The Only Article about Growth Hacking That You Need To read
Why Facebook, Snapchat and Co. are successful and you are not. Guest author Marcel Azeroth explains what really matters in marketing.
Growth hacking is like puberty and sex is the dressing room after physical education. Virtually everyone is an expert in the field, everyone claims to be doing it all the time, but the only ones who have ever really done it are out of the room.
But while pubescent teenagers grow up at some point and the way the topic is (for most) normalized, the Internet is like the Neverland, where it was decided at some point that you just will not grow up.
No wonder then that hardly a day goes by, on which blogs and magazines do not rave about the new wonder weapon from the marketing arsenal. Unfortunately, we have all gone to a big lie: there is no growth hacking.
That’s certainly not exactly the answer you expected with such a headline. You’ve probably landed here because you want to grow a project and you or your boss have heard something about this crazy “Internet” before and during a very tough meeting the phrase “Let’s go viral” has fallen and you are now looking for answers.
Even though it may not seem that way, this article is just right for you.
Growth hacking story
What is this growth hacking that I claim does not exist? The idea behind the concept is, with as little monetary input as possible, to give maximum attention and an accompanying brute growth.
Those who wanted to grow fast before the birth of the Internet, the only way left over a high marketing budget, which I affectionately call a brute force approach.
If you simply shoot every available advertising space over a correspondingly long period of time, sooner or later you will find your way into the brain of your consumer — mission accomplished.
It still works today, but this strategy is not a real option for startups due to limited resources and competencies in the field.
Fifteen years ago, making something out of nothing was quite difficult, but the rules of marketing and advertising with the birth of social networks changed dramatically. This revolution has turned passive consumers into active channels, which has become the foundation for growth hacking.
Companies such as Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder, and Spotify all enjoyed impressive and sustainable growth with relatively few resources.
So how can I still claim that growth hacking does not exist?
The misunderstanding
The above examples show that the topic can not be denied and something must be right. It is true that these new players, who are now dwarfing traditional companies, have done something different. However, I think it’s wrong to call this approach “growth hacking” or to pretend that it was really something new. In truth, what these companies did was an old known strategy.
That something as old and elemental as the new big thing is celebrated shows that we currently have a very fundamental problem in understanding marketing.
There are two major misconceptions on this topic. On the one hand, it is believed that by copying “tricks” one can copy the success of others and thus obtain virality. Instagrams cross-posting feature was such a trick or Twitter’s proposed users.
There are countless examples of smart and very successful decisions, all of which have one thing in common: they can not be copied because they only ever work in the context of the respective product. Presumably, however, a list with the headline “These 9 non-duplicable tricks have made Facebook and Co. rich” probably does not get the desired attention.
However, growth hacking, according to experts, is not just about making such smart moves but is essentially making use of low-cost channels such as blogs, Kickstarter sites, and newsletters. These are to guarantee that the place burns off without a big budget. Here is the second big mistake.
Now it happens that marketers and entrepreneurs read the countless contributions, Listicles, and columns on the subject and try to transfer the advice to their business.
But instead of three-digit relative growth numbers, they ended up creating only content cemeteries and wasted tons of time, capital and potential.
The product
How could that happen, you ‘ve read all articles about growth hacking? Why do you sink into insignificance?
The answer is sometimes simply because very few companies fail in the wrong marketing, they fail because they have not understood the following a very simple principle: Product is King.
This is not a Harvard Business School secret and you do not have to be a goddamn Elon Musk to realize that. Go to any forest-and-meadow-university, sit down in “Basics of Marketing” and in the first lecture the lecturer will tell you something about the 4 P of marketing.
Price, Place, Promotion and FUCKING PRODUCT. Absolutely fundamental and yet every day I see companies that simply have not grasped this logic or ignore it so hard that I now believe that they do not want to understand it.
That’s where marketing departments get a half-finished and ill-considered product, and they’re supposed to be creating a concept around here to somehow get it out there.
Shit with strawberries will always stay shit and even the smartest marketing heads will not find a taker for it. Of course, you can just go the brute-force way and spread the shit so far that statistically it just has to land in someone’s mouth.
But that’s not smart or sustainable, it’s just a complete economic catastrophe. Something like that is then argued with the 20–80 rule (Pareto principle) because you have to find a solution and somehow quickly enter the market. Welcome to the mediocrity, the antechamber of failure.
Successful companies have understood this logic and have accordingly invested all their energy in their product, which was then rolled with a few smart touches.
The approach of not building marketing around the product but integrating marketing into the product can be done so that they communicate with their customers early in the development process to provide a killer product with feedback from a good product to turn on and unscrewable warhead and a heated windscreen. Such a case is the perfect marriage of product development and Growth Marketing.
That’s how you create attention and create a product that your own customers value. What happens when customers value a product?
They will talk about it. In the circle of friends, on social networks,
This is an old process, only the speed and choice of means of communication has changed. To dismiss this as a reinvention of the wheel is absolutely over the topic.
Already infomercials have focused on the product and have even gone so far as to display ridiculously scripted comments from alleged customers. Seems ridiculous, but has worked.
What we learn from it
Growth Hacking also has something good. The product comes back to the forefront and (successful) companies realize that they have to bring product development closer to marketing again because users and consumers are getting more and more accustomed to good products.
Have you ever seen in a new upscale sedan (eg Audi A6) and have you wondered how stupid a manufacturer can be, that he built in a car beyond the 60k a navigation system, that of the operation and the speed approximately on the level of iPhone 3G is?
It still works, but in a few years millennials will have real jobs and then they will not spend their real money on half-baked things anymore.
Are you developing an app? Then involve your users in the development. Do you operate an eCommerce company?
Then put shopping and marketing in a common room.
Do you sell wool blankets?
Then overspend your product development with money until your blanket is the softest, warmest, and most innovative way to cover money you can buy. Now just invest in a smart, agile marketing team, which spreads the customer of your superior product efficiently into the world and you are already set up smart. If your resources do not give that away, you can always keep the 20–80 rule in mind, but wonder if it works efficiently for you or is just an anchor that holds you to the bottom of mediocrity.
