When people talk about growth marketing (and this is truer still when using the term growth hacking marketing), there are still some who imagine certain stereotypes:
A professional with tattoos and piercings, or colored glasses and accessories from the 80’s, leaning over a computer, inventing magic formulas to attract customers and make a company grow overnight. Usually with the help of some disruptive innovation.
The truth is that growth marketing is an older practice than many imagine. Any company can use its techniques, not just technology startups.
We’ve separated two widely used growth hacking marketing techniques that have shown effective results over the years. They’ve been studied and documented by market professionals and experts, in books that have become highly regarded.
You don’t have to change your style, suit and tie, piercings or shorts and slippers, it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to make you a better or worse professional. But studying some of the established growth hacking marketing techniques, that might help.
See also: Disruptive innovation: Is it the new fashionable business expression?
2 clear and objective growth hacking marketing techniques
Often reading a good book can help you to see solutions and find the paths to rapid growth, no matter if you are a small business entrepreneur or the manager of a million dollar business.
Check out some of these ideas on growth hacking marketing that will help you find solutions faster for your business challenges.
Bullseye: Getting Traction To Make Your Business Grow
The growth hacking marketing tip from Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares’s book “Traction” introduces a framework called Bullseye. This framework shows you the most efficient way to hit the mark and make your business grow rapidly.
Basically they list all sorts of attraction and customer acquisition channels and help the entrepreneur choose which ones to use throughout the development and life cycle of their product or service.
And to make it easier for you to hit the bullseye and not just focus on the channels you’re already used to dealing with (your comfort zone) the book has a visual representation of 3 circles.
Source: Startapeando
The key is to discard the least efficient channels until you get the one that will deliver the best results, faster and at a lower cost.
4 questions may help you with this search:
- How much do you estimate will be the cost to acquire customers in each channel?
- When will this channel become saturated?
- Is it possible and how long will it take to review the return of this channel?
- What is the minimum amount of investment needed to make this channel work?
For this, you must follow 5 steps:
- Brainstorming to know the channels, without eliminating any, for now.
- Rank the channels regarding time, cost and effectiveness in a list (here the visual framework can help a lot)
- At most, prioritize 3 channels, those that appear near the center of the target
- Time to test and see if the results match your estimates
- Now with correctly measured real data, get rid of everything that doesn’t work and focus on the bullseye!
Yes, it’s not easy to summarize a more than 230 page book into a few paragraphs. So, if you are interested in it, go to: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
The Turning Point
What do you need to do, what features and events need to occur in order for a trend to reach the turning point and become an overwhelming wave that everyone embraces?
In his book “The Tipping Point,” the New York journalist who also worked at the Washington Post, Malcolm Gladwell, set three fundamental criteria for these questions.
So, look at each of them and discover how to use these ideas in your company’s growth marketing strategy.
Have you ever imagined turning your product or service into a craze? Could there be a more interesting way to make your business grow quickly?
1- The Rule of the Elected
For Gladwell, there is no way to spread ideas without issuers. He divides them into 3 types:
- Communicators: It’s more important to have a vast network of weak contacts, than a small network of strong contacts: the breadth helps a lot in the spread of ideas, this is the benefit of communicators.
- Experts: They are people who are “aware”, who always keep themselves up to date on the news and like to divulge it. They have small networks of contacts, but with people who they trust and who respect their opinions, as well as spread them.
- Sellers: With great power of persuasion, they like to convince people to try new things. They change people’s perception positively about novelties.
2- Factor of Fixation
For your idea to ‘stick’, your message needs to have a good factor of fixation. It should be easy to memorize and understand, and can motivate people to act.
Gladwell’s example is blunt:
In a tetanus vaccination campaign, the initial outreach material, which talked about the ills of the disease and how to avoid it with vaccination, greatly increased the public’s interest in the subject.
But it motivated only 3% of those impacted by the material to get the vaccination.
After reviewing the material, the organizers included a map indicating the location of the vaccination outpost.
Engagement then increased to 28%.
3- The Power of Context
You must have heard the expression: I was in the right place at the right time!
Consequently, this is the basis of the idea about the power of context. Environment and time strongly influence the adoption of an idea and change people’s behavior.
A famous example, which occurred in Brazil, was alcohol gel, a hand sanitization product. This gel turned into a consumer craze when alarming news about the flu caused by the H1N1 virus appeared which changed the habits of the population. It then quickly disappeared from pharmacies afterwards.
In another era, under different circumstances and in other countries, the sales growth of this product would never have happened.
So, do you want to make your idea reach a Turning Point?
Therefore, use the right issuers, create the most appropriate message and take advantage of favorable conditions.
Check out the complete work: The Tipping Point