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.