Growth Hacker Marketing

Growth Hacker Marketing explains the 4-step framework today’s startups use to remove the barrier between marketing and product development, thus making the product itself the best way to get new and more customers.

Back in the day when Apple started, they would follow a simple mantra: Build a great product, and then get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

That worked in the 70s and 80s, but today, not so much. The world has become so noisy, that even the best products go unnoticed, if not marketed well.

This is why startups focus on growth hacking, a technology-based approach where marketing mechanisms are built into the product itself.

It’s cheap, it’s scalable and done right, it works incredibly well.

Growth hacking is what got Facebook a billion users, Instagram 400 million, Dropbox 300 million, and on and on goes the list.

Instead of orchestrating a perfect launch with a big hype, startups get their product out as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter if version 1 is bad, since the whole point is to make version 2 better.

Once the product is out, startups measure and track every bit of data they can, in order to then improve the product to a point where users can’t help but share it all over the place.

This approach dissolves the line between marketing and product development and usually relies on the power of the internet.

So how can you growth hack the heck out of your own product? Simple: Target the right people. It might sound obvious, but the general approach most people and companies take to marketing is to try to sell to everybody. However, this leads to a lot less sales, a lot more sales to the wrong kind of customer, and eventually, horrible feedback. Even if you manage to sell a bunch of lawn mowers to people who live in apartments in the city, what could they possibly tell you that’ll help improve your product? Nothing! Instead, just target a very small, but specific group of people who are a perfect fit. For Dropbox, they knew Digg had exactly the right kind of crowd for their service. So when Drew Houston recorded a demo video to show how Dropbox works, he inserted a bunch of easter eggs, which only the Digg community would recognize. Within 24 hours the video had 10,000 Diggs (a like on that platform) and drove hundreds of thousands of people to their site, signing up for the private beta. Only by making access to their product exclusive to their perfect target customers and catering specifically to their needs did they manage to hit critical mass for the product to get traction. So…