product Market Fit (PMF)
What is PMF?
Product market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. — Marc Andreesen, who originally coined ‘Product Market Fit’ in his post “The Only Thing That Matters”
In this way, the most exceedingly awful mix-up an advertiser does is “Beginning with a Product no one needs.” Here comes the job of Growth Hackers. They begin adding to the procedure of product improvement. Segregating your clients, making sense of their needs, structuring a product that will blow their minds — these are marketing decisions, not design and development choices.
Take Instagram, it started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app — the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this:
“We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’” The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram for $1 billion. They spent a long time trying new iterations until they had achieved what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF). — Ryan Holiday
2. Growth Hack for your Product
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
This is the most difficult task a Growth Hacker do as they have to find the right growth hack for their product. So, how do we start?
With growth hacking, we start by testing until we can be certain we have a product worth marketing. At exactly that point do we pursue the huge explosion that launches our growth engine. Without this bounce, even the best-structured products and most noteworthy thoughts go no place.
The growth hacker’s job — like we marketers have always done — is to do that pulling.
In any case, how? Positively not with the wasteful and costly strategies for old. With product-market fit, we don’t have to hit the first page of any News Paper to report our dispatch. We just need to hit the News Paper of our scene. We’re attempting to hit two or three hundred or a thousand key people — not millions. That is a consolation, isn’t that so? Even better, it works. But you look to do it in a modest, successful, and typically special and new way. While all conventional showcasing begins in an equivalent way — with a report or a promoting campaign — start-ups can dispatch in a huge number of ways. In the last, we need to target “Right People not all People”.
Take Dropbox — User Sign-Ups. So, they made a video by themself of their product and pushed on the Reddit, Slashdot etc and they ended up getting 75K waitlist signups from 5k. The fun part was the video was homemade (cheap) and after this hack, they made it to the newspapers and blogging site(the hack was traceable and trackable).
3. Turn 1 into 2 and 2 into 4 — Going Viral
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
You’ve heard it in a million gatherings. What’s more, customers are so flip about it: “We need to turn into a web sensation. Make individuals share this on the web.” Everyone needs it. As though massive viral sharing is as simple as asking for it.
The growth hacker reacts: Well, for what reason should a consumer do that? Have we made it simple for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth discussing? It’s shocking how once in a while people dare to respond to this inquiry, I myself wouldn’t withstand it. They expect that “going viral” — benefiting from a quick, infectious, individual-to-individual spread — is something that can mysteriously happen to any product. But virality is not some accident. Just a particular sort of product or business piece of content will go viral — it not just merit spreading, it needs to incite a longing in individuals to spread it. Until you have achieved that, or until your customer is accomplishing something noteworthy, it simply won’t occur.
Take Groupon, it’s “Refer a friend” and you get $10 when your companion makes their first buy. For LivingSocial, it says, “Get this deal for free”: if you buy the deal and recommend it to three friends who buy it via a special link, it’s free for you. No matter how much the deal costs. This is not quite the same as tossing some “Like this on Facebook” or “Post this on Twitter” buttons on the base of a blog entry and anticipating that it should abruptly spread. Think about how much less Groupon and LivingSocial had to spend on advertising because every offer had advertising built into it — they were paying their users to do it for them. — Ryan Holiday
A common strategy is to focus on “traceable virality” — which is when a new user acquisition can be traced back to a specific person or activity that led to it. For instance, when Alice sends Bob a link to a cute YouTube video, and Bob clicks on that link, YouTube knows that Bob was acquired because of viral activity, not from a generic review about YouTube. With a few more steps, YouTube can link Bob back to Alice and credit Alice’s viral score with the acquisition.
This is how virality works, you have to work for it and you have to think about it. You have to think about how can you make your hack easy, traceable, trackable and how can you collect all the data from the users to generate your products’ viral graph.
Let me know, in the comments below, what you think about the Growth Hackers and their ‘Hacks’.
