So What is Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and the Blockchain? The Best Explanation for the Average Person.

Once you get past the opening comments, this becomes one of the best explainations of money, bitcoin, cryptocurrency and the blockchain.

Who Are the (Potential) Growth Hackers in Your Neighborhood?

I imagine that, within the growth hacker community, there's a general understanding of what we mean by growth hacking.  It would be my hope that, overall, we all speak the same language.  But, when terms like growth hacker marketing, bootstrapping and lean make it into the lexicon of business speak, does our common language and understanding become misunderstood buzz phrases?

There was a recent study released from Local Search Insider that caught my eye.  Study: SMB Growth Depends on New Advertising and Marketing Strategies.  The study reflects the optimism of SMB's for the next year and it's certainly good to see that business owners are thinking about growth again.  But That got me thinking about the idea of growth as Growth Hackers think about it and, in turn, how SMB owners focused on growth think or understand growth hacker marketing.  With all the information you can find online about growth hacking, what's the likelihood of SMBs trying to put square pegs into round holes as a result of confusion or misunderstandings?

According to a recent poll conducted by the National Small Business Association (NSBA), 72% of SMBs are somewhat or very confident in the financial future of their companies and 51% of SMBs pointed to new advertising and marketing strategies as the primary growth strategy to be used in the next 12 months. 

When we, as a growth hacker community, address growth, we understand that growth can have very specific and different meaning as well as having associated benchmarks and KPIs used to measure that growth.  Without these benchmarks and KPIs, what's the growth target you're aiming for?

We also understand that growth is influenced by the stage a business is in.  When defining that stage of a business, I use the phase approach as spelled out in Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mars.

Now, within the context of the above study, it looks like this is probably mostly focused on brick and mortars.  But there are a few things about the study that made me think about the connection between how we can think about traditional brick and mortar marketing and growth hacker marketing.

First off, the study does not say that the SMBs surveyed were only brick and mortars so I don't know if I can assume that.  The study also covers how the surveyed SMBs were looking at their website, adding more ecommerce and other areas of digital marketing as important "growth channels".  Well, there was the term that triggered this post for me.  When an SMB gets into digital and "growth channels", even a brick and mortar, now they're speaking our language and growth hack marketers can become an asset to them.

If SMBs, including brick and mortars, are looking at using more digital marketing and digital advertising as growth channels in the year ahead, they can certainly benefit from learning about and understanding all the same growth hack marketing principles that a SaaS, mobile app business or others that are usually thought of when we're talking about growth hacking.

When a brick and mortar SMB begins looking at digital marketing or adding ecommerce to their website as a desired channel to generate "growth", it would make sense to me to have the same conversation about funnel and conversion optimisation, goal flow optimisation and analytics that I would with any other business that uses growth hacker marketing effectively.

So, if the above study is correct and SMBs are looking for their traction channels to generate growth, 2015 would be a good year for those of us in the growth hack marketing community begin to have those conversations with them, invite them to our Meet-Ups and generally include them.

After-all, it's the businesses in our communities that shape the places we live.  Have a thriving local economy and community and it's very likely that it will also be a place that will attract and retain talent that creates a dynamic start-up community.  We see that here in Minneapolis. By working to support a diverse local economy, we have a better chance in making our city a good place to live for talent in the tech community and keeping them here, as long as they don't mind the winters.

Marketing Mind Hack and Colour My World

If you're old enough to pick out the song reference in the blog title, then congratulations, you're old like me. But at least you
also recognize good music with you hear it.

This post is a bit outside of the more common topics of growth hacker marketing or lean start-ups, but I found a post from the youzine blog that was interesting and something that's certainly worth thinking about when developing a start-up and branding.

In their blog post The Science of Color and Why Twitter is Blue makes a very good point, most of the brand logos you know today did not happen casually, there's a great deal of thought and even human psychology that comes into play.  So why not use the science behind color to do a little human psychology hack of your own while working on your brand?

There's also an interesting infographic from The Logo Company in their blog post The Psychology of Color in Logo Design.

We probably don't need to into much explanation here and the infographic does a great job of doing that.  I do think it's important to keep in mind that Growth Hacking is about bringing a product or service to market that fits and that fit needs to be thought about from the very beginning.  Just as marketing and product development need to work in parallel, this should also to branding.  So thinking about the psychology of color becomes very relevant. 

From my own personal observation of the infographic, I find it rather ironic that Kmart would fall into the "excitement, youthful and bold" category as my experience is that Kmart is pretty much none of those things.  Now, maybe that wasn't the case 30+ years ago.  I do remember fondly, as a child, the excitement as the announcement would come over the PA system to announce a new blue light special.  It was always a race through the store to find it.  I never purchased anything since I was a young kid, but it was youthful and exciting. 

Maybe this is a case of public perception not matching the best of intention branding.  But, in the end, public perception is what matters.  So when thinking about your brand identity, it's important that your PMF applies to your branding as well. 

Happy hacking and see you in the next post.