Ryan Holiday in Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising Growth Hacker Marketing [Speed Summary]
Author: Ryan HolidayPublisher:
Profile BooksPublication Date: 20
It’s a case of mistaken identity.
“You may think you’re a marketer,” says growth hacker marketing author Ryan Holiday in his new book Growth Hacker Marketing, “but you’re just a ‘hacker’ who is trying to get people to buy things they don’t need or can’t afford.”
What is a growth hacker?
The term ‘growth hacker‘, popularized by Sean Ellis, the founder of an internet startup called Qualaroo. He first used it when describing his job title at another company he founded – The Startup Factory.
A growth hacker, says Ellis (and many others would agree), is a person whose true north is growth. Their quest is to increase the conversion of visitors into paying customers. To accomplish this, one might experiment with changes in design, copywriting, calls-to-action, pricing or other variables to optimize a web page until it converts better.
Unlike traditional marketers who tend to think only about short-term sales, a growth hacker always thinks about new ways to acquire customers and grow the business through a long term scope.
Traditional marketing techniques are starting to become a thing of the past, with Growth Hacking being the future of marketing.
But not everyone agrees with Ellis’ definition. Many people have insisted on giving it their own twist:
We’ve been drowning in brand jargon – brand fit, brand awareness, brand recall, brand lift. Marketers must talk business, not brand. We need to let go of vanity metrics, focus on growth, and harness the power of evidence.
How to Become a Growth Hacker
This is where we’ll list all the points and summarise Growth Hacker Marketing as much as possible.
Product-Market-Fit is where growth hacking begins.
Product-Market Fit is the first step in Growth Hacking. It’s where a product meets an untapped market. Not just any old market, but one that’s ready to buy. When a company finds a Product-Market fit, it has found something unique and magical happens: suddenly, people are buying your product. You also have the chance to learn from early adopters so you can improve your product.
Early adopters make growth hackers successful: they find ways to get more people to care about their products.
Airbnb went through several rounds of iterations before founding a solution to their problems. Then once they were able to find product-market fit, they started looking at new ways to expand their growth.
Find your “minimum viable product” and start improving based on customer input.
Find your Growth Hack
Your Growth Hack is finding a new and innovative way of getting people to feel the emotional trigger that makes them want your product.
Examples include an invite-only feature, a celebrity endorsement, or a giveaway. For example, Dropbox utilized invite-only and had a waiting list of 5,000-75,000.
Another great growth hack was when Reddit created 100s of fake profiles on their site to make it look more popular than it was.
It’s about putting something so valuable in front of people that they want your product because it makes them feel good to have it—a unique feeling of excitement for early adopters. If you can make people think that way, they’ll tell their friends. Your growth will snowball out of control, and before you know it, you’re a success story in the making.
Go Viral
The goal is for a marketing strategy to spread itself without further effort on either the marketer or the customer. It’s when what you’re giving away is so valuable that people pass it on to their friends and family because they want others to have what they’ve got.
You can make something go viral by offering extraordinary value.
You have to give people something valuable, then remove the obstacles stopping them from doing something with it.
Tim Ferriss offers the reader a book and tools to help one get out of their comfort zone for just $4. Of course, what most marketers would do is charge $14 or even more! But because Tim offered his book for less than the cost of a large latte at Starbucks, he got his viral growth hack. He used a “freemium” to offer something free and later let people pay to get premium features or better versions.
Get Your Free Word-of-Mouth
If you can create something truly unique that makes people feel good and then make it easy for people to share it, then you’ll have a powerful viral growth hack!
Make your product so good that people admire it and discuss its greatness with their friends. Do everything in your power to get free word-of-mouth marketing. Nothing is more powerful than getting someone else’s opinion about something they love.
When you find something that gets talked about online, it’s a Self-perpetuating Marketing Machine (SMM) that’ll grow exponentially.
Client Retention and optimization
Once you find a product-market fit and SMM, then spend time on retention. It’s one of the only ways you’ll make money in the long haul – I like to call it the growth machine.
You have to optimize every aspect of your product, from design to copy, to get more people using it more often, and then figure out new ways to engage them over and over again.
It’s preferable to bring out new features that help your existing customers than to go out and prospect for new ones.
It’s shown that a 5% improvement in client retention may result in a 30% revenue gain. 60-70 per cent of sales are to current users. Individuals who have been using your product from the start are way more likely to affect your revenue positively.
Never forget about your existing user base.
Build an email list.
If you’ve read many books about growth hacking, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Email is still the most powerful marketing tool for businesses.
With an email list, you can constantly market to your prospect in the future. In addition, you can run a campaign to get new people to sign up for the list.
Promote something that absolutely nobody is going to want to miss:
- An early-bird offer.
- Exclusive content you won’t be released elsewhere.
- Some inside scoop.
An email list also allows you to send announcements about future products or events related to your product or service.
Don’t be fed into the idea of emails being “dead” because that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Growth Hacker Marketing: Review
Money didn’t interest me. It’s when something spreads like wildfire, affecting millions in days. That captivated me.
Ryan Holiday shows how a company can fly high with such a simple strategy.
By thinking outside the box and using low-cost techniques, your business will not only grow but also thrive!
The book reveals that growth hacking is neither secretive nor exclusive to big companies. Instead, mass product adoption is what matters for any single company or startup.
Who would I recommend the Growth Hacker Marketing?
If you’re a startup owner, blogger or individual with an idea to build your business, then this book is for you. As you read through the book, you’ll get a real-life example of how this culture has developed into something of high demand.
Ryan gives all these examples in a language that is easy to understand and apply to your own business or company.
You will find this book helpful if you are new to blogging and wish to build up trust.
You can get the Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday in paperback and Kindle versions on Amazon.
Rating 4/5