Is “Growth Hacking” a Viable Strategy With Actual Tactics That Make Sense, Or Is It All Platitudes?

in #marketing6 years ago

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IN HERE: We’re looking at the advice of the leading Growth Marketer - Sean Ellis - as told in conversation w/ Kevin Rose on a podcast episode. Is this stuff useful and valuable or is it a bunch of platitudinal bullshit?

To answer the question up front — Growth Hacking is super legitimate, but potentially misleading and platitude-y if you only glance at the idea.

The correct definition of growth hacking is: “When you treat marketing as an important part of the entire business process for a project, from the beginning of the product development, all the way to the final marketing campaign.”

A growth hacker uses focus groups and surveys to test their initial product, waiting until they find something that performs extremely well with the target demographic. Once you achieve, as Sean Ellis mentions in the podcast, 40% of your users feeling like they’d feel “very disappointed” if they could no longer use the product, you know you are primed for viral growth.

Another way of defining Growth Hacking, as defined by Sean in the podcast, is this: “The act of refusing to release products that don’t lead to either (1) habitual use, or (2) the desire to refer the thing to others, within at least 40% of the focus group.”

This is a very consumer-first, marketing-focused, money-generating way to approach business. I don’t think it is meant to be the ultimate rule of creation for all products — many many products are not being designed to reach the largest audience or generate the most money.

Also keep in mind that some massive mainstream businesses, famously Apple, don’t approach product development this way. It’s one of the available choices, not the only choice.

When I make music, I’m not trying to reach the largest audience - I’m trying to make the best music for people with music taste similar to me.

Most musicians do that - we rarely do a broad market analysis and create a 3-5 year plan of branding/content creation. We look for inspiration, make what we love, then try to market it. That’s great, i am NOT saying that is bad.

The flip is that in other areas - like, designing a t-shirt you want to use to generate income, or planning what your patreon rewards will be, or even if you’re blogging daily on Steem with money as your main priority - in those kinds of areas, growth hacking could be super legit.

What if you refused to sell a T-shirt until you were able to get 4 out of 10 friends to genuinely, unprovokedly say that this is AWESOME and that they really want the shirt?

It might take 10 different shirt designs to get there. And then, in theory, you might sell out the shirt with ease, maybe you start running FB ads for it too and end up selling thousands of them, whereas you only expected to sell dozens. That’s growth hacking. It’s the use of marketing in the product design phase, whatever that means for you, to “hack” your way to a “10x” or even better result compared to what is reasonable without the growth hacking.

At least, the above is what I am thinking based on what Sean and Kevin say in the podcast, and some prior research (this book is good).

Growth hacking is only one tool in the marketer’s toolkit. I don’t use it much now - my music and my blog are both about personal expression, not maximizing for income or attention in the short term - but I will use it for things like the T-shirt example above as I move forward.

Since the phrase and the ideas behind it are confusing, I wanted to use this post to clarify “Growth Hacking” for my audience. What do you think? Can you imagine a way to use growth hacking for your own work?

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Marketing is the beginning and ends of every business organization

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