I’m the first person to admit that marketers need to reshape how they approach their craft. We are building businesses in a climate that relies heavily on the malleable ability to disrupt the norm. What “always worked” has become outdated and new ideas are needed.
“Growth hacking”—the process of selling products or gaining exposure through a combination of analytical and creative thinking—is one form of marketing disruption taking place. A growth hacker is someone that bridges technical understanding (SEO, basic coding, analytics, and paid advertising) with skills drawn from communicators (PR, content production, community building, and customer service). It’s a beautiful symphony of qualitative and quantitative know-how.
I welcome the enthusiasm growth hackers are stoking within the industry, but I’m also weary of the startup marketing culture that is being created from this hyper-inflated need to generate as much attention as quickly as possible. The result is an impatient breed of marketers who get lost in the minutiae of tactics, and aggressively seek to replicate another organization’s lucky success.
Growth hacking encourages a culture of impatience
There are no shortcuts to building a solid business. Marc Andreessen, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, and any other rock star venture capitalist will beat that phrase into your head. But for some reason, I still happen to encounter all these startups hoping to secure a quick win gimmick to attract attention.
Marketing requires patience. It doesn’t have to be incredibly slow, but it can’t be ridiculously fast either. Tactics need time to develop. Strategies need time to be realized. Take PR for example. Anyone can get coverage for their startup on TechCrunch or Forbes or Recode, and it’ll read like a verbatim spew of the company’s press release; but to truly achieve media mentions that let you stand out from the rest, to survive above the news cycle and noise, to have someone to turn to when your company flubs with a product release or glitch, one needs to build a rapport with media. That takes time.
Growth hackers can’t optimize PR by blasting out a template email to 100 contacts at once hoping someone bites. Yes, some level of automation and process can help organize teams to perform tactics smarter, but much of what marketers do still requires human interaction. Instead, startup marketers should consider constructing a database that records the preferences, habits, and behaviors of select media. The goal should be to build relevance with quality media and to tell a story about the product, not to gain all the coverage possible in order to bloat the company’s importance.
Constant experimentation can turn into a tactical nightmare
Growth hackers champion experimentation. A/B testing, landing page optimization, paid media tweaks, email subject lines. These are good tactical things to do; and when done well, the tactics can help startups achieve relevance with potential customers. But constant experimentation can leave teams walking in circles around small problems when bigger challenges are facing an organization.
If marketers bury themselves in constantly tweaking Google Adwords, they might solve the problem of attracting new users, but then fall flat on moving traffic through the startup’s experience because of a number of underlying problems: advertising might not be the problem because the company’s registration page is a nightmare; customer service is atrocious and turns curious visitors away; or maybe the product isn’t what visitors were promised from the ads they clicked. Everything is tied together.
I’ve encountered this many times with startups. I’m asked to focus only on Y while the team handles X and Z independently. There’s no cohesion and the result is a mismatch of marketing tactics that are creating more friction for the user and a constant scramble for the teams blindly chasing success.
This is where vision and long-term goals are so important. Growth hackers need guidance that goes beyond acquiring new users, and an understanding that customer retention after the initial honeymoon period is far more lucrative.
So what can be done? Build a marketing framework—a collection of principles that guide the team’s purpose and effort to attract customers. Experiment with tactics within that framework; be malleable, and remember that all work should help achieve the higher goal. Growth hackers have to know when to stop and adjust an approach, especially when efforts fail to materialize tangible results.
Someone else’s success might not replicate for you
Success is largely a habit of doing things over and over again until luck and preparation meet to create something phenomenal. It’s small experiments marching toward a larger solution.
It’s easy to get lost in the flood of articles on Hacker News or Product Hunt. Every startup wants to know how to improve open rates, or how to get users to click on their ads, or how to entice customers to return with incentives. The problem is that marketers can’t replicate someone else’s approach because the stack of variables will always be different.
The competitor’s list of customer emails might be cleaner; the budget could’ve been larger; maybe they slowly cultivated a network of influencers that distributed new product announcements to highly active audiences. Even if your company has those same attributes, it still might not work because luck is the underlying factor. Think about how many charitable organizations launched different versions of the ALS Ice Bucket challenge only to see marginal or zero success. User-generated content has been around for years and has seen varied success. It blew up in the context of the Ice Bucket Challenge, and it probably won’t happen the same way again.
Growth hackers need to learn from startup success; and rather than trying to follow another company’s example, the right startup marketer should take elements of a successful approach and redraft it to fit the needs of his or her current situation.
I’m excited that growth hacking can be considered a valid disruptor to aged marketing tactics, but startups need to be careful when placing their marketing dollars and reputations into disruptive methodologies. Growth hackers will be responsible for the development of your brand beyond word-of-mouth. The right person must be patient and understand the importance of a vision.
