Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Instead, we are intensely focused on driving an initial set of new user sign-ups and customers, right now.

It doesn’t matter how many people know about you or how they find out about you. It matters how many sign up. If handing out flyers on the street corner accomplishes that, then consider it growth hacking.

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them.

“Retention trumps acquisition.”

“Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. . . . We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.”

The role of the growth hacker is to ruthlessly optimize incoming traffic for success.

To make that clear: you should not just encourage sharing but create powerful incentives to do so. If your product isn’t doing that right now, why would anyone share it? But if you do it right, people will advertise your product and feel like they are the ones getting something out of it!

Remember, raw growth is great, but at the end of the day, we’re running businesses here. We want to turn stats into dollars.

To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.