GROWTH

HACKING 101
How To Market Smarter, Be More Agile, And Grow
Lightning Fast Without Spending Any Money Using State
Of The Art Digital Marketing Tactics
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Growth Hacking Defined
Chapter 2 A Short History Of Growth Hacking
Chapter 3 Growth Hacking Methods and Tactics
Chapter 4 How To Create a Compelling Product Or Offer
Chapter 5 How To Attract Users and Generate Leads
Chapter 6 How to Engage Leads
Chapter 7 How to Track and Improve Your Product
Conclusion
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INTRODUCTION
Growth hacking. Growth what? Growth hacking is one of the hottest buzzwords in online
marketing and in the world of technology start-ups in the United States and elsewhere. It
seems like people can’t repeat the term enough. In fact, growth hacking is one of the
hottest terms used by start-up founders when they’re trying to raise funds for their
ventures.
Unfortunately, ‘growth hacking’ may have become the victim of its own success because
the more people repeat the phrase, it appears, the fewer people understand it. There’s a
tremendous amount of hype and mythology surrounding the concept. What exactly is
growth hacking? Why should you care? Does it even matter in the big scheme of things?
This book helps you to get a practical definition of this hot product development and
marketing concept. There’s a tremendous amount of misconceptions regarding it and it’s
very easy to get derailed by going with the wrong definition.
This book not only defines what it is but also helps step you through the process of
making growth hacking work for your company. Whether you are producing a software
product, launching a blog, developing an online service, or designing a mobile app,
growth hacking can pay off tremendously for your organization.
What’s crucial is that you go about applying growth hacking techniques the right way. It’s
too easy to treat growth hacking into a simple empty buzzword that doesn’t mean much of
anything at all. If that’s the case, then it’s just another piece of marketing hype mentioned
repeatedly in yet another start-up business plan. Thankfully, growth hacking does live up
to the hype, provided you have a clear understanding of it so you can put together the right
plan.
Chapter 1
Growth Hacking Defined
If reduced to its essentials, growth hacking is all about engineering your complete
operations to maximize your company’s growth. It doesn’t matter whether you are a
blogger, an online publisher a software developer, or a mobile app producer. Regardless of
your product or service, your company can stand to benefit from growth hacking.
What separates growth hacking from marketing techniques, or product development
paradigms is that it involves a comprehensive ideology regarding the importance of
growth. GROWTH is the fundamental focus of growth hacking. All product development
and marketing decisions are subordinated to this goal.
Previously, it was the other way around. Back in the original Dot Com days of the late 90s
and early 2000s, internet companies would build a product, and then seek to grow. With
growth hacking, growth is hard-wired into the DNA of the product you are developing.
Even while the product is still in a barely conceptual or preliminary idea stage, growth is
already being consciously and actively engineered into the DNA or foundations of the
product or online publication the company is building.
Growth hacking also requires a unified purpose. It isn’t just a tactic the company’s
happened to stumble upon. This unified focus on growth is purposeful, intentional and
clearly defined. It is not just a hack that someone comes up with along the way to solve an
isolated problem. Instead, growth is the paramount objective of the organization as a
whole. All solutions are intended to facilitate growth. All solutions flow together to
maximize growth. I hope you can see how growth hacking animates the whole operation
of an organization instead of simply being viewed as a means to an end.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT GROWTH HACKING WILL ALWAYS
MAINTAIN THE SAME MEANING BUT ITS IMPLEMENTATION CHANGES
DEPENDING ON WHICH STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT THE COMPANY IS IN. THE
GOAL IS STILL THE SAME WHILE THE EMPHASIS MAY SHIFT.
This ideology is extremely important because a lot of people are laboring under the
misconception that growth hacking simply involves a fixed set of implementations that
rarely change. As the company grows from initials, idea, proof of concept, angel investor
stage, seed funding stage to full blown product launch and commercialization. This is
absolutely wrong. Growth hacking’s definition remains the same but its implementation,
or the shape it takes, changes depending on which stage of development the company is
in.
THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS
Growth hacking is implemented in four major stages: creating a product or coming up
with a service offer, promoting the product or service software, engaging leads or
servicing current customers and finally, tracking and improving or scaling up. These are
distinct developmental stages and each require different implementations of the same
growth hacking principle.
The Difference Between Growth Hacking And Online Marketing
Since a lot of online marketers keep repeating the phrase “growth hacking,” it’s very
tempting to think that growth hacking is simply just another online marketing buzzword. I
can’t say I blame you if you’re thinking along these lines. However, there is quite a big
difference between online marketing and growth hacking.
Online marketing, simply put, involves using different audience persuasion tools and
tactics at different stages of a product and websites’ development life to achieve
promotional objectives. Growth hacking on the other hand involves a unified focus which
requires a cohesive system. Everything must lead to growth and sustainability. All tactical
decisions, whether it’s hiring people, picking out the right place to set up an office,
creating a product or coming up with a particular product upgrade, are informed by the
need for sustainable growth.
It’s as if online marketing focuses on issues on a problem-by-problem basis, while growth
hacking proceeds with a constant mantra of growth. Growth is at all times at its center of
attention. Accordingly, growth hacking requires rapid testing of marketing materials,
building a mailing list, developing viral strategies, tapping into search engine optimization
which is often seamlessly engineered into the website attached to the product or
incorporated into blog posts. Growth hacking also focuses on conversions from Day One.
It is very heavy on A/B testing.
Growth Hacking Targets Sustainable Growth
When the phrase ‘growth hacking’ initially became popular, the whole focus of people
looking to implement this particular product and company development strategy, centered
primarily on huge bursts of growth. People who were implementing growth hacking at
that point in time, wanted the same explosive growth enjoyed by Facebook or Instagram.
As more and more companies adopted growth hacking, the focus shifted away from
achieving explosive growth (Who wouldn’t like to grow as quickly as Linkedin or
Facebook?) towards sustaining that growth. In short, getting a lot of people to sign up for
your social networking platform is great and everything, but it is a temporary blessing if
most of those people don’t come back.
Early on, the proponents of growth hacking recognized the importance of sustainable
growth. It’s not just a question of getting a lot of people to adopt a particular technology
platform or use a particular software tool or visit a particular blog. What’s equally
important is that a tremendous percentage of that initial growth base continue to use the
product, so the product achieves an internal organic self-sustaining growth rate.
This is a particularly important criterion because most technology start ups don’t have
unlimited capital. In fact, the typical American start up has a very small marketing budget,
assuming he or she even has a budget at all. Accordingly, the initial definition of growth
hacking evolved rapidly from explosive growth to sustainable growth.
Unified Focus On The User Base
Another key distinguishing feature of growth hacking is that it also has a unified focus on
the user base. Previous to the rise of growth hacking, many internet companies looked at
their user base as simply a metric to a goal. They looked at the amount of people that they
recruit ed as a simple number which determined whether they were doing well or not.
While the internal activities of that user base were important for most internet companies,
most of them turned a blind eye to the cornucopia of product development data goodies
and marketing opportunities a particularly active user base brings to the table. Growth
hackers look at the user base in a completely different way. They understand that the user
base impacts customer intelligence. For your product to be successful, it has to adequately
address the needs of the people you are marketing that product to. There is no better
source of information that would enable you to fine tune your product than your existing
customer base.
Second, your user base impacts the amount of “evangelists” you have. There’s no better
source of free promotions than a happy customer. Statistically speaking, the larger your
user base, the larger the amount of people you can rely on to spread the good word about
your product.
For example, if your user base has a total of 100 active subscribers and you can rely on
5% of those people to get on Facebook and Twitter to spread the good news about your
product, then you’re looking at five evangelists. That’s not really saying much.
Now, if you were to expand your user base to a hundred thousand active users, then the
amount of active evangelists you have would be around 5,000 people. Growth hackers
don’t just focus on blindly exploding their user base, they also have a laser focus on the
amount of internal promoters or “evangelists” the software, product, blog, or any kind of
online product they are developing has.
Another point of distinction is that growth hackers look at user base numbers to eyeball
the chances of actual monetization. All online properties, if they are serious in remaining
in business, need to earn dollars. They need to generate revenue. The sooner they focus on
monetization, the more likely they’ll stay in operation.
Growth hackers look at the over all size of the user base and make educated guesses as to
the actual percentage of that population who will actually buy a premium or a value added
version of the free product. This applies across the board even if we’re talking about a
simple blog. With a simple blog, you can restrict access to “members only” (premium
content) sections where people have to pay either a flat rate or a recurring subscription fee.
On top of all of these concerns, growth hackers also focus on growing the total user base
and retaining as many users as possible. Their focus is on sustainability because it is the
cement that holds everything together. What’s the point of getting a ton of people to your
website, only to lose them immediately? The key is to hang on to as many of those people
as possible and as I have mentioned already, there are tactics you can deploy to help
ensure user’s sustainability.
Chapter 2
A Short History Of Growth Hacking
The funny thing about growth hacking is the fact that companies have been doing it all
along. Ever since the commercialization of the internet in around 1996, companies have
always devised all sorts of hacks and small innovations to spread the word about their
product quickly and as cheaply as possible.
These techniques have been floating around the internet for a long time. These companies
just haven’t gotten around to labeling their tactics and strategies as “growth hacking.”
Some Early Examples Of Growth Hacking
Shortly after the free web-based email service Hotmail launched, it automatically added a
clickable signature to all the emails sent out by people who use Hotmail. Accordingly, the
more members use d Hotmail, the more emails they sent to non-members contained that
link. Non-members only needed to click that link and they would be taken to a sign-up
page. This unleashed an exponential effect and Hotmail’s user base blew up very quickly.
In no time at all, Hotmail was bought out for a lot of money by Microsoft.
Similarly, Facebook blew up very quickly by using two growth hacking features. First,
when you join Facebook, it automatically accesses your email address book and asks you
whether you’d like to invite your friends to Facebook. It asks you so quickly, that a lot of
people simply just keep on clicking yes to make the nagging prompt go away. This
seemingly small feature allows Facebook to essentially mass mail your friends and
relatives, using your email address as a reference. Since the invitation email mentions your
name and email address, your friends and associates are more likely to open the email and
sign up.
Even if a relatively small percentage of people went through this referral system, it had an
exponential effect as more and more people joined, and more and more people were
referred through the address book feature.
The other significant growth hack functionality that Facebook engineered into their
product is the “people you might know” feature. When you log in to Facebook, you can
see the thumbnails of other Facebook users that they are suggesting to you as potential
friends. These are not blind suggestions that Facebook randomly selected from its
database.
Instead, Facebook takes your email address and cross-references it with the address books
of other members. When there’s a positive match, Facebook will show the profiles of
those people. It’s as if Facebook is reading your mind as to who your friends and relatives
are. This is extremely powerful because the more friends you make on Facebook, the
larger your friend network becomes, and Facebook then match you with your new friends’
address book and this becomes exponential very quickly. This is how people are able to
create massive friend lists in a relatively short period of time.
The Origin Of The Phrase “Growth Hacking”
The originator of the term growth hacking is the marketer Sean Ellis. He coined the phrase
in a blog post in 2010. What made his blog post stand out is that he successfully defined a
unified paradigm for online business growth. He defined growth hacking as all about
growth, as the enterprise’s main focus - product development and all other areas of the
company are subordinated to growth.
Previously, online product development took a completely opposite tack. Back in the day,
the typical internet or software company would produce the product and then scramble for
ways to create demand for it. Unfortunately so, just judging from the number of
companies that went bankrupt during the first Dot Com Bust. Most companies developed
their own product and got wiped out when not enough people warmed up to (much less
paid for) it.
Sean Ellis points out that growth hacking is all about a unified focus on growth. It’s not
just a tactic, or a combination of tactics companies stumble upon. It’s not just a series of
hacks that solves a problem here and there. It not only recommends actions, but it also
directs actions. In short, it is the driving force of the company. Ever since Sean Ellis’
groundbreaking description of growth hacking, it’s been fine tuned through the years.
Here are the key elements of its continued evolution:
Growth Hacking Is All About Working With Your Target Audience
Looking back at growth hacking and what happened before and after it’s wide adoption,
one thing stands out: growth hacking requires that you work with your target audience.
Instead of imposing some sort of prefabricated or pre-conceived product idea on them,
learn from them.
In other words, this concept revolutionized product development because, previously,
companies operated on a purely “build it and they will come” mindset. The innovator was
so excited that that product is so hot that it basically sells itself. But the problem with that
assumption is that the inventor thinks that his or her target market thinks like him or her.
This is hardly the case.
In fact, for every product built on a hunch that became successful, there are literally
thousands of other products that have crashed and burned. Growth hacking solves this
problem because it constantly keeps your target market or target audience in the loop
throughout the whole product or service formulation process.
In other words, product development and marketing go hand in hand, guided by the
singular focus o n quick growth. This enables internet companies to save a tremendous
amount of capital. Let’s face it, the “build it and they will come” philosophy will push
your company to burn thousands if not millions of dollars and end up with very little to
show for that investment.
Growth hacking, on the other hand, enables you to develop a product that has a higher
likelihood of success by forcing you to simply listen and work with your target audience
from Day One. Another point of differentiation is that growth hacking lists virality and
zero cost marketing as crucial goals from Day One.
Again, you’re not using a system where you build a product and, once you’ve spent
thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on the proof of concept, you then rush
out there to market it. Growth hacking pushes you to “bake into” the product features that
would enable it to spread very quickly as more and more people use it.
Similarly, lead generation and customer retention are engineered into the product or blog
from Day One. The whole idea of ‘growth for growth’s sake’ with no retention is a waste
of time. Growth hackers know this, and this is why customer retention is a primary
company value from Day One of product development.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line with growth hacking is that it is a unified, seamless, cohesive approach to
growing a company quickly and building on previous games to produce sustainable
growth. It’s not strictly about the product, it’s about the company as a whole.
This is how companies like Instagram were able to be bought out for a billion dollars in a
relatively short period of time. Did you know that Instagram only had 13 full time
employees when it got bought out by Facebook for a billion dollars? Instagram only
became attractive to Facebook because they were able to successfully use growth hacking
principles to grow their user base explosively within a ridiculously short period of time.
They achieved this stunning growth with almost zero marketing budget. The good news is
if a company like Instagram can do it, so can yours.
Comparative Case Study
Compare these two representative stories of companies that either use the traditional
product development model or growth hacking.
The Traditional Model
Company A involves a company founder who has a hot idea. The founder is so excited
about the product and he is extremely confident that people would get as excited about the
product as he is. He builds a prototype, promotes it, spreads the word, fine tunes the
product and eventually gets around to including elements that enable the product to earn
revenue.
The big drawback to this development model is that starting from Day One, the company
is burning through scarce company capital. I mean it’s one thing if the founder of the
company started off with millions and millions of dollars. Unfortunately, like the typical
entrepreneur, he doesn’t have that much money.
Consequently, the company founder puts himself in a situation where he has to spend a
tremendous amount of time and money building up the product and then later on playing
catch up with actual market feedback. This is very risky because you’re rolling the dice.
You don’t know, this early on, how your target audience members would respond to your
product. You better hope that they are as excited about it as you are.
Unfortunately, you will only know once you’ve spent thousands if not hundreds of
thousands of dollars introducing the product to the market and promoting the product.
This creates a ridiculous situation where company founders are essentially forced to create
demand.
While companies like Microsoft and Apple computers do a great job in creating demand,
the typical one-man band technology start-up is hardly equipped to “create demand.” I
hope you see the big disadvantage with the traditional model.
The Growth Hacking Model
In this situation, we’re dealing with the same company founder and the same idea. The
company founder gets all excited about this hot concept, but instead of pouring precious
and scarce resources into a proof of concept immediately, the growth hacker cross
references the idea with actual customers.
Feedback is solicited. Customer intelligence is gathered. Blog posts are published along
with polls and online surveys. This goes on for quite some time because the idea is fine
tuned, modified, upgraded, revised, or even torn apart and restarted based on the feedback.
After enough end user feedback, a working draft of specifications is formulated and a
limited launch is announced for the product. In exchange for people signing up to a
mailing list, they get limited access to the product. As more features are recommended by
the actual users of the product, more and more people are recruited to sign up to the
product’s mailing list. The more people sign up to the mailing list, the more consumer
intelligence is gathered.
Along with these activities, more customer intelligence is gathered by the company
founder based on actual customer behavior and usage patterns. In the case of a blog, the
blogger would look at traffic statistics, ad clicking / email form submission patterns, and
content consumption patterns. In the case of software, the product creator would look at
the number of installations as well as server calls and server interactions of the product.
The software developer would also pay attention to customer complaints and suggestions.
Update after update is paired with mailing list announcements to maximize product usage
and testing by the actual customers themselves. The product remains in “free” form while
it’s being fine tuned for further and further refinements. The mailing list is then
incentivized, using more access time, or a free software update to spread the word about
the product.
This leads to an even bigger mailing list. Finally, the company founder announces the
launch of the official version of the product. This official product charges a fee for
premium access. Given the fact that the product has already managed to create a sizable
mailing list, the company founder can reasonably expect that a certain percentage of this
mailing list would convert to paying customers.
Upon launch of the product, the product gets out of the gate with both a revenue base of
paying customers and a promotion base of email list members who can be incentivized to
spread the word further about the product.
Do you see the big difference here? In the first situation, we have a company founder who
spends a tremendous amount of time, effort, energy, and money, only to roll the dice at the
end of the process. While he can roll a seven here and there, for the most part, he’s rolling
snake eyes. He’s losing out.
In the second scenario, we have a more results-oriented process that produces a specific
revenue and promotion asset for the company founder. Which situation would you rather
find yourself in?
Chapter 3
Growth Hacking Methods and Tactics
Since most start-up companies suffer from a lack of capital, most of them don’t have a real
marketing budget. Also, most of these new businesses involve people who have a hot idea
and not much of anything else. Most of these inventors and pioneers don’t have a solid
marketing background.
Usually, this combination of almost zero capital and an almost total lack of marketing
experience means automatic failure. Thanks to growth hacking, you can compensate for
serious shortcomings by simply using innovation to connect with users’ needs and off-
load as much of the marketing of the product or blog / website to its install ed base. You
do this through user connectivity / community outreach.
What follows are some methods and tactics that most hackers utilize to use the product to
market itself.
Why Establish Community?
Growth hacked products and online publications tend to focus on establishing a
community. This helps your users to develop a sense of “ownership” in what you’re doing.
The more they feel a personal connection to your product / blog, the more likely they will
evangelize your product. That’s the bottom line. It pays to not only listen to your
customers, but also to let them feel that they have a stake in how the product turns out.
This is why it’s crucial to tie-in product design to commercialization and to marketing.
They’re all interrelated. Here are some key examples.
Example 1: Hotmail
Hotmail was one of the first web-based free email services. It got so big that it got
acquired by Microsoft in a relatively short period of time. The reason why it blew up so
quickly was because the emails automatically g e t a tagline that says “Hotmail” when
people use this service. This is a clickable tagline, that when clicked by the recipient, goes
to the Hotmail sign up page. Even if only a tiny fraction of Hotmail user recipients clicked
on the link, this feature created a cumulative effect where the overall distribution base of
Hotmail grew rapidly over a short period of time.
Back in the day, people were so happy not to pay for email that they used Hotmail as their
primary email address. They developed a ‘sense of ownership.’ This increased usage led to
an explosive spread of the Hotmail sign up link.
Example 2: LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform where people post enriched resumes and
can join communities. At one level, LinkedIn seemed to be a fairly shallow version of
Facebook. But don’t let appearances fool you. LinkedIn was able to grow very quickly
because when someone joins the website, the system ask s them if they would like to
invite their business contacts / colleagues. If this sounds familiar, it should be - this is a
page taken out of Facebook’s viralization playbook.
Since most users start an account by blindly clicking through confirmation pages, a certain
percentage of LinkedIn’s new members automatically access their email address book and
LinkedIn sends a ton of email invitations.
Again, just like Hotmail, even if only a small portion of its user base utilizes the mass
invitation feature, it can still produce a massive upwards spiral. This is because no matter
how measly the invited users are, they still end up signing into LinkedIn, which produces
an accelerating number of invitation emails that creates explosive user growth.
However, if you thought that that was awesome, LinkedIn has some more tricks up its
sleeve. One particularly powerful recruitment tool is Linkedin’s partial view feature.
When you type in a name in LinkedIn, you will see online resumes. And after you view
enough resumes, LinkedIn will plant a cookie in your browser which prompts you to log
in so you can view the full resume. Of course, logging in requires an account.
Therefore, by using this double-barreled approach, Linkedin was able to explode its user
base.
Analysis
Based on the two representative examples above, we are made aware of several key
features of growth hacking. First, the promotion tie-in is linked directly to the
functionality of the product. In the case of Hotmail, the more you use your email account,
the more your friends find out about the free email. Why? Because when you use your
account, you’re sending out emails, and each of these emails has a clickable tagline. In
effect, the more you write and send emails, the more you promote Hotmail.
In LinkedIn’s case, the more you log in to this site, the more you’re encouraged to invite
your contacts . Also, the more you search your contact‘s or associate’s resumes online, the
more likely you will be pushed to create a LinkedIn account so you can access their
complete resume information.
What unites these two distinct products is the fact that their promotional components are
actually tied in directly to their functionality. The more you use the product, the more you
promote it.
It’s important to note that promotion features were not just added as an afterthought, they
were actually engineered into the product; probably, since Day One, to enhance its value.
This is especially true in the case of social networking platforms.
Facebook is not a lot of fun if you don’t have any friends using it. They’re not going to
send interesting articles to you. You’re not going to see stuff that people are interested in.
You’re not going to see updates regarding their lives.
Now that Facebook has engineered all these growth promoting features, you have a
tremendous incentive of continuously using Facebook. The more you use it, the more your
friends are encouraged to join. And the more that they use it, the more content they
generate, which keeps you motivated to continue using Facebook. When you use
Facebook, you generate content over and over again.
I hope you can see how content generation, promotions and networking are all intertwined
in creating an upward spiral of value and, just as important, content volume. This is not an
accident, these promotion features were not added as secondary considerations or after
thoughts, they actually help in enhancing the value of the product.
Growth Hacking’s Upward Spiral Of Value
Growth hacking is all about creating an upward spiral of value. You start with the initial
product, then you promote. The more the product is used, the more it is promoted by its
actual users. The more the people use the product, the more valuable it becomes, and the
more people promote it through sheer usage, and so forth.
The more people use Facebook, the more likely their friends, co-workers and associates
will also create accounts, and the more likely people will generate content. See the
sustainable upward growth spiral?
The Mechanics of The Growth Hacking Growth Spiral
The process begins with product awareness which often leads to product use. The more
users engage with the product, the more opportunities there are to share the product sign
up page link. This setup leads to even more awareness that bring about more internal
sharing and increased use which then boils down to product promotion.
Keep in mind that the people behind the platform are not the only winners. Growth
hackings setup actually produces a win-win situation. Here are two examples.
Airbnb
This shared lodging company used a mobile app to blow up quickly early on. Indeed,
airbnb’s user base blew u p because it enabled people to easily advertise on Craigslist
through a simplified link. Using this feature creates a win-win situation. The system wins
because it’s able to recruit more lessors and landlords more easily. Lessors win because
they are able to publicize their available housing units on Airbnb with just a few clicks
and keystrokes. End users win because they only need to check Craigslist and other online
resources to get a wide range of cheaper lodging options. Classified advertising sites like
Craigslist also win because they get listing content. Everybody wins.
Groupon
This group buying website blew up very quickly because people shared its special
discounted deals on their social media accounts. Keep in mind that they’re not only
sharing based on purely altruistic reasons. Groupon is set up in such a way that a certain
number of people have to sign up for the deal for its discount to become operative.
Accordingly, the more aggressive people g e t about taking advantage of a particular deal,
the higher the likelihood that they will get the deal that they’re looking for. This built-in
promotion incentive pushed people to go all out in promoting particular Groupon deals.
They win because when their friends get discounts by signing up, they get a discount as
well. The merchants win because they increase their local business’ overall awareness.
Sure, they’re paying a bit of a premium by offering discounts, but they get to spread the
word regarding their local business.
Make no mistake about it, Groupon creates a win-win situation for all the players
involved.
The two seminal examples above highlight how engineering ‘virality’ into a service or
product’s design enables it to not only market itself but grow its user base or grow its
overall value to its end users as well.
Chapter 4
How To Create a Compelling Product Or Offer
As a growth hacker, your first job in applying growth hacking principles is to create a
compelling product. This is crucial, because your product must promote itself. Whether
the product takes the form of a blog, website, software product, or an online-hosted
software solution service, the steps are the same.
Consumer Intelligence Is Crucial
To paraphrase the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu: “Never fight a battle that you know
you’re going to lose.” In other words, a little bit of advanced intelligence can go a long
way. Don’t get so excited about your idea that you waste your hard-earned money coming
up with a ‘hot’ concept only to market a product that nobody wants. I know that this
sounds ridiculous, but it happens all the time.
Again, as I’ve mentioned previously, the old idea of “build it and it will come” simply
doesn’t work. While it makes for a great plot line for an all-American baseball movie, it’s
a lousy idea when it comes to business, especially an online business.
You need to pay attention to your target customers. Ask yourself the following questions:
What do they really want? What problems are they trying to solve? How do my
competitors answer my target audience’s needs?
Instead of creating a product and building a market around it, focus more on identifying an
existing market with identifiable needs, and build a product around that market. There are
several ways to do this.
Personally, I prefer blogging.
You create a blog to gather information. This blog simply features overview articles
regarding a set of problems that your target customers have.
At this stage of the game, you really don’t have a clear idea about the parameters of the
problem. You are simply trying to ask the right questions instead of fixating on a specific
answer. Generally speaking, you just know that a particular audience group share certain
issues and have certain needs.
Accordingly, you blog about those problems and you publicize your blog posts by
reaching out to forums where your target audience hangs out. You can also post comments
or reach out to other blogs that cater to the same target audience.
You can also go to Twitter, and find influential leaders who focus on your target audience.
There’s just so many ways on how you can slice and dice the customer intelligence
problem. You can even try video comments section at YouTube. You can try Google plus
communities, or Facebook groups or pages. What’s important is that you spread your
blog’s content to online areas where your target audience is hanging out. Of course, these
content sharing pages have links that direct you back to your blog.
It’s important that you have the right perspective about your blog. You should view your
blog as a central frame of reference for feedback at this stage.
At this point in time, you’re just simply taking shots in the dark. You know that you want
to solve a problem, but you don’t know which. Similarly, you don’t know the exact way
on how to solve it. You’re simply doing market research. By putting together a blog, at the
very least, you have a central ‘clearing house for information’ where your target audience
members can click to. Consequently, you’ll be able to monitor their online behavior for
further interaction once they go to your blog.
What Are Your Objectives?
Your objectives should be four-fold. With your blog, you’re trying to detect your target
audience members’ needs. What kind of problems do they have? What are they trying to
solve? What kind of issues are they facing consistently?
Secondly, you’re trying to validate solutions. This is where your blog post comes in really
handy, because once you’ve drawn them into your post, you can already start throwing out
possible solutions. It’s really important to use this as a two-way dialogue. The worst thing
that you can do is to simply assume that you have the answers and impose them on your
audience members. That’s not going to pan out well.
You should have a more open-minded approach. You should ask for a consultative or
collaborative problem-solving dialogue with your audience members. Simply jumping to
conclusions and claiming that you’ve found the answers will not do the trick. It can just
lead to you wasting your time and investment providing solutions that don’t have a
market, or have a very limited market.
The better approach is to interact with your audience members over a long period of time
to step through possible solutions to their issues. The more audience members you keep in
the loop, and the more feedback points you gather, the higher the chances that your proof
of concept actually has a market.
Up until this point, I’m talking about building a blog. This process, however, can also
apply to a software product or a physical product. It’s all about working with your target
audience members and factoring in their feedback so you can come up with a better
solution - in this case, a better blog or website.
Don’t just take your audience’s word: Use action-based validation
Validate solutions based on your audience members’ specific feedback, and most
importantly, their behavior. The problem with people is that they often say one thing, but
their behavior completely says otherwise.
Also, pay attention to your traffic patterns. When you talk about certain solutions, do these
posts attract a lot of traffic? Do visitors stay and click on internal links? These are
indicators of interest. At the same time, do people share your blog posts about certain
solutions on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter? Do they also talk about other
solutions related to your chosen topic?
By paying attention to both direct customer feedback as well as customer behavior, you
can get a clearer picture of what kind of solution your target customers prefer. This is the
best way to validate your efforts.
Find your competitors’ solutions
The next step is to find competing blogs, or software products and detect ‘industry
standards.’ For example, if you have a ‘revolutionary’ blogging software in mind, be on
the look out for competing products that help customers blog more efficiently. Try to find
as many different products as you can. What features do they all have in common? The
fact that these features are present across the board means that there is a standard demand
for these features.
Don’t clone!
Now, what will make your product stand out is not how faithful you are to the product
specifications of your competitors. Because if you simply clone what they are doing, then
you won’t get very far. If you don’t have enough creativity in improving your own
product, your target customers will just go to your better known competitors instead of
dealing with you.
I hope you can see how this logic works. Detecting standard industry solutions is just the
starting point. You have to come up with points of comparison. You have to answer the
key question on your prospective customers’ minds: “Why should I do business with you
instead of a better-known brand? What makes you different?”
Get Feedback
It’s important to get as much feedback as possible about your blog, your product, or
prototype. The good news is that feedback has many forms. You can get feedback by
directly soliciting people’s comments on your blog, or third party blogs. You can also get
feedback by directly asking your newsletter subscribers. Even your social media
interactions with influential leaders in your niche can lead to a clear feedback.
I don’t wish to sound redundant, but it’s imperative to draw a line between a stated
feedback (usually comments and emails) and unstated feedback, which involves actual
traffic patterns. As I’ve mentioned previously, what people say and actually do often
diverge. Keep this divergence in mind, because if you base all your product or blog design
decisions on stated feedback, you might be misdirected, and end up developing the wrong
product.
Mix Product Design With Marketing From Day One
This is the standard growth hacking mantra. You have to implement it from Day One. This
means that everything about your blog, sales pages, product launch page, and everything
else that you use to draw targeted audience members must be about growth. Things as
basic as sales copy should have growth in mind. You must base your sales copy or the
versions of your sales copy on consumer behavior and gathered customer intelligence.
Adopt growth hacking software solutions
Next, we should create tools that push your service, product or blog into marketing
channels. I’ve already mentioned Airbnb as an example. Another great example are the
typical social media sharing tools such as the “like” icons and “share” buttons on
Facebook. Besides that, you can also draw people in deeper sections of your blog, and
then require them to share your blog post before they can access an internal page with
high value information.
There are many ways to skin the ‘viralization’ cat, what’s important here is to engineer
either premium content or your product features with promotions in mind.
Keep Your Customers In the Loop
This is the most tricky part. If you really want to make your customers feel invested in
what you’re doing, you need to keep them in the loop. This involves notifying them about
new products or product features and make them aware that you are really interested in
their feedback. Don’t just conduct a limited launch of the prototype and invite your initial
base of ear ly adopters. Ask them for their feedback. Let them feel that they are part of an
“exclusive club.”
Eventually, once you get enough customer intelligence regarding your product features,
and you have upgraded your product, try to run a special promotion to recruit them to
spread the word about the product.
Keep It ALL Fact-Based
It’s crucial to keep everything fact-based with whatever decisions you make about your
blog, online publishing platform, software product, or whatever it is that you’re
developing. The problem is that everybody’s got their own opinions, and opinions don’t
put food on the table - facts do. Facts don’t lie.
Accordingly, it’s really important to run a statistical analysis of the different feedback you
are getting. This practice will give you the mentality of being rational about processing
feedback based on numbers. This attitude will give you a higher chance of coming up with
a product that will become a commercial hit.
Chapter 5
How To Attract Users and Generate Leads
At this stage, you already have a prototype or a working model since you have walked
your customer base through the product design process. In the case of a blog, you already
have an initial design. In the case of a book, you already have an outline both for the book
as well as the sales page. The next step is to use this developmental stage to attract users.
The best way to do this is through launch marketing.
Simple launch marketing
Starting with your blog, reach out to your target buyers’ online communities; buy targeted
ads; run free traffic campaign by doing organic outreach; and engage in social media
marketing.
Whatever it is you’re doing, you have to find out where your online target customers are
hanging out, and engage them. One of the cheapest ways to do this is to hire a virtual
assistant from places like the Philippines, which has millions of people who speak English
as a second language. Not only are you going to tap into a large educated and highly
motivated pool of professionals, you are also guaranteed a pool of highly productive
individuals who won’t cost you an arm and a leg to hire on a freelance level.
After you’ve started your blog and successfully generated traffic, you should interact with
your visitors. Depending on how aggressive you are, this can all happen fairly quickly or it
can take a bit of time. Regardless of how you do it, stick to it, don’t expect instant results.
At all times, make sure that you’re building a mailing list with your blog.
Why Build a List?
The vast majority of people who visit your blog will never come back. This is why it’s
important to recruit people to your mailing list from Day One.
Not only is a list a powerful source of customer intelligence, it’s also a powerful source of
traffic. Whenever you have a new blog post, you only need to update your mailing list and
you’re sure that you will get a nice chunk of traffic. If you keep on repeating this, your
traffic will keep getting bigger and bigger as your mailing list grows in size as well.
Mailing lists are valuable assets; they only increase in value over time.
Once you’ve built your mailing list, the next thing to do is to build anticipation with your
list. Work closely with community members regarding your product design. If you’re
building a sales website, share your wireframes and initial designs with them. You can
offer special promotions and discounts in exchange for their feedback. You can also
identify credible influential leaders in your mailing list and get testimonials from them.
What’s important is that you send people updates, keep them in the loop, and build
anticipation for the product or publication that you’ll be launching in the future.
Incentivize Existing List Members To Pre-promote Your Product or Website By
Giving Them Incentives
By simply giving people advance discounts or free upgrades for the products that you are
going to launch, you can incentivize them to drive more traffic to your mailing list sign up
page. You need to be as aggressive as you can here, because the more people you get on
your mailing list, the more people you can find to fine-tune your product and spread the
word about it. It’s like you’re building an upward spiral. The larger your base, the wider
you reach, the higher the chance of you getting more money in the future.
Launch With Niche-focused Marketing
After you’ve done all your pre-promotions and built up your list, it’s launch time. After
the launch, start a guest posting campaign. Guest posts enable you to get direct traffic
from a blog that caters to the same target audience. Plus, guest posts give you SEO
benefits. Each guest post has a backlink that increases the amount of free traffic you get
from search engines.
Another promotional option that you can consider is buying a solo ad. Solo ads are
advertisements placed on email blasts by people who own newsletters. Look for blogs that
are in the same niche as you are, and offer to pay them to publish solo ads in their
newsletter. If you play your cards right, and you are in a fairly non-competitive niche, you
can get a tremendous amount of publicity using solo ads while paying a little amount of
money.
Another way you can spread the word regarding the product that you have launched is
through forum campaigns. Regardless of how esoteric your niche may seem, there’s
probably a forum or a sub-forum that’s dedicated to your niche. Find these forums and
engage the members in conversations regarding the problems that your blog or software
product addresses.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-shot solution. You can’t just go to a forum, drop a link,
and call it a day. There is a term for that - it’s called spamming. Don’t do it. It can screw
up your brand. The better approach is to build credibility by sharing a high quality third
party information, helping people with their specific problem, and eventually becoming a
pillar of that online community.
Once you’ve established a certain credibility and authority, then start talking about the
problems that your particular blog or software product addresses. This will eventually lead
people’s attention to subscribe to helpful posts on your blog. That’s how you attract
attention in a credibility-building way. You’re not spamming; and you’re not just hitting
people over the head with your link.
Finally, you should also launch social media campaigns. There sure are many Facebook
groups and pages that deal with the problems that your product addresses. The same
applies to Twitter, and other social media platforms.
Again, treat your social media campaigns the same way as you would treat your forum
marketing campaigns. Don’t just focus on spreading the link around. Instead, share high
quality third party information, address people’s problems, build credibility, and establish
a name for yourself.
This doesn’t happen overnight; it takes some effort. Oftentimes, you need to put in a
sustained effort over an extended period of time. Still, by becoming an acknowledged
expert or credible opinion leader in your niche, your brand will go a long way which can
immensely help the promotion of your product.
Chapter 6
How to Engage Leads
As I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, you need to engage in email marketing almost
from the get-go. In fact, I suggest that you build your squeeze page at around the same
time you register your domain name. That’s how early on in the process, you should pay
attention to email marketing; that’s how crucial it is.
How do you engage your leads? Here’s a quick run down of Email Marketing 101.
Email Marketing 101
This chapter assumes that you already have a mailing list and that you already have
subscribers. If you’ve achieved both, congratulations! The following information helps
you to engage your audience members to increase the likelihood of them behaving the
way you like them to.
Needless to say, you didn’t build your mailing list, create your product, and put up your
website just for fun . It’s not like you went through all this work putting up a list and a
blog because you had nothing better to do. Obviously, you’re doing it so you can earn
money.
Keep this in mind, this should be your paramount focus in email marketing. Earning
money requires growth. Again, the whole point of growth hacking is growth. Growth is
not just defined in terms of traffic, but also in dollars and cents. If properly implemented,
email marketing can put more dollars in your bank account.
Keep the following in mind:
Write Compelling and Relevant Headlines
When people sign up to a mailing list, chances are good that they’ve already signed up to
other mailing lists. This is going to be a problem for you because the email you send will
be competing for real estate space in your recipients’ inboxes. They’ll be getting emails
from their personal contacts and from the lists that they’ve previously signed up to. It can
be a mess.
In fact, it can be so messy that your emails fall between the cracks. Your recipients don’t
even notice that you’ve sent them an email. That’s how bad things could get.
In order to prevent this problem from happening, you need to invest time in coming up
with compelling and relevant headlines. Make sure that your headlines speak to the needs
of your target audience members.
The headlines should appeal to basic emotions like fear, guilt, regret or desire. And they
need to trigger actions from your audience. The actions that you’re expecting from them
are to read the headline in their inbox, view your email, and click on the link that directs
them to your blog or sales pitch. Try reverse engineering your competitors’ emails or try
clickbait-type headlines used by sites like Upworthy.
Publish Event-triggered Updates
In terms of email marketing, one cardinal sin that you have to avoid is to send updates
randomly. Your list members don’t want the feeling that they’re being spammed. They
don’t like unnecessary emails. Unfortunately, if you’re habitually sending emails with no
real purpose, then you’re going to burn your mailing list. What a waste. You’ve invested
all your time, effort and energy in building a list and now burn it because you keep on
sending emails randomly.
It’s essential to send out emails that are triggered by events. An example of an event that’s
worth an email update is the launch of your software’s upgraded version. Another
example is if you are offering discounts to your mailing list members.
In other words, put yourself in the shoes of your recipients. What kind of event would they
be interested in? What kind of event would they deem so important that it’s worth getting
an email for.
Keep the KLT Process In Mind
KLT stands for know-like-trust. KLT is crucial in making any kind of money online. Why?
When was the last time you bought something f rom somebody you don’t trust? I thought
so. For you to sell anything, your prospect must trust you first. But before they trust you,
they must like your solution first. For them to like your solution, they should feel that they
know enough about the problem it solves to adequately weigh different options.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to mimic the KLT process with one email. You can try. But
you’ll be sending out a very lengthy email that few people would want to read.
The better approach is to use your blog to convert visitors into leads. When you send out
emails, direct the traffic to a page that filters people based on KLT. People who are
looking for more information c an click on the link that will lead them to the page that
provides them with what they need to know. If they are ready to move along, they find a
link on this landing page to go deeper. The new landing page then workson building
enough trust to convert them into buyers. Similarly, somebody who already likes your
solution, but is not committed to buying your product yet, can directly be directed to the
second landing page.
I hope you see how all this plays out. The KLT process is crucial and it has to have an
integral role in your email marketing strategies and practices. Otherwise, you’re just
wasting your time.
Give People a Reason to Stay on Your List
When composing emails, make sure that you give people a reason to stay on your list.
Your updates should get them excited. Your email should remind them why they signed up
in the first place. They should feel that they are getting continued value f rom staying on
your list.
Give People a Reason to Convert
Whether you’re sending out a one-dollar promotion or a special discount, give people a
reason why they should convert. This can be as simple as sending out testimonial videos
of people who have used your products, and are happy with them. Whatever fits your
product offer, you need to convert people with your updates.
Reward Your Customers’ Loyalty
Finally, if you have converted people on your list and you are sending updates to a buyers
list, reward them for their loyalty. Either by giving them special discounts to upgrades for
your products, or new products, or by giving them specialized information that you only
send out to exclusive members. You can even give them ‘members only’ freebies.
Whatever that case may be, make your loyal customers feel special. Make them feel that
staying on your list is worth it.
Chapter 7
How to Track and Improve Your Product
In many ways, this is the most important chapter of this book. If you want your business to
be successful, you need to scale it up, and you need to take it to its fullest potential. You
won’t be able to scale up if you don’t resolve to track your users usage patterns right from
the start and commit to improv ing your product in a systematic and methodical way.
I’ve separated this advice into two general camps: online publications like blogs and
websites on the one hand; and products like software on the other hand. Regardless of the
particular product that you have, you need to implement the following optimization tips:
Improving Your Blog
Improving your blog is fairly straightforward. If you have installed an analytics system
like Google Analytics or Statcounter, you have to use it to identify your best performing
content. Now, you might be thinking: “My blog only gets ten visitors a day. I can’t really
say that I have content that performs the best.” Absolutely wrong. Look at the ten visits
you get and pay attention to where most of your visitors spend their time on your blog.
Those posts make up your best performing content.
While it’s true that you only have ten visitors, and you don’t have that much to work with,
you still have something to build on. Ten visitors a day is still much better than zero per
day.
Now that you’ve identified your best performing content, the next step is to create more of
this content. Blog more about those topics; come up with related topics, and blog about
them as well.
Next, you have to heavily interlink from your most successful content to your newer
related or similar content. If you play your cards right, you’ll be able to keep your visitors
longer on your website. Why is this important?
Again, growth hacking is all about engineering growth into whatever product or
publication that you’re dealing with. In this case, the more people who “dwell” on your
blog, the higher the likelihood that they will share a word about your post. This can lead to
them sharing your blog post on Facebook or Twitter or posting one of your pictures to
Pinterest. Whatever form it takes, you can piggyback on their social media accounts by
simply engaging them long enough on your website.
I’m not saying that all this is a slam dunk, all I’m saying is that the longer your visitors
stay on your website, the higher the likelihood that they will share a word of your content
on social media websites. Interlinking to related blog posts on your site is a crucial method
for increasing your site’s overall dwell time.
Tighten KLT
Since I’ve already described what KLT is, now is the time for you to use its principles to
drive more and more people to your email subscription page. While you’re probably
trying to make money from your blog by getting people to click on ads, getting visitors to
go to your email subscription page can also help boost your revenue. Again, getting
people to sign up for your mailing list enables you to turn temporary traffic into a long-
term asset that pays off over time.
You can experience significant traffic bumps by sending out updates to the members of
your mailing list. When people receive your email notifications about your new blog post,
some of them will click the link and you get instant traffic. The larger your mailing list is,
the larger the traffic bumps become.
Also, if you’re going to upgrade your software products or launch a new service with your
blog, you can use your mailing list to help market your launch. I’ve already discussed
above how launch marketing is done, and your mailing list is crucial for making all of
those tips work out.
Additionally, if you are developing a new blog or product, you can use your mailing list
for consumer intelligence. The bottom line of having a mailing list is that you’re able to
turn your relationship with your content’s community into a long-term asset.
Improving Your Launched Product
After you’ve launched your product, you can optimize it by fine-tuning integrated
promotion elements. Pay attention to how people who use your product can spread the
word about it. Are they tapping into the right social media platforms? Pay attention to
where most of your traffic is coming from. If your traffic is coming primarily from
Facebook, you might want to specialize on specific Facebook channels like groups, pages,
or even the walls of your individual users.
You have to understand that online traffic follows the Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule.
Eighty percent of your results are produced by twenty percent of your efforts. Doesn’t it
make sense then to maximize your return from the efforts you exert. The best way to do
this is to pay attention to the main source of your traffic and spend most of your time on
optimizing for that source.
Conversion Rate Optimization For Your Sales Page
The next step is to maximize the rate at which your sales page converts visitors into actual
product installers or product users. How do you do this? Well, the typical sales page can
actually be broken down into many different elements. One element is the actual content
of the text. Other elements include the graphical features of the sales pages: font types,
font sizes, colors, layouts and other visual elements.
In order to perform conversion rate optimization in a practical way, you need to use an
‘elemental’ approach. Meaning, you have to start with just one element and come up with
variations.
Try to run simple variations of just one element each time and see which variation
accounts for an increase in conversion. Then take that variation and make more
modifications of it. Find out if you were able to achieve an incremental improvement.
Once you’ve reached the point where you no longer enjoy an incremental improvement
due to slight modifications of that one element, you have to move on to the next element,
and go through the same process.
By using this elemental approach, you can, for example, take a sales page that converts an
anemic five percent, and turn it into a super conversion machine that can convert at above
fifty percent. Time is your only investment with this approach.
Conclusion
Considering how competitive the technology start-up space in the United States and
elsewhere can be, growth hacking is no longer an option. It is an absolute necessity. The
sad reality is that most inventors and entrepreneurs do not have the capital and/or expertise
they need to properly market a product from Day One. They need to adopt growth hacking
principles to give them a fighting chance.
It’s not like you’re funded by a major venture capital firm that’s located in Silicon Valley.
You probably don’t have that much capital to work with. Whether you’re a would be
blogger, a software developer, or just a person with an interesting product idea, maximize
your existing resources by investing in growth hacking.
The best thing about growth hacking is that by using a growth-focused strategy, you build
growth into the very DNA of your product. In this way, you are able to maximize your
product or blog’s adoption while trimming down your expenses.