A Primer on the Future of Pr, Marketing, and Advertising
Here are my notes of Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. It's a solid introduction to growth hacking and the future of marketing. The author discuses the benefits of growth hacking and provides some examples to help you understand the power it has over traditional marketing.
Biggest lesson: growth can be hacked, measured and scaled eliminating the guesswork.
The traditional route to market is broken. Holiday explains how companies that have come to rely on massive advertising budgets, infomercials, and a broadcast-only marketing focus are missing out on huge opportunities.
In Growth Hacker Marketing, he introduces a new class of marketing professionalâthe growth hackerâand shows how to apply their unconventional tactics to your business.
By reading this book, youâll learn how to identify growth opportunities, measure and test your unique value proposition, and distribute your product through a viral growth engine.
The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. â AARON GINN
First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only. And by steadily increasing the number of invites allowed to its existing user base, Gmail spread from person to person until it became the most popular, and in many ways the best, free e-mail service.
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. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like âbrandingâ and âmind share,â growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growthâand 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.
âMarketing has always been about the same thingâwho your customers are and where they are.â
How do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?
Make something people want. â PAUL GRAHAM
You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.
Some companies like Airbnb and Instragram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); others find it right away.
Isolating who your customers are, figuring out their needs, designing a product that will blow their mindsâthese are marketing decisions, not just development and design choices.
In other words, Product Market Fit is a feeling backed with data and information.
The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.
But 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? Ask your customers questions, too: What is it that brought you to this product? What is holding you back from referring other people to it? Whatâs missing? Whatâs golden?
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. â BRIAN HALLIGAN, FOUNDER OF HUBSPOT
This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.
Instead, we are intensely focused on driving an initial set of new user sign-ups and customers, right now.
Virality isnât luck. Itâs not magic. And itâs not random. Thereâs a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even. â JONAH BERGER
All of which is to say a simple truth that we try to deny too often: if you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product. There must be a reason to share it and the means to do so.
As Eric Ries explains in The Lean Startup, âThe focus needs to be on improving customer retention.â Forget the conventional wisdom that says if a company lacks growth, it should invest more in sales and marketing. Instead, it should invest in refining and improving the service itself until users are so happy that they canât stop using the service (and their friends come along with them).
Growth hacking is about maximizing ROIâabout expending our energies and efforts where they will be most effective. Youâre better off rolling out new features that get more out of your customer base, that turn potential users into active users, than going out and pounding the pavement for more potentials. Youâre better off teaching your customers how to use your productâspending time, as services like Facebook and Amazon do, to get users to supply more personal information and make them more engagedâthan chasing some new person who doesnât really care.
Instead of pushing for TV and radio coverage, we worked with bloggersâbecause blogs are trackable and work fast. Knowing the type of reach we needed, we set a floor: the blogs had to have more than one hundred thousand unique visitors a month. With tools like Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa, it was easy to research potential sites we wanted to appear on, cross-check their traffic, and then reach out.
The thing about marketersâand, well, everyoneâis that weâre wrong all the time. We think we make good gut decisions, but we donât.
Growth hacking really is a mindset rather than a tool kit. And if you leave this book with one thing, it should be that mindset.
Lesson: Cheaply test your concept, improve it based on feedback, then launch.
Lesson: Reduce barriers to entry; use targeted media and platforms to bring your first users on board.
Lesson: Aim for a wow factor and response from your customers.
Lesson: Build your e-mail list!