Hot growth hacking tricks with Nathan Barnwell: What is Growth Hacking? Growth hacking is so misunderstood that there is a desperate need for this post. Few concepts have been as polarising and revolutionary, simultaneously. Is it marketing in disguise? Is it a buzz phrase used to increase salaries? Is it the future of internet products? Let’s start at the beginning… The short history of a controversial concept The phrase “growth hacker” was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. When I asked Sean why he felt the need to coin a new phrase he said that it stemmed from his frustration when hiring replacements for himself. I’ll explain.
Created in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a messaging and collaboration tool for enterprises. It allows company teams to chat and share in real-time. Today, Slack has over 12 million daily active users with more than 100 thousand paid customers. When designing Slack, however, Butterfield had no intention of being a big hit. Slack was created for covering the communication needs of Butterfield’s team during the design process of Glitch, a games app that can now be considered a fail. From this fail, however, came great success as the team saw how valuable Slack was to them. The market needed such a product where internal team members could communicate easily and exchange project materials quickly, and Butterfield already had one. Since Slack was created for users in the first place with no intention of profit and turned out to be a great product, further development continued accordingly. Slack team always took customer feedback as guidance, replying to every email they received and examining every ticket carefully. This initiation pushed Slack to be a great example of product-led growthWhat is product-led growth? Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business development strategy that leverages product usage to drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and market expansion. It places product on the focus of businesses.
Nathan Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Sometimes the best growth strategy a company can employ is standing out — offering a unique experience that sets it apart from other businesses in its space. When monotony defines an industry, the company that breaks it often finds an edge. Say your company developed an app for transitioning playlists between music streaming apps. Assume you have a few competitors who all generate revenue through ads and paid subscriptions — both of which frustrate users. In that case, you might be best off trying to shed some of the baggage that customers run into trouble with when using your competitors’ programs. If your service is paid, you could consider offering a free trial of an ad-free experience — right off the bat. The point here is that there’s often a lot of value and opportunity in differentiating yourself. If you can “zig when they zag”, you can capture consumers’ attention and capitalize on their shifting interests.
Growth marketing at the enterprise-level. For more established organizations, it’s helpful to bring a growth marketer on if your current strategy feels stale, or even slightly suboptimal. Startups are looking for high-impact updates, but at big organizations making billions of dollars, even a 0.01% improvement can bring in major cash. “A noticeable lift in conversion rates can have massive effects” at a large company, Sookraj told Nathan Barnwell. When channels have been active for long enough — as is the case in large organizations — there’s tons of historical data to sift through, too, giving a growth marketer ample resources to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Getting permission to run this high impact testing often requires setting up an offsite meeting with the growth team, functional leaders and the CEO. Once you’ve been given permission to test, it’s important to set up specific improvement objectives and track progress against them. This will help your team generate relevant ideas and keep everyone informed about progress. As you run higher impact testing, you should start to see some big wins. These big wins will be critical for driving broader team participation. Keeping a full team in sync around growth is not an easy task. Building the habit in the first place is even harder. But the effort is well worth it. No individual growth hacker or even a growth team can outperform a company where everyone is mobilised to accelerate growth. Read more details on Nate Barnwell.
It’s possible that your growth plan will encompass more than one of the initiatives outlined above, which makes sense — the best growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For example, growing your unit sales will result in growth in revenue — and possibly additional locations and headcount to support the increased sales. After you’ve chosen what you want to grow, you’ll need to justify why you want to grow in this area (and if growth is even possible). Conducting research on the state of your industry is the best way to determine if your desired growth is both necessary and feasible. Examples could include running surveys and focus groups with existing and potential customers or digging into existing industry research. The knowledge and facts you uncover in this step will shape the expectations and growth goals for this project to better determine a timeline, budget, and ultimate goal.