Name: Growth Hacker Marketing
Rating: 4.2 (102 reviews)
Author: Ryan Holiday

What’s in it for me? Reach customers easily, effectively and cheaply through growth hacking.

While the business world obsesses over the latest marketing buzzwords, from big data to virality to social media, they’re overlooking the most basic question: “How can I get more customers?”

A business may want its product to “go viral,” for example, yet still rely on old-school marketing approaches to get there. The truth is, if you want more customers, you have to re-evaluate every part of your company, not just your marketing strategy.

That’s what Growth Hacker Marketing is all about. To successfully market today, you need to understand that the product itself is the best way to capture new customers.

With that in mind, these blinks explain how companies like Dropbox, Instagram, Twitter and Groupon all used cheap and easy growth-hacking techniques to grow exponentially.

After reading these blinks, you’ll know

how Dropbox created serious buzz without a big launch party;
why you shouldn’t consider “everybody” as your target market; and
how the author used growth hacker marketing techniques to sell this book.

Growth hacking is a new, low-budget form of marketing aimed at rapid growth.

Today’s top internet companies, like Dropbox and Groupon, are now household names, but how did they build up their brands so quickly?

Instead of taking the traditional approach to marketing and buying huge billboards and newspaper ads, these companies used growth hacker marketing, a low-budget approach which differs from conventional marketing.

For instance, while traditional marketers ask, “How can I get customers?”, growth hackers use technology to answer that question, tracking user behavior and adjusting products accordingly.

Consequently, this new approach requires growth hackers to work on products, breaking down the division between marketing and product development – and in the process, redefining marketing.

Because for today’s start-ups, marketing is no longer about using big budgets to help big companies secure a one-percent annual growth rate; rather, it’s about using a small budget to help a small upstart become the next big thing.

After all, most start-ups can’t pay for traditional mass media marketing campaigns. So to attract a massive customer base, they have to get creative. And that’s why Instagram, Dropbox and Twitter have all used growth-hacker techniques to reach millions of users.

It’s also important to note that growth hacking aims to achieve rapid growth by continually improving the product. This is not the case for more traditional approaches; for traditional marketers, the most important stage occurs before a product is launched, when marketers build up “buzz.”

But growth hackers don’t have to launch a product by throwing a party and inviting celebrities. For them, the most important stage occurs after the launch, when they get busy measuring everything they can (from click rates to Facebook “likes”) and applying what they’ve learned to improve the product, with the aim of boosting growth.

And since these start-ups aren’t developing consumer goods like laundry detergent, the products don’t have to be perfect at launch, but can be optimized over time.

If you’re interested in trying growth hacking for yourself, press on! The next blinks will describe four steps you can take to growth hack your product.

Targeting the right group of people is the most effective growth strategy for a start-up.

The next step of growth hacking is about creating customer awareness around your product. Because, after all, even the best product in the world won’t be successful if people don’t know it exists.

For instance, before he co-founded Reddit, entrepreneur Aaron Swartz created a collaborative encyclopedia (similar to later-launched Wikipedia) and WatchDog.net (similar to Change.org). Although both were great ideas, they failed because Swartz didn’t get enough attention for them.

The fourth step of growth hacking focuses on improving your product to retain customers.

Too many marketers stop once they’ve attracted customers to their product. “Job done!” they say.

But with this kind of mind-set, it’s only a matter of time before you start losing unsatisfied customers. If you want to achieve sustainable, long-term growth, you have to focus on keeping your customers around after you’ve won them over.

The author effectively used growth-hacker marketing to promote this book!

Need proof that growth hacking actually works? The author used these very techniques to launch and promote his book!

He started by “testing” his book idea. So instead of capping months of hard work with a big hardcover book launch, the author wrote an article about growth hacking for the business magazine Fast Company.

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