Stanford Webinar: Introduction to Growth Hacking

Today's featured presenter is Lynda Smith.
Lynda Smith brings over 30 years of experience in marketing, sales and
general management across a diverse set of industries, and has spent the last 20
years working in the area of high-technology products and services.
In her capacity as an SVP marketing, chief marketing officer for
a number of companies, including Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories,
Genpact, Jive, WeVideo, and Twilio, Lynda has owned the full
end-to-end marketing responsibility for the organization.
She has successfully driven product marketing, product management,
corporate marketing, field marketing, demand creation, channel marketing,
developer outreach, marketing research, and strategy development.
She's currently working as a consultant and advisor for a variety of startups,
ranging from social robotics to cloud-based development services.
She has experience in business to business, consumer and
developer platform companies.
Her global background is extensive, with hands-on work with the US, Europe, India,
China, and other major markets.
Lynda has an undergraduate degree in liberal arts from Simpson College, and
an MBA from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
She's on the faculty of Stanford University, where she serves as lecturer
in global entrepreneurial marketing in the engineering school,
and diverse programs for the Stanford Center for Professional Development.
Her passion is what is happening in this next generation of marketing,
where digital media and social networks are reshaping the discipline.
Now I'd like to turn the floor over to Lynda.
>> All right, great.
Well, fantastic to be with all of you.
And this is a really big topic.
We're not going to be able to get through every possible detail,
but I really have a goal today of being able to help you
see where this world of growth hacking is really going.
And so, we're going to go through a number of things.
I want to develop an understanding of what growth hacking is,
there's a big debate about is growth hacking marketing or not.
We're going to explore how growth hacking is and
isn't like the traditional marketing you may have experience with.
And then, I want you to gain some basics so
that you could start implementing growth hacking in your business.
Now, I'm going to tell you,
growth hacking has traditionally been really focused on online businesses.
It's natural there, it's a fit.
You'll see that as we go through.
But, I've had some experience now, even working with a hardware company,
where we've been able to take principles of growth hacking,
to really drive revenue and drive the business.
So, want to give you some perspectives on that as well.
So, we're going to be looking at growth hacking, how it's defined.
The basics of growth hacking.
We'll dive into your website, because that's the heart and
soul of the growth hacking strategy.
And then we'll get into process, testing, and tools.
So, the jury's out, is it marketing or not?
And it's really funny, because I'll get into conversations with people who
have other business cards, how to grow, growth hacker, and
get this feeling from them of, no it's not marketing.
It's something totally different.
Well, it is and it isn't.
We're going to be talking about that.
But I got to tell you, there have been some great brands with great
growth stories that all really came back down to how they implemented
these basic principles around growth hacking.
So, it started a while ago, and people will say, well,
how long has been this been around in business?
How many years have people been doing growth hacking?
Well, the reality is, it does kind of date back all the way to 1996.
Now, there was a company called Hotmail, that you may or may not be familiar with.
But they were really one of the first people who implemented
some of the core principles that we now see as a part of everyday growth hacking.
And it really came down to someone having to rethink how to do marketing
based on an absence of money to spend, so they had to get super creative.
Now, the way the Hotmail story goes down is that they were working with their VCs
and one of the VCs suggested, well,
hey, why don't you use the product itself to be able to get other people to jump on?
And so, they created a backlink.
So essentially, every time you got an email from someone with a Hotmail account,
it enabled you to click on that link, go back, and sign up for an account yourself.
So, some might say that this world of growth hacking
really started off back with Hotmail in 1996.
Probably in modern terms though,
we really relate it back to around the 2010 timeframe.
That's when the term was really coined.
And it was coined by a gentleman by the name of Sean Ellis.
And the reason he coined the term was,
he had had some great start-up experience, some great exits, and
everyone saw what this guy was doing in terms of marketing that felt so different.
And so, they would hire him to really help them get started on it.
Come in and get them off the ground.
Well, he didn't want to be there full-time.
It was time for him to move on to the next venture, and so
he needed to hire someone to step into his shoes.
And he put out there a basic resume that said, hey, looking for a VP of marketing,
looking for a chief marketing officer.
And he wasn't finding the right skills coming through when he would do
the interviews.
So he decided, all right, tired of doing this, I'm going to come up with a new term
that better describes this individual, that better describes what I need.
Henceforth, the term growth hacker was invented.
And he went out with that resume, and ended up getting the right type of people,
or the right type of job description,
and getting the right type of people on top of that.
So, what is Growth Hacking?
Well, it lives in this very interesting intersection between
the traditional discipline of marketing that we all know and product development.
And when you look at the basic Wikipedia term, which I think, a very strong
representation of this world of growth hacking, basically says it's a process,
it's data-driven, and has a lot of rapid experimentation in it.
And when you think about the difference from the traditional world of marketing,
the traditional world of marketing seems much more planned.
Especially when you get into large campaigns, the months, the weeks
that go into planning it, it's not about that rapid experimentation, necessarily.
So, I think when you really look into growth hacking, it's this discipline that
lives at a very interesting intersection, it heavily involves products, but
it's data-driven, and it also has this construct of rapid iteration.
And we're going to drive a little more into that as we proceed here.
So, when you think about the mission of a growth hacker,
it is about creating this self-perpetuating machine.
And this is largely tied to this idea of using the product itself
to grow the target audience.
And we'll talk about how that's done.
Aaron from Everlane, StumbleUpon, once again, one of the leaders in this
idea of growth hacking as a discipline, saw great success from it.
But he really is the one who came back with this idea of,
it's about self-perpetuation.
It's about getting the product itself to do the marketing for you.
Having dug into this,
having used the principles myself, this is how I look at it in terms of core tenets.
So to start off, it does have this deep tie in product.
And when we're talking about it in terms of implementation,
how people leverage the product to do this, it's dependent on virality.
going to go deeper into that as well.
It lives in analytics.
This is back to that data-driven principle.
It involves staying with the customer across the entire funnel process.
Now, I will say the trend in marketing is for
marketers to actually be more involved across the full customer lifecycle.
But here in growth hacking, the growth hacker, the leader, the head of the field
is like I own every aspect, because I've gotta make sure that that product.
Is doing what it needs to do to actually drive that growth.
It's a company culture, and it's a mindset.
Again, I'm going to give you some more details on each of these.
So let's start off with the product.
Yes, product has always been a part of the marketing discipline.
And where I have been chief marketing officer I have often had not only
product marketing but also product management as a part of my team.
But here growth hackers they have to have the product they see themselves as
the people, the person who owns the product, and
they see that product as that cheap channel for growth,
and they also see, optimizing the product as a part of their job.
So, they really take seriously that they own that product,
and when you talk about company culture, you'll see how there's a really
interesting difference there in a lot of the companies that apply growth hacking,
but product is central to what they're trying to do.
Virality, a little more on that.
Getting your products out there in such a way that it
spontaneously will drive growth really becomes a big focus.
The virality stems from it being engineered into the product itself, so
this goes back to ideas like the backlink and
we'll go through a whole list of these in product tools that are actually used.
So a growth hacker is looking every day at how do I make this go viral?
And when you think about it, just a few quick rules on virality.
First of all, rule number one is make it easy for others to spread your product.
Back links, Hotmail, we talked a little bit about that.
It's also about provoking this desire to spread the product.
To have the product must be something that everyone wants to share out, and then rule
number three is finding ways to do all of this without spending very much money.
So morality is very key to all of this, and
again the reason why the growth hacker feels they own the product,
if that product has to be pretty darn special to create that notion of morality.
Analytics, so the first day that a growth hacker gets on the job may be different
than any other position that you see.
He dives in, he or she dives in, and
really looks at what are the event based analytics that I need to understand?
What's going on with the product?
How are people using it?
How is sign-up going?
How are people going through the sign-up flow?
And then they'll sit down with anyone that touches somewhere where
they need analytics.
And really look for, how are we going to wire this product?
How are we going to wire the website?
So I get the analytics I need to drive growth into the company.
Part of the reason in analytics again,
very important across all forms of marketing.
But for the growth factor,
one it keeps them honest because he really is going through and saying,
yeah let's look at where our success track record is, what works, what didn't work.
Let's keep what worked, let's not dive any further into stuff that's not working.
It allows the growth hackers to stack right into the to do,
because every day is about experimentation.
Every day, the growth hacker is waking up, looking at the numbers and
saying what are we going to try today to initiate more growth?
It makes success repeatable, because you know what's worked and not worked and
it also allows you to somewhat predict the future.
So analytics, another one of the key thrust in growth hacking.
The funnel process again, in all marketing disciplines we have a funnel,
we're trying to drive people through that funnel.
Here the growth hacker thinks about owning all the steps.
Acquisition, activation, retention,
revenue, and then that referral, that referral that drives that virility.
So keen interest in owning everything that touches the funnel.
Company culture, now this is the piece that when I get into these discussions
with friends who say, yep, I'm the head of growth, I'm a growth hacker.
The thing that I have found that is different about their
company from other companies is, they are a power from the top down to own
anything that might get in the way of growth.
So, if you think about traditionally, marketing in an organization is a pier
to other disciplines, the engineering discipline, the customer support
discipline, the IT disciplines, G and A, all the other disciplines in the company.
And that had that CMO that had a marketing is sitting in a table
with their peers supporting in to the CEO.
What I found in the culture of companies that are truly embracing this idea of
growth hacking is the CEO has essentially told those peers, hey, you work for
me but you also work for our head of growth.
At any point in time, if our head of growth says you need to change something,
do something differently.
You've got to get out of the way and make it happen.
Because that's the person who owns the numbers.
That's the person that we've got to enable.
So there's a different level of power if you will for that head of growth.
Then you might find the head of marketing having in other companies.
And then as I said it's a mind set.
You know, it really comes down to when you talk to people who are passionate
about being a growth hacker, what they think about is hey,
my job isn't marketing as you might know it.
My job is driving growth.
My job is owning the revenue number or the use number,
and it's about doing it really fast.
Because growth has to move quickly.
So there's a different mindset that you
might find in someone that's considered themselves truly a growth hacker.
If you're hiring for this head of growth,
there are a few things that you really need to be looking for.
This person has to be passionate about data.
They have to love waking up every morning and living in the numbers, and
understanding how those numbers are shifting and changing over time.
They're super curious about everything.
They're poking at everything.
They're poking at the products.
They're poking at customer support.
They're poking on anything that might change where those numbers are going.
They're infinitely creative.
They want to try all sorts of stuff, throw it against the wall, see what sticks.
They're obsessive.
When it comes to they tried something and yeah it kind of worked but
let's try it again.
See if we can do it better.
They're constantly trying to be that experimenter out there.
And they live in the user experience.
Because the only way you're going to get people to be raving fans,
to spread that word of mouth, to drive that virality.
If they're not only people who like what you've offered, but
they care about it to actually be passionate and help you drive that growth.
So, what is different?
I'll leave that up to you to decide if you think it's a completely different
discipline or not.
But I thought this Dilbert was pretty funny.
What's your marketing strategy?
Marketing's dead.
I'm a growth hacker.
We create product and market fit.
We find scrappy ways to get the word out, and we optimize with data to grow.
What part of that isn't marketing?
It's all in the hubris.
So this gives you a little bit of an idea of the growth hacking, how it's defined,
how it may be a little bit different from what traditional marketing looks like.
But let's get into what's probably really important to you.
The basics of growth hacking.
So, I talked about the fact that
growth hackers feel like they own the whole funnel.
You saw a five step funnel that I had in the front section of our discussion today.
Here's a simplified version for the purposes of getting down to the basics.
When you think about a growth hacking funnel, because so
much of it is oriented to the website,
it starts off with getting visitors into that funnel, visitors to that website.
Then it's about activating members.
And what activate really talks about is it's taking an action
that is an indication of relationship.
Now that may be buying something, it may be signing up for
something, it may be something as simple as stepping into some type of a trial.
But it's getting that action that says,
all right, I'm interested in going further with you.
And then it's about retention.
And retention is about getting people to use that product regularly.
Or use that service regularly.
So you're looking at visitors, activation and retention.
And we're going to get deep into each of those and
some of the basic principles that growth hacker uses.
Now conversion rate relative to that funnel is something that a growth hacker
is constantly looking at.
And that conversion rate really is, again that idea of when you move through each
section of that funnel, what's going on in terms of my conversion rate from
getting people there keep activating them to actually retaining them.
And another thing that a growth hacker is constantly thinking about is, boy,
if I change something at one stage in this funnel it may have repercussions
elsewhere.
So, for example, maybe I've amplified the number of users to the top but
they're not the right users.
So my conversion rate into activation may greatly change.
Or perhaps now I've got people activating but
the way that I did it made everyone activate but I'm not retaining anyone.
So a growth hacker is looking at those conversion rates also as indications of
are my programs working to move people through that funnel?
Now a question that we often talk about,
is what is the truth about conversion rates?
What is a good conversion rate?
What should my conversion rate be?
Well, the reality is you need to know what they are for your own funnel.
And then you have to decide where you want to move them.
But if you're trying to get some idea from others maybe in a like industry for
have a like target customer, you can bind some numbers out there to start you off,
and some of those are the fact that they're just published.
People will publish the type of conversion rates that they're seeing.
You can also enter into the idea of a buddy system.
As long as there's not competition, you'll find that a lot of growth hackers
are really happy to share what numbers they're getting across that funnel.
So when you're thinking about conversion rates, you want to start with a baseline.
That can be your own baseline or
you can find someone else out there that might have that data.
So let's talk about how we actually get people moving.
Let's talk about getting visitors.
There are essentially three ways that visitors will get into your funnel.
One is the pull methodology, so they find you.
Some people call that inbound marketing, so
it's enabling people to find where you live.
There's pushing, so really going to where they are.
Some people will equate that to what we normally call outbound marketing.
And then what's a little bit different,
again coming back to the idea of growth hacking is,
how do I use the product itself to bring people to that top of the funnel.
So pull tactics, you'll find that a lot of these are content oriented.
So it's things like the blogs, guest blogs, podcasts,
videos, eBooks, Visual assets like infographics.
It's that realm of content marketing that has become so popular.
It's search engine optimization.
Super Key,
it's such a great tool because you can do it with a relatively low level of spend.
And we all know that organic search is better than paid search in terms
of the types of people that actually come and activate.
It's social media, which you are all familiar with.
And finally it's this idea of leveraging other people's audiences.
Let me give you a great example of that, when Air B&B first started,
out of their marketing efforts they were looking at, well how do we get people to
jump on board and start really working with us from an Air B&B perspective being
our customers, because it's really hard to find customers when you're starting up
what they did is was they leveraged Craigslist.
So whenever you would, in the very beginning days, you would say,
yes I would like to put my house up or my apartment or my room up on Airbnb,
they would say, well do you want us also to list it for you on Craigslist.
And people would opt in or opt out.
Well most people opted in, and the great news was.
Now you had people that had sign up to be a part of their B&B.
But you are actually using Craigslist and
network of people to advertise that you had depended available.
So they were leveraging someone else's network.
So little bit different tactic that you see in the growth casting environment.
Is this idea of leveraging other people's networks.
But for the most part getting people the top
looks a whole lot like traditional inbound marketing.
Let's talk about the push tactics, again,
will look a lot like What you see in traditional outbound marketing.
It's public relations.
It's purchased ads, ad words, display ads, social ads, retargeting.
Then come back to Promo Swaps.
It's email marketing.
It's webinars, it's contests,
it's stuff you would traditionally do in an outbound marketing environment.
Promo Swaps is an interesting one because, again,
you get this real friendship going in the growth hacker world.
And it's this idea of hey, why don't we swap tweets?
I'll tweet for you, you tweet for me.
Let's swap Facebook posts.
I'll post for you, you post for me.
We could even do something like a dedicated email swap.
But it's this idea of working with other companies to jointly promote.
Yep, you've seen that in marketing for years.
But you really see it vibrant in the growth hacking world.
And again, come back to creativity.
Remember one of the core principles here was the fact that we're looking for
ways to market that doesn't take a lot of money, that's highly creative,
that we can experiment rapidly on, and see what works.
All right, let's move into the one that I think is inherently different in
the growth hacking world from what you have traditionally seen in other worlds.
And it's this idea of in product tactics.
It's using the product itself, wiring the product itself To actually build
up that network, to build up that customer-based, to build up that parality.
So, let's look at what those are.
One of the tactics is network invitation.
How many times had you been in touch with the company and
when they come back to you and said it's hey, can we borrow you phone contacts?
Could we use your email contacts?
Could we use your social contacts to invite other people to come in and
use this service or this product.
In fact, probably most of you have touched LinkedIn, at somewhere in your career.
The way they got started was by using your email list.
They would ask you, do you mind If we sent out an offer to everyone
that's in your e-mail address book and invite them in to be a part of one gift.
So this idea of networking invitations is a big one for
being able to get people on to the product.
Social sharing, that's probably familiar with everyone.
It's making it very easy to have people get the word
out through their social network.
API Integrations, okay, this really gets at the heart of tying products together.
It's integrating your product with an existing network.
Again, as individuals you've probably experienced this.
For instance, if Spotify is something that you've used they've actually used
the Facebook Connect integration so that you can sign up, you can Facebook.
So by using other people's APIs, you can leverage their networks.
Now, there are pros and cons on that.
The pro is wow, I get this whole new network I can leverage.
The con is sometimes you'll tie your boat to someone else, and they decide okay,
we're tired of having people tie their boat to us And
they'll shut down that ability to have that integration,
but again, very product centric way to do things.
Backlinks.
We talked about this in the Hotmail example dating all
the way back to the 1990's.
By providing a link in your product that easily brings people
back to the top of the funnel, back to the web site is a way to grow that audience.
Incentive.
Dropbox has been great about this.
This idea of hey, if you get someone to sign up,
we'll give you additional storage free of charge.
So building incentives into the product that helps people grow that virality.
And then organic.
That's the best of all worlds.
Your product is so awesome, that people want to share it out So
talk about this idea of quite a bit.
So something else you need to have in your data store here is this idea of the viral
coefficent or what we also call the K value, this is where the magic happen.
What this basically says is I want to get everyone of my users,
of my customers of my people that have signed up to be a part of this network.
I want to get them to invite at least one additional person.
If they invite more than one person well,
that's awesome because now you've got virality and it's growing.
And what you're looking for Is the K value that is over 1.
Now that's not easy to do with all products or services.
Basically, there you're betting that every one of the people out there is going to
invite at least one additional person.
But even getting something northward of 50 or 0.50 is awesome.
So look at virality, look at what you can get for your K value.
So we've talked about, how do we get customers,
how do we get them to the top of the funnel?
Let's talk about activation, and
activation essentially falls into two buckets, two categories.
There are in product motivations and then, external motivations.
The in product motivations include things like, calls to action.
Getting people that once they've sign up to actually take that next
step to a great CTA.
We'll talk about CTA as we talk about your website.
Onboarding, giving a visual tour.
Twitter's done a great job of this.
People unfamiliar with the world of micro-messaging, getting them in,
giving them a guided tour of what's going on in the product.
Guided experiences.
This is idea of okay, you've done that.
Now let's handhold and get you to do why.
So it's taking people for each step of onboarding onto that product.
Gameification, who doesn't like earning a little status?
Who doesn't like getting that badge, that gold star,
not to mention the progress report?
How many times have you gotten to 80% of building a profile and
they gamify you to wanting to get 85, getting 90%.
Incentives in pricing strategy, getting to earn credits,
getting to earn special options because you've done something.
And then the idea of leaderboards where there right out there in the open and
say hey, this is how you compare with the other people that are onboarding, and
signing up.
So really getting creative in how to get people beyond just showing interest, but
actually activating, showing some level of interest in going further, and then,
on the external side, this ties back to a lot of what we've done in
the traditional world of marketing, DRIP campaigns.
So, has someone has signed up and now they haven't gone to the next step,
you remind them through other channels like email.
So activating, very key second stage in that very simplified funnel.
And then the last stage comes down to the idea of retention.
The only way this works is if you got people that are so
happy with the product that they're word of mouth for you.
They're inviting other people.
They're making it go viral.
Well that only happens if you retain them.
So, again we have two categories of retention that you typically see.
There's planned and there's organic.
So, planned is where you're taking really,
control if you will, first one is speed to value.
It's really one of the things that we look at is once we had a developer that
has signed up for an account, getting them on to the API.
We wanted to make sure that they had that instant gratification of
wow this is awesome.
Twilio was a platform that allows developers or
allows developers to bring in messaging and voice into their application.
So one of the campaigns we had was the Hello World campaign that gave them
speed to sending the first text message.
And it was amazing.
People were so excited that it actually sent a text message with their app.
Customer communications, all right.
This ties back into things we do in the traditional world of marketing.
Keeping customers informed.
Feeling a part of the company.
Feeling a part of where things are going.
Using things like newsletters to keep
people excited about being connected into your product and your company.
Top customer programs, rewards, t-shirts.
Whatever your customer base wants, having them be able to be a part of it,
rewarding them with a customer program.
Building a community.
Sometimes it's as simple as people being able to leverage, and connect, and
contact other people that are using your product or your service, and
giving them a community platform to do that, and then making them stand.
Again, one of my memories of Twilio is walking down the street, people seeing
a Twilio t-shirt, or my Twilio track jacket, and saying my God, we love Twilio.
Well boy, when you have raving fans,
they're out there creating that virality by word of mouth for you.
On the organic side,
again, some of it's going to be very familiar to traditional marketing.
The organic things that retain customers are things like cost of switching.
If you've got a lot invested in getting started, getting set up,
that's a high cost of switching and likelihood is you're going to stay.
Comfortable with the user experience, wow, it's so easy to use.
I just really can't think about using something else and
then the network effects.
Even if maybe the product is not as great, as what someone would want,
the fact that everyone else is tiding into it will help people retain.
So those are your basics in terms of getting people to the top of the funnel,
activating them and retaining them.
And believe me, we can actually go into all of those in much more detail.
So that gives you the basics.
So let's talk about your website.
The reality is, the website is for a grow packer the front door.
It is how people find them, they activate and even retained in the long run.
So when you think about the web page, what you want to think about is the top of
the funnel, it's really that persuasive end.
It's the home page, it's products and services page,
it's basic information pages.
It's all that content that sets up the value proposition and
persuades people to take action.
And then you think about the transactional end.
Those pages on your website, where the transaction actually occurs,
where that activation actually occurs, those can be forms, those can be
shopping carts, so, as you're looking at your website, a new perspective.
It's not just this very informational source, it's not just this pretty source
It's really about this persuasive end, my top of the funnel and
then transactional end that's getting people to activate.
Now going back to a difference from a growth hacker's perspective,
their thinking about how do I engineer these pages
to drive more activations, to drive more sign ups.
It's not about is it nice looking, it's not about is there great content just for
content sake, they're really engineering what's going on.
So a few best practices to optimize your site and
get those activations you're looking for.
First of all, no distraction.
You don't want people coming to the website like that's nice,
let me wander overt here, let me look over here.
You want to get them to what you want them to do.
You want enough information that they immediately go I got to sign up.
Speed matters. When it comes to websites,
if it takes a long time for things to load and we all get enamored by flash and
design, if it takes a long time to load, you're going to lose people.
When you have very short term memory, you have needs for immediate satisfaction so
speed matters.
People value social proof.
Get right out there on front.
Who else is doing it?
Who else like them is interested in the service or in the product?
Think about every page as a home page.
Wow, with all the things that link now to our websites,
someone may not hit that homepage.
They may actually come to another page.
So make sure that sign-up, that activation,
call to action is there on every page.
And then think mobile.
We are a mobile generation, we're a mobile world, think mobile first because you may
actually see your activations happening from a mobile channel.
I talked about a moment ago this idea of CTA, call to action.
Great calls to action, give clear direction.
Don't make visitors figure out what you want them to do.
Don't get overly cute, don't get overly creative.
Make sure that it's clear that you want them to click here and sign up.
Make the CTA obvious.
The buttons need to stand out.
And you'll laugh about, yeah, we spend a lot of time, is it a blue button,
is it a red button, is it a gray button?
The reason we spend time doing the A/B testing on that is based on your target
audience, that could all be different.
But make sure your button stands out for your target audience.
And if you have a phone number involved,
make it prominent, don't make people go digging for it.
A few basics to how to make your growth hacking website really stand out.
Now, final bit, testing.
I told you that the growth hacker is constantly looking at the numbers.
The growth hacker is constantly looking at what's working, what's not working.
So what they're doing is a lot of A/B testing.
So for those of you who have not been thrown into the world of A/B testing, and
thank goodness we have some awesome software now that helps us do this.
The idea is you get visitors to come in to your websites, but
through automation what you've been able to do is key up a number of tests.
So you can have a person come in, and what they see on your website is
the control page, the standard page that you've had up there.
But someone else coming in gets served up variation A,
while another one gets served up variation B, and you can look at what's working.
Are they hitting the buttons I want them to hit?
Are they activating?
Are they doing what I want them to do?
And with that information, you're able to go back and revamp what you've got.
What do you want to A/B test?
Everything.
It can be the product itself that you're A/B testing.
But it's your call to action,
it's the content, it's the copy, it's the visual, it's the navigation.
It's those forms that are the bottom of the funnel.
It's ads, it's emails, it's pricing.
Again, if you're a growth hacker, every day you're living to try something new.
See what works, keep what works, and throw away what doesn't.
And as I said, they have some great
tools that we can use to be able to do this constant A/B testing.
And you'll find there are a number of them out there,
Optimizely is one that I personally use.
But basically, each of these tools does a great job of splitting that traffic.
It sets that control mechanism to ensure each visitor
has a consistent experience rather than a random one.
It tracks the goals of the conversion rates for
each variation, gets you some great tests, shows the statistical data,
so that every day, you can try something new.
And then a final comment on tools, analytics.
Think all of us as marketers have gotten very familiar with general analytics,
things that Google actually provides to us.
In addition to that, every growth hacker's going to dive into event based and
people based analytic tools.
Because they have to understand what's going on through that website based on
events, based on people's actions, not to mention, also inside that product.
So, 45 minutes, I know we want to leave time for Q and A.
That has given you the basic role, if you will, of what growth hacking is.
How you implement a growth hacking strategy,
how that is like and dislike what's going on in marketing.
And then, looking at process and tools.
All right, let's jump into some questions.
>> So the first question, Lynda that we got submitted is,
where has growth hacking been used for services opposed to products?
And what is the most significant difference in applying growth
hacking to services?
>> That's a great question.
Let me start off by answering it in terms
of the online world versus the more traditional world.
So when you think about growth hacking, everything I just walked you through,
thinking about the website, it really has us bent to products and
services that are actually online.
What I have found is that there's some elements of this that we can really draw
into services and products that are offered in an offline world.
It things like really thinking about that whole life cycle of a customer and
how marketing can be really engaged in it.
It's about looking at analytics, but looking at them on a more daily basis,
so that's it's not just a once a month type of report.
It's looking at things like diving deep into my product.
Is my product what my market needs?
And these are all very traditional things we look as marketing.
But when you're thinking about it in this growth hacking mentality,
there's this rapid fire experimentation that comes into it.
Now in terms of services, when you think about products and services.
When you think about services,
I think about something like DropBox actually as a service.
It's a storage service.
There's a product that's a part of it, but the reality is, to me as a consumer,
it's a service, it's my storage service.
I think it's really diving into what your type of service is.
And in fact, can you think about your service a little bit differently?
I hope that answers that.
>> I think that's great.
The next question we have here is, can you give some examples of
recent companies that successfully used growth hacking and how they did it?
>> Yeah well, the lot of them are ones that you're very, very familiar with.
It really comes down to any of the social platforms that we have participated in.
You will find that they are using growth hacking as a large part of how
they look at marketing.
And they're using a lot of the end product tactics.
But they're also constantly every day driving in to looking at the product.
Is it offering the features that my online customer wants?
LinkedIn a long time ago, really got started this way.
They continue to operate that way.
Think about the gamification you have, and I use LinkedIn as a professional.
Most of us are familiar with that social platform.
Think about the gamification that goes on constantly with them
telling us how we can improve our profile, how much further we can go along.
You've seen a lot of the companies that appeal out to developers,
like the Twilio's of the world, are using a level
of growth hacking in what they're doing to drive those conversions.
Actually when you look back, one of the original slides that I had shared.
Dropbox, Zynga, Groupon, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter,
Facebook, Evernote, AppSumo, Stumbleupon, Everlane.
All of these companies have been very active in using the growth
hacking construct.
>> Good.
So another question we have here is, what in your option, is the best practice for
a start-up to build a culture of growth hacking?
>> That is an awesome question.
First get to your CEO really fast, or
if you're the founder, get your head around it.
It really does start top down.
And so I think it really comes down to sitting down with the founders,
sitting down with the CEO and really thinking about,
when we look at our approach to how we're going to drive growth.
Do we see this is something that we want marketing driven?
And if so, then really started to lay out and I had listed the,
kind of, core tenants.
Getting everyone's heads around that.
How are we going to use the product for this?
How is the head of growth involved and able to really drive and
touch all the disciplines to make this happen?
So, I think the way I would approach it if I were coming into a company,
I would say, sit down with the top management say, is this right for us?
Understand and listen to the reasons why it may or may not.
And then really, working with the management team to say this is
what it's going to take for us to really execute on this.
So it's gotta be top down.
The hard part would be, if you went it, bottoms up.
I've just been hired as the new CMO, the head of marketing of this startup.
And I'm going to go do growth hacking.
And no one from the top is acknowledging that this is how we're going to drive
growth in the company, and then you'll just constantly be hitting brick walls.
>> Okay, so we have another question here that says, traditionally,
marketing takes a long view on bad news or bad mentions in popular media.
Because eventually, it'll be forgotten and
name recognition benefits eventually outweigh the short-term losses.
Does this concept hold true on growth hacking as well?
>> I would say, not, and I would also, from my own perspective, and
I've worked both in the startup world, as well as very large companies, so,
I'm really familiar with what you're putting forward there.
I would say, because of the advent of social media,
that the reality is all companies, growth hacking companies and
traditional marketing companies, are acting much more quickly across bad news.
Because you just can't let it fester up there.
Now, they might have different strategies about how they're going to do it.
But it's very hard just to let things fester.
because they just don't go away the way they used to.
I can tap into my own career without giving specifics and say, there are so
many times that I've seen where maybe there was one bad review, one bad comment.
Wouldn't you not, every time you do a Google search,
it comes back up on page one.
I wish I could bury it.
But I can't get it off the radar.
So, I think all companies now, quite frankly,
are having to take a more proactive,
a more rapid fire approach to how they handle the bad news that's out there.
Now, putting that aside, knowing that there's some very large traditional
organizations that are a little slower to move on that.
In a growth hacking world now, you gotta constantly be reacting, responding.
You don't just want to wait for something to go away.
I think also in the companies I've watched and
companies I've been in that are applying growth hacking,
there's much more transparency in terms of interacting with that target audience.
And I think also there's a new bar that as we look at millennials and
younger Gen Xers versus Gen Xers and baby boomers.
There's a different bar that's also being given to us by our target audience that
says, hey, be transparent, be rapid.
Make sure you're connecting with me on good and the bad or
I'm going somewhere else.
So, I think there's major shifts that's going on now in the world of marketing.
And definitely, in growth hacking, [LAUGH] you address things fast, you move, and
you get onto the next thing.
Love that question.
>> [LAUGH] Good question.
So, we have a few people actually asking something relating to how the role
of a product and marketing teams are now changed with the growth hacker.
And how are they thinking about growth together and how they play a part?
>> Yeah, and so, this comes back to that company culture model I was talking about.
In a more traditional environment, what I would say is if there was a product issue,
if you had noticed as the head of marketing and
you didn't own product management.
So, if you notice that there's a product issue that is preventing you from moving
forward, getting more users, having customers who are negative,
you would really have to sit down with your peer and have this discussion around.
Hey, I see these problems, I'd like to share them with you.
Let's work together to find a solution.
And depending on the road map,
depending on the process that was being used on product development.
It may or may not happen in a period of time.
In the Growth Hacking Model, the pure, true Growth Hacking Model,
I wouldn't have to have that side-by-side conversation.
Instead, I would be empowered to go to engineering, or
go to the product management team, and say, all right, you know,
we've lost 15% on our conversion rates because of x.
When are you going to have it changed?
So, there's a different mentality there from a cultural perspective and
what you own if you're in real growth hacking.
Now, companies will do hybrid models.
It's essentially one of the companies I'm working with now,
we have that hybrid model.
The way we've all been at there to make sure that we get what we need to change
in the product is it really comes down to everyone
understands that growth is the number one objective.
And everyone's into it saying, all right,
we're all going to look at the numbers every day.
You're responsible for them and driving them at the head of growth.
But we're all going to be looking at those numbers each day and
you find that when you create this culture of, hey, it's about growth,
that's our number one objective.
Even if you don't own it, you can't go and say, engineering do it,
because everyone gets that that's the fundamental goal,
you'll find a lot more willingness to be a part of it.
And then, it's on your shoulders to produce the reports,
put up the bright shining panels, have monitors that are constantly
showing the numbers to get the culture thinking about a growth culture.
>> Great, so, I think we have time for one more question.
So, we have a lot of people asking.
You talked a lot about some of the tools and strategies for a growth hacker.
But in your opinion, which are the most effective?
If any, which are the ones that we need to focus on in order to
be a great growth hacker?
>> Yeah, good question.
So, first of all, let's say, it always comes back to who your target audience is.
And whenever I look at doing anything at marketing, I always come back and
I call it the who.
I always come back to try and figure out who's my target audience.
And I ask questions like, how did they learn?
Where do they live?
What is their temperament towards marketing?
And I try to really get in their shoes because any tactic you deploy.
It may be a great tactic, but if it isn't in line with how your target
audience thinks about the world, it's not going to go very far.
So, I would first say, think about who your target audience is.
Really do that sub-segmentation.
Really get into their shoes.
Really understand that individual you're trying to cater to.
And out of that will fall the tactics.
Now, from a growth hacking perspective, what I would say is it is the end product.
If you have that opportunity because you have an online product and you are using
your website as the main way that you're driving growth, it's going to be really
looking for what can you do in product that will spawn other people's interest.
So, it goes back to really that whole list of in products tactics.
And again, it's very specialized to what your product or your service is.
But again, think about your consumer, think about your customer.
And by the way, this can be done in the B2B world or the B2C world.
Get in their shoes, and
that will drive which of those tactics are going to be most useful.
>> Thank you, Lynda.
Great, and also, thank all of you for attending this webinar.
I hope you learned something new about growth hacking.
And we look forward to seeing you next time in the next webinar.
And if you want more information, please contact us or
look at our website at create.stanford.edu.
Thank you everyone.

Stanford Webinar: Introduction to Growth Hacking

Latest Posts