Growth Hacker (noun) /’grōth ha-kər/: a highly resourceful and creative marketer singularly focused on high-leverage growth. Growth hackers thrive in resource-constrained environments where money is tight and time is of the essence. Through a mix of creativity and technology, a growth hacker is able to hack through the jungle, uncover buried resources along the way, and construct the tools needed to grow a business. A growth hacker is the figure-it-out-as-we-go adventurer of Indiana Jones mixed with the problem-solving ingenuity of MacGyver.

Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret is a good end to end overview what you need to take into account when running (digital) business.

It is very simple and trivial, but if you are doing Growth Hacking you need to remember, and remind yourself EVERY DAY that your two primary resources are TIME and MONEY. It is always tradeoff to choose between one of these two, while building a business.

Entire book describes so-called ASP - Automated Sales Process:

1. Attraction (Acquisition)
2. First Impression
3. Engage & Educate
4. Follow-Up
5. Sales Technology
6. Referrals & Retention

Many times, when working on a product, we tend to forget about some of above elements. Most companies focus on acquisition, but forget about first impression or education. For people working on particular product many things are obvious, but most of them might be not obvious for new customers.

Attraction (Acquisition)

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

This is not a case anymore thanks to Facebook and Google! With Facebook ads you can target males in their 30s who live in Seattle, with income in range of $100-150k/year.

When creating targeting profile, authors recommend to take following customer signals into account:

• gender
• age
• profession
• income
• living location
• martial status
• having kids
• hobbies
• interests

A clever way to determine specifically where your target customer spends time is to use a tool called SimilarWeb. Enter your competitor’s URLs into the tool, and scroll down to see exactly where their website traffic is coming from. This is a great way to discover places to “steal” clients away from your competition.

The job of growth hacker is to without spending a dollar more on marketing, acquire the most customers in the least time.

The domino theory of growth hacking states that small wins beget progressively larger wins. Your job as a growth hacker is to identify the lead domino, the first tactic to implement, and line up the subsequent dominoes in ascending level of achievability on a path that leads you to your ultimate goal.

Other acquisition techniques:

• The four primary categories to keep Attraction tactics organized are direct, search platforms, branding platforms, and other.
• A framework for identifying high-ROI Attraction opportunities is called advertising arbitrage: seek advertising opportunities where advertising inventory supply outpaces advertiser demand.
• A strategy for creating cost-efficient advertising opportunities is to marry content creation with commerce.
• Collaboration opportunities exist where your customer base overlaps with a complementary company and is fertile territory for affiliate, joint venture, comarketing, and other similar types of partnership arrangements.

First Impression

Making first impression is hard, but it's very important. My takeaway from this section is that you should just look at the best first impression strategies that are out there and use fast follow/copy strategy.

It’s far cheaper to stand on the proverbial shoulders of early-adopting giants than reinvent the proverbial wheel. The trick is to figure out whom to follow.

You need to be on top of that all the time, and update/evolve your first impression technique ALL THE TIME.

Engage & Educate

In order to maximize the persuasive effect of your communication, you must make all three rhetorical appeals of persuasion:

1. ethos (credibility)
2. pathos (emotion)
3. logos (logic)

On top of that, you need USP (Unique Selling Proposition) - succinct summary of what differentiates you from competition.

Use customer-centric words and phrases to describe your product:

• Words to avoid: “we”, “my ”, “us” and “our”
• Words to use: “you” and “your”

Social proof helps to engage people, because when people are unsure what to do they mimic the actions of others. Especially, if others are people they know or their friends.

Follow-Up

Once you get your customer familiar with your product, you need to remind of yourself.

First step is to get customer information.

It's important to remember that more information you request from your lead, the more friction there is, which leads to the prospect being less likely to provide the requested information.

Instead of asking explicitly for customer information you can use retargeting campaign using Facebook or Google ads.

There is very thin line between being effective and annoying which may result in losing customer. On the other hand, there is the marketing rule of 7.

The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a prospect needs to “hear” the advertiser’s message at least 7 times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service.

All reach-outs need to follow 4Es:

1. Engaging
2. Educational
3. Entertaining
4. Emotional

Sales Technology

Upsell - “up” the price by suggesting a more premium product or service.

Cross-sell - encourage you to reach across the aisle and add a complementary product to your order.

Automating your online sales require you to build everything by yourself (time) or use existing solutions (money).

More you automate, and measure the better results and improvements you can make. E.g., sending upsell/cross-sell emails after purchase or even confirmations can help to increase sales.

There is list of recommended tools for automating sales.

Referrals & Retention

Once your customer made the purchase, you need to try to retain him, and encourage to refer your product to others.

Increasing client retention increases Customer Lifetime Value. This allows to spend more on acquisition, which opens up new customer acquisition channels that are otherwise unaffordable.

The most popular and easy retention technique is to send simple holiday or birthday card. However, authors recommend to send holiday cards on less popular holidays, e.g., “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” card will be more distinctive and more likely to be read than a New Year “Happy Holidays” card

We worked with one of our clients to send a box of See’s chocolates for Valentine’s Day to their top general contractor clients, and they ended up generating more than fifty thousand dollars of contracts from a two - hundred - dollar investment. They also helped several “forgetful” gentlemen look like wonderfully thoughtful husbands when they brought chocolate to their wives on Valentine’s Day.

The best time for applying growth-hacking is after the point of initial purchase at the very bottom of the proverbial funnel.

Testimonial formula: [Specific End Result or Benefit the Customer Received] + [Specific Period of Time] + [Accompanied Customer Emotion] + [Customer Name with Relevant Stats].

Dealing with negative comments, opinions, feedback:

• Preempt it through satisfaction surveys and other internal feedback forms
• For a negative truth: admit, apologize, and promote the opposite
• For a negative lie: state that the comment is inaccurate or invalid, and substantiate your comment

The two primary categories of active referral systems are:

• financial, e.g, get product after referring a friend
• in-kind (non-cash), e.g., encourage to share product with friends, or leave review on social media

Summary

I really like this book. Although it doesn't provide direct recipe for growth, it outlines different stages of customer journey very well.

1. ATTRACT thousands of interested new leads.
2. Create a powerful FIRST IMPRESSION to set the tone for a consistent, personalized, and professional experience with your company.
3. ENGAGE & EDUCATE your prospects so they have all the information they need to feel comfortable buying from you.
4. Implement a seamless FOLLOW-UP process so that no business slips through the cracks and your company is always top-of-mind.
5. Use SALES TECHNOLOGY to more efficiently close sales, upsell, and cross-sell products and services.
6. Generate high-value REFERRALS while RETAINING existing clients.

There is complementary list of resources to dive in more on book authors' website: deviatelabs.com/resources. Especially, check the list of recommended tools for each part of ASP.

Comfort is a death sentence to progress, and progress is what you seek.