My pick: Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
Approximate read time: 12 minutes
Approximate read time: 12 minutes
This is What a Killer Marketer Skill Stacking Road Map Looks Like
“You want to find an outlaw, hire an outlaw. You want to find a Dunkin' Donuts, call a cop.”– Leonard Smalls, Raising Arizona
During the Vietnam War, the United States upped its Special Operations Forces game to combat the North Vietnamese-backed communist insurgency in South Vietnam. In 1964, MACV-SOG was established by the United States to conduct covert unconventional warfare in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Included in its ranks were personnel from the US Army Special Forces, US Marine Force Recon, US Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a brand spanking new unit, the US Navy SEALs.
The SEALs were particularly effective at combating the Viet Cong. Trained specifically for anti-guerilla and guerilla warfare, SEALs operated close to their targets. They brought a personal war to the enemy, on the enemy’s turf. Their small numbers made them highly mobile, and enabled them to learn and adapt quickly. Their operations were precise and effective, delivering terror to an enemy that relied on terror as a tactic. Feared and recognized as extraordinary warriors, the VC called them the “men with green faces.” Among the most decorated units for their size, their kill ratio during the war is estimated as high as 200:1.
Unconfined by convention, the SEALs were able to accomplish what their regular military colleagues could not. Intimate proximity to the enemy granted actionable intelligence, facilitating adaptation and disruption in real-time, with measurable results. They were lasers in the jungle, surgical precision in stark contrast to the ineffectual bombing campaigns carried out for 10 years in the country.
What could a company learn from SEALs in Vietnam with regard to marketing? Precision customer targeting and rapid adaptation is a start… Hell, their brand went more viral than Dengue Fever- and that was in the middle of the jungle. Oftentimes it’s people outside of the sphere of authority that find a better way to do the work. Sometimes it just takes a new perspective, a new way of looking at an old way of doing things.
The role of marketing in business has historically been a compartmentalized one. Its function came at the conclusion of a development cycle. Its purpose- to find the customers wherever they might be. The traditional marketing model is familiar: A finished product is handed off to marketing, who creates marketing, PR, and advertising campaigns timed for product launch for a product essentially developed in a vacuum, and sales happen or don’t, for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s positioning, maybe it’s the market. Maybe it’s just a bad product. The response in any case is usually to throw more money into marketing.
The traditional marketing model makes finding customers expensive, while offering uncertain returns for the efforts. A lot of money is spent to blister the landscape in hopes of hitting customers, based on an estimate of where the customers are, and often too much faith that the product is worth buying. It’s inefficient, outsourced carpet-bombing, and it’s crazy. Companies have been operating on crazy for years.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was coders in the startup community that found a better way of marketing- one that literally turned traditional marketing on its head to create explosive growth for companies like Dropbox, Uber, Groupon, AppSumo, and Instagram. What’s more, they did it in a very short time, and they did it cheap.
Growth hacking is more than a new way of marketing. It’s a mindset- a way of thinking, and one that can be applied to any business. Rather than focusing on unmeasurable abstractions like branding, and casting a wide net for an audience by way of bought advertising through traditional media platforms, growth hacking is ROI and metric driven, utilizing low-cost alternatives like social media, viral marketing, and super-targeted advertising.
Rather than treating marketing as a separate function, it’s designed into the business model from day one. Regardless of the product or service, whatever the age or size of the company, the process is the same:
1. Merge marketing with product development
2. Pull the customers in
3. Go viral
4. Retain and optimize
2. Pull the customers in
3. Go viral
4. Retain and optimize
Merge Marketing with Product Development
By fusing marketing into product development, the business model is geared to generate explosive reactions within a very tight window, with little or no money, from the first people who see the product. The goal: product/market fit (PMF)- a good product, in the right market, that satisfies a compelling need. For early customers, the most efficient way of finding PMF is with a minimum viable product (MVP)- a product that has the bare minimum features based on customer feedback. The end goal is to have customers and product in perfect sync.
“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…marketing as we know it is a waste of time without PMF.”
Growth hackers conduct rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to learn from customers themselves- gaining feedback to iterate quickly and design a product that is irresistibly sexy for early-stage growth, while learning how to tune the business into a growth machine. Rather than desperately looking for customers for the product they have, they build the product customers want. Turns out, if you ask customers what they want they’re happy to tell you.
Talking to influencers, innovators, and the best candidates for actual users that can be found yields valuable information that might not even occur to the founders confined to the four walls of an office. A well-designed survey is ridiculously effective for this. Tools like Wufoo, SurveyMonkey, Qualaroo, and Google Docs, make it easy to survey customers about their experience- what they love, what they’d change, what brought them to the product, if they’d recommend it to someone else- anything that gets the business closer to product/market fit. Services like Google, Optimizely, and KISSmetrics allow you to see how users are engaging with your site, giving insight into their behavior and how effective the site is as a touch point. Even if customers don’t tell you what they want, they can often show you.
Pull Them In
Even amazing products are dead in the water if no one knows about them. People probably aren’t actively searching for your bitchin’ product that you just released if you haven’t let them know you’re there. They’re drinking a cup of coffee and going about their day. You’ve got to get their attention or you’re lost in the noise- or worse, invisible and non-existent.
Customers have to be pulled in. We’re not looking to pull everybody in, only the right people. Maybe it’s a thousand, maybe a hundred. If we did our job finding product/market fit, we only need to target the few, those who will make or break the new product, even if it means finding them one-by-one.
We’re not just going after sales, but targeting in a calculated way to stack the cards in our favor. The customers we get early become the market influencers- the trendsetters, advocates, and evangelists. We reach out and capture the users that really dig us. That’s how the business grows, and growth hackers do it by pulling them in with a strategic opening or stunt, one that’s cheap and effective, often novel and unique, targeted only at them. A few examples from the book:
- Dropbox created buzz with an invite-only waiting list, and produced different versions of homemade demo videos for certain outlets and their specific audience, who ate them up.
- Uber offered free rides and barbecue delivery for SXSW goers.
- Amazon created a sub-domain that users could sign into, Smile.amazon.com, where a portion of the purchase was donated to a charity of the user’s choice.
Note the distinction between pulling the customers in versus building a brand. The time will come when building a brand makes sense. Right now, it’s about customer acquisition and eliminating waste. The brand will naturally follow, and why not get it for free?
Go Viral
A product will only go viral if the users find it worth spreading, and it’s conducive to spreading. They also have to be willing to do it for free. So, make it look like it isn’t a favor. Virality doesn’t happen by accident. The tools and campaigns that enable virality must be put into place as part of the design. Create incentives to share, make them feel like they’re getting something out of it. Think about it: How often do you see something on social media that your friends shared and that you in turn wanted to share? What turned you on to make you go through the effort, and what does it say about how you see the product or service?
Going viral can be engineered any number of ways. Referring several friends on Groupon can score you a freebie. If I receive an email from an iPhone, I know it- there’s a “Sent from my iPhone” signature on the message that tells me so. And chances are, you know a lot of Apple users without ever seeing any of their devices, simply from seeing an Apple sticker stuck to something they carry around. Think about what each sticker costs relative to each user compared to the cost of advertising to each user.
Retain and Optimize
Customer data is only as good as our effectiveness at making it actionable. For that, we need the right analytics- the measurements that show us how to increase things like stickiness and conversion, and mitigate churn. Vanity metrics like “total customers” tell us nothing about the value customers get from the product, or if they’re happy users. More important are the metrics that tell us things like the factors that most contribute to adoption or abandonment, or the effects on user experience of an individual feature among a new feature set.
The business grows by relentlessly repeating these cycles, constantly tweaking to optimize internally, to produce better and more profitable customers. The greatest progress doesn’t come from attracting new customers, but by being so damn good existing customers can’t stop using the service. Makes it pretty attractive to a friend, doesn’t it?
Bottom line: growth hacking gets better results in less time, for little or no cost. The current reality of an online world means businesses are not limited to television and radio, or billboards and front pages, and certainly don’t require the services of advertising, marketing, and PR firms.
With the multi-directional communication capabilities of social media and loads of online tools and services, businesses can test, track, iterate, and learn to scale, safely and inexpensively, using data received directly from the prospects and customers themselves. The effectiveness of growth hacking tactics is made even more apparent by their adoption by companies outside of the startup community that recognize it is just better marketing.
The best way to get people to buy what you’re selling? Know your target. Know everything about them. Live in their world. Then use that knowledge to reach out and touch them in the most effective way possible. If what you’re selling is early death, you know the diet of your target from the poop samples you collected from their camp. If you eat the same diet, you poop the same poops. You become impossible to track.
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Why this book is my pick
Growth Hacker Marketing is an important book for any entrepreneur, marketer, or executive, and certainly for any startup. Holiday gives a clear explanation of the complex concept of growth hacking, making it easy to understand and immediately apply. His account of using growth hacking tactics himself, both for a client’s book and his own (I recommend getting the revised and expanded edition for this), is inspiring. I recommend reading this book first, followed by Lean Analytics, The Lean Startup, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany, in no particular order.
This book is a great resource for seeing both what creative work looks like in the realm, and the skill stack of those doing the work- shedding light on the reality of what competitive advantage means within the new marketing paradigm. It still stands as the single most important book I’ve read in shaping my own career trajectory.
This book is a great resource for seeing both what creative work looks like in the realm, and the skill stack of those doing the work- shedding light on the reality of what competitive advantage means within the new marketing paradigm. It still stands as the single most important book I’ve read in shaping my own career trajectory.