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. 

Customer Retention - Are You Missing this Vital Element of Growth?

The term "Growth Hacking" or Growth Hacker Marketing itself suggests that growth is a primary goal, or to use a little nerd speak, we could say it's a prime directive.

But growth takes place in many ways depending on the stage a business is in.  Growth can take place in a long established brand just the same as it can in a start-up.  Growth can also take many forms, depending on what the team has determined to be the goal.

Growth is measured in users, customers, revenue and several other ways that can demonstrate movement in the right direction and traction.  While revenue may the be the life blood of a business in the eyes of many people, I would suggest that traction is the oxygen.

But to often, way to often, growth is equated to acquisition.  Acquisition of customers, users, downloads, signups or whatever it may be. Marketing teams can become so focused on acquiring new customers that customer retention can get overlooked.

When this happens, customer acquisition begins to work in opposition to growth and you become the little mouse on the wheel above (courtesy of www.animateit.net).

"If you are focused on profit, Customer Retention will boost your profits. 

According to research by Bain&Co, just a 5% improvement 

in your retention can boost your profits by anywhere from 25% to 125%."

In Growth Hacker Marketing, we should be thinking about customer retention and the potential lifetime value of a customer from the very beginning.  A customer, mind you, that you've worked hard to attain and probably spent money to gain.

I think about a primary term used in Growth Hacker marketing, Product/Market Fit.  Have you really achieved PMF if your product or offering can get new users or customers but can't retain them?  If you have high churn rates, you're leaking customers as quickly as your acquiring them.  If that's the case, it sounds antithetical for marketing teams to have meetings about the next "viral" marketing strategy. No, it doesn't sound antithetical, it is antithetical.  How can you attain viral growth if you lose users at the rate you gain them?

The churn rate or fixing the churn rate should be sending the entire team back to the drawing board to address the problem before the word acquisition is muttered again because something suggests that you don't have PMF.  Hopefully this can be discovered while you're in still in your testing your product or offering with your minimum viable product (MVP).

To me, the value of growth hacker principles and growth hacker marketing and where it distinguishes itself as a better way is that we are ok with admitting and actually seeking ways to reveal how our product or offering sucks and jumping at the chance to attack the issue to fix it.  It's not about being ok with taking a crap product to market simply because that's what we were hired to do.  It's also about the entire team collaborating and recognizing crap and fixing it as the goal of taking a great product or service to market.

In a previous blog post, I shared a recent research brief that suggests user engagement is becoming a greater focus by marketing executives.  But placing value on customers and users is not an after thought or separate thought for growth hack marketers.  Growth hackers build that into the product, offering and marketing from the start.

A few days ago, Popcorn Metrics shared a great blog post that offers 5 Customer Retention Strategies to Increase Growth that I would offer as a must read for anyone that's responsible for growth or on a team that is.

This all reminds me of a meeting I was in a few years ago with the team of a young consumer product start-up.  They were an eCommerce based business and the conversation was about marketing and their SEM spend. Through the course of the conversation, one of their team members, very casually, stated that they were aware that their eCommerce shopping cart was wonky and was probably causing some failed transactions.

After this was said, I looked around at their team for some sort of reaction, but nothing, they just went on talking about ad spends and projected budgets.  Needless to say, I was a bit shocked.  Did I just hear that right?

Now, here's were a growth hacker may think differently then a traditional marketer.  If I were there as a regular marketing consultant, I could have easily dismissed the fact that they had a broken shopping cart and just focused on getting a big ad budget out of them.  After all, website UX is not my responsibility as a marketer, right?  That's the dev team, right?  But I just can't roll that way.

When I got the chance to speak, I could not help but ask why they were even talking about an Adwords spend when they knew they had a broken shopping cart?

If the idea is to continue running search ads with a broken cart to keep building awareness while you work on it,  then go in the corner and think about that.  While it may be creating awareness, it's building awareness of a bad UX!

But here again, as I stated at the start of this post, it's so easy go myopic and focus entirely on customer or user acquisition that the obvious is missed.  A broken shopping cart is just as much a part of the conversation of growth as is an ad spend.

Check out the 5 Customer Retention Strategies to Increase Growth that I shared above and I look forward to sharing more about exploring the inner growth hacker next time.

Are Marketing Execs Starting to Thinking More Like Growth Hackers?

A new research brief came through my inbox a couple of weeks ago.  In the past I probably would've read a research brief like this and found the information interesting.  But reading this new brief now, through the lens of a Growth Hacker, I see the insights of the report a bit differently.

Pulling from this research brief called Marketing Morphing from Expense to Revenue; Measured on ROI, it

was blindingly clear that marketing executives are starting to hear the message of marketing that Growth Hackers, by the nature of who we are, hold true to.

Now, in the brief, the term ROI is used extensively and we can make a safe assumption that ROI is being measured largely by revenue, as the title suggests.  But, in the early stage of a start-up or a growth company, ROI can be associated with the milestones and objectives of the phase they're at.  I would even suggest that KPIs for an established brand or company can also be measured as an ROI as long as it moves the company towards some established growth goal with that growth goal having an impact on revenue.

So let's go through this research brief and see what it tells us as Growth Hackers.

• According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s survey of high-level marketing executives worldwide, more than 80% say they need to restructure marketing to better support the business. And 29% believe the need for change is urgent.

Yes, I think just about any Growth Hacker that's been operating outside of the traditional marketing world can agree that this change of thinking is urgent.  As Growth Hackers, we realize that if it does not drive or contribute to growth and isn't track-able and measurable, it's not something that should consume resources of staff, energy or budget.

• Marketing will increasingly be seen as more of a source of revenue. The proportion of companies where marketing is viewed as a cost center will dwindle and the number where it is seen as a driver of revenue will grow. In three to five years, survey respondents say, approximately four of five companies will classify the marketing function as a revenue driver.

The very nature of a start-up or growth stage company does not allow for anything to be a "cost center". Avoiding cost centers is pretty much the purpose of Growth Hacking.  Growth Hacking also does not view marketing as a separate center but is organically part of the organization as a whole.  Marketing is baked into the product and business from the beginning and operates in parallel with the development or engineering teams right for the start to develop a product that fits your market to where the marketing, while it may seem organic, is well planned and tested to fit the market they're shooting for.

• The customer experience is increasingly seen as a key to competitive advantage in every industry. Slightly more than one-third of marketers polled say they are responsible for managing the customer experience today. However, over the next three to five years, 75% of marketers say they will be responsible for the end-to-end experience over the customer’s lifetime.

I would bet you that if you ask any Growth Hacker or successful launch company that used Growth Hacker Marketing would tell you that customer experience is what it's all about!  When you read this finding from the research brief, you almost have to wonder what marketing executives are thinking.  The customer and growth of users is the lifeblood.  It's well stated in the Growth Hacker community that Every Failed Start-Up Has a Product, What Failed Start-Ups Don't Have is Enough Customers.  Knowing that, if your're not thinking about your customer or the customer you're trying to obtain,  what in the world ARE you thinking about?

• A marketer’s greatest achievement is an engaged customer, says the report. Because an engaged customer keeps coming back, engagement is defined most often in terms of sales and repeat sales. 63% of marketers polled say that engagement is manifested in customer renewals, retention and repeat purchases. Adding in the 15% who see engagement in terms of impact on revenue, a full 78% of marketers see it as occurring in the middle or later stages of the classic funnel. 22% view engagement in terms of love for a brand; important, but part of marketing’s legacy skill set.

Everything from the cost of customer acquisition (CPA) to the viral coefficients (K) needed for viral growth hacks to the lifetime value of a customer is dependent on the engaged customer.  A product or business without engaged users or customers is missing a big part of Growth Hacker marketing.

• 39% of marketers want new blood in the two areas of digital engagement and marketing operations and technology. A close third, and not significantly different, 38% want skills in the area of strategy and planning.

A simple response to this would be to find and hire more committed Growth Hack marketers.  Seems pretty clear to me.  Maybe the bigger message from this is that marketing executives are realizing, by seeing the success stories all around them of massively successful product launches, that there is a better but still elusive way of doing things.  Maybe we need to begin an organization like Big Brothers where we match a Growth Hack marketer with a marketing executive so the Hacker can mentor the Executive and to show them a better way in a safe and understanding environment.

When Marketing Case Studies Can Harm Your Business

Case studies are a great resource for any start-up or business that's trying to achieve traction and growth.  I will be share case studies that feature growth hack marketing often as well as other case studies to show the hidden growth hacks within.  While a case study may not specifically feature the growth hack, chances are there is a hack or two within a successful case study.

Here's my Caution Label Concerning Case Studies

Good case studies can teach us a lot and a well written case study can reveal a growth hack that we can take, learn from and replicate it to our benefit.  A good case study can provide time-saving insights to a growth hack that has already proven itself.

But, taking action and trying to replicate the overall message of the case study can only work if all the other elements of growth hack marketing and a growth hack minded team are present. Like with any recipe, you need to have all the ingredients in place to replicate the outcome.

I recently had a coffee shop meeting with an early stage tech start-up and this error soon became clear.  While I will certainly point out the credit they deserve for putting together a short list of marketing ideas that they felt could work, I soon realized that it's also important for the team behind the product to evaluate who.  Was their product and team able to execute growth hacks.

Trying to apply growth hacks without holding true to the other principles of growth hack marketing may lead the team to a failed attempt without realizing that the failure was inevitable.  Not because the hack was bad, but because the foundation was not in place.

Are you thinking like a growth hacker and are you staying true to growth hacking?  Have you applied the principles of Product Market Fit?  What are you trying to achieve by the hack and is it the right hack at the product stage you're at?  Are you looking for a hack to provide feedback to your team during a minimum viable product (MVP) stage of your product?  Are you even at that stage or aware of what it is or why you need it?

If you are looking for feedback, have you planned out how you're going to gather that feedback, measure it and evaluate it?

My fear is that many well intended product developers may take the overall idea of the case study and attempt to apply it by jumping right to the final traction phase of their business.  When failure is achieved, the tragedy is to walk away from the experience thinking the hack does not work when, in reality, the hack was not the right fit for the product or business or for the stage it's at.

I certainly don't want to imply that I'm discouraging start-up teams from going through the exercise of researching case studies and putting together a list of possible ideas.  In fact, this is exactly the approach I would encourage.  You can learn more about how to use this exercise, check out Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.  You can find the link to this book in my resources section.

Use Case Studies the Growth Hacker Way

In their book, they walk Start-Up teams through a process they call the Bullseye Framework.  No this isn't something you can get a Target, it's a process a collaborative process that a team can go through to identify the channels that will get them the traction they need for the stage they're at.  From the initial brainstorming sessions through ranking these channels, prioritizing them, testing them and focusing on what works and repeating the process.

So, case studies can play an important part of a traction phase for a hacker start-up, but they need to be applied within the mindset of team that is applying them using a process that can deliver the desired results.  Ironically, the desired result is not necessarily a home run on the first swing.  While this may sound a little crazy, it's important to understand that the hacker mindset is focused on failing fast to find what does and does not work and to avoid wasting time and budget on things that sound great in a case study but do not fit for you product or team.

Coming Out as a Growth Hack Marketer

Hello and welcome to my latest blog.  I've had a few blogs based on digital marketing and local marketing, but this blog will be enough of a departure from the subjects of my other blogs that I felt it deserved it own space.

My other blogs are more about strategies, techniques and news from digital marketing.  The Accidental Growth Hacker will be based on my personal observations of digital marketing, from the perspective of a Growth Hacker as well as my personal notes and thoughts on some great case studies containing some good Growth Hack Marketing lessons to learn.  But I will also touch on several other subjects and topics that do not fall within the digital marketing world.  However, Growth Hacker Marketing does call on the abilities of digital even when using hacker methods that are not classically digital.  That's because analytics and the ability to measure the impact of non-digital marketing like PR, connects the digital to the non-digital and analytics is a fundamental element of Growth Hacker Marketing in the mind of this hacker. 

Before we get into the good stuff, let me tell you how I came out of the closet.

As I thought about how I ended up identifying myself as a Marketing Growth Hacker, I realized the process was somewhat similar to my journey coming out as a gay man.

You see, Growth Hacking first appeared in the marketing world in 2010, but I stopped paying much attention to marketing buzz words awhile ago.  Even though I was curious about the term, I did little to learn more about it.

When I began doing my research about Growth Hacker Marketing, the more I read the more I discovered that there were others that looked at marketing the same way I did.  I began to realize that the way I approached marketing was similar to that of other Growth Hackers.  I was also finding it in the success stories of many start-up products and companies that are well know today.  I soon realized that, while I may say to think differently than other traditional marketers, I was not crazy and I was not a misfit marketer.  Turns out I was a growth hacker like.

That reminded me of another life journey I had.  When I was a young teen, I began to see ways that I was different than my classmates and friends.  In late 70's and early 80's during my middle school years, when school dances and other social events came around, these differences and feelings of social awkwardness were clear but I was unable to identify what the difference was.  Needless to say, the feelings and my thoughts were not something that was talked about in the mid-west in the 70's and 80's.

But, sparing you the long version of my story, I eventually found that there were many others like me and that I did fit in somewhere.  I can say the same for discovering the growth hacker in me and for the sake of my own sanity, I'm glad the way I think about marketing and the things I say in client meetings are finding more acceptance today because I'm certainly not one to refrain from speaking my mind.

So I hope you find The Accidental Growth Hacker a good read.  My intent to be helpful, informational and probably a bit controversial.  I will be sharing notes from the field, case studies, resources to my readers.  But I already know that I will not hesitate to call BS when I see it.  This will be a place to put ingrained and inefficient industry thinking aside.  Growth hackers and Growth Hacker Marketing is not the place we hold onto outdated thinking for the sake of egos and maintaining established job titles. Growth Hacker Marketing is about being willing to take chances and doing what you need to do to launch a successful product and to create a successful business. It's about finding and accelerating traction.  If it does not help a business find and gain traction, if it does not add to the growth and momentum, if it does not lend itself to being cost effective or cannot be quantified, then it's simple BS fluff.

Growth Hacker Marketing, in my opinion, is marketing in it's most holistic and purest forms of marketing.  Terms like "awareness" and "engagement" are crap terms that have no value if you cannot measure them and connect the dots between them and the traction metrics that are the life blood of a start-up or business that depends on it.

I look forward of exploring and sharing this exciting new world with you and welcome to The Accidental Growth Hacker.