RATING: 6/10
A primer on Growth Hacker Marketing–with marketing baked into companies using analytics and social metrics to grow a company without spending money.
Notes:
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 “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and 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.
When you get right down to it, the real skill for marketers today isn’t going to be helping some big boring company grow 1 percent a year but to create a totally new brand from nothing using next to no resources.
Phil Libin, told a group of entrepreneurs in a now-classic talk “people [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.”
Once we stop thinking of the products we market as static—that our job as marketers is to simply work with what we’ve got instead of working on and improving what we’ve got—the whole game changes.
(A very common question: Where do I find the right people? If this isn’t immediately obvious to you, then you don’t know your own industry well enough to even consider launching a product yet. Period.)
“Retention trumps acquisition.”
At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness . . . to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention . . . to drive sales. Social media drives communication . . . to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing. That is what growth hackers have taught us.