Growth-hacker marketing is a whole genre within marketing – and now it’s a book by Ryan Holiday, who attempts to give you the low-down on what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Holiday asserts that growth-hacking is more of a mindset than a toolkit – and goes into an overview of key concepts in his estimation of Growth-hacking:
- The old way of marketing is dying
- Growth-hacking includes changing the product even until explosive growth is acheived.
- Focus on what users want and care about
- Growth-hackers focus on influencers, and early adopters to get their word out
- & Create virality methodically through incentivized sharing and ultra-targeted campaigns
- Growth-hacking is about maximizing ROI – focus on current customers with new offerings with a 60-70% greater chance of selling to them.
I personally can’t help but think that some of this is a one-sided approach to growth-hacker marketing – because, I do growth-hacking for service based companies and believe that different methods and approaches can be used for different niches. And yes… I do feel like the toolbox has a lot more to do with growth-hacker marketing than someone giving a broad-strokes overview and wanting it to last longer than a year would want to go into.
So much of what growth-hacking is involves automation, and finding really targeted ways to get at influencers and make things happen – which involve mindset AND very specific application of tools.
That being said… these things are crucial:
Targeting a small number of influential people makes a ton of sense in a world where these people have a percentage of the clout that media companies (and those they deemed worthy) formerly occupied more than anyone. Social media has broken open this sacred grail for all to take part in – by whatever means they can attain that influence.
Make your thing easy to share and tell people to share. If you can get a chain going – a viable reason for one customer to share, and a valuable enough reason (emotional, humorous, value) for the next person to share as well, you’re on the verge of virality.
It’s all about incentives – give people an incentive and a specific thing they can do to get that incentive. Give them a $10 credit if they simply share your link and someone buy through the link – and so on and so forth.
All together Ryan Holiday’s Growth Hacker Marketing was a great read, even though I don’t think it will be the definitive book on Growth Hacking per say.
