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

A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, data targeting, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” g

“Retention trumps acquisition.”

First Google built a superior product. Then it built excitement by making it invite-only. And by steadily increasing the number of invites allowed to its existing user base, Gmail spread from person to person until it became the most popular, and in many ways the best, free e-mail service.

“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.”

With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we are confident we have a product worth marketing. Confident based on the evidence, not our ego or our fantasies. Only after securing this do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine. Because even the best-designed products and greatest ideas go nowhere without a jump.

So we try to check in with all the current owners at least every quarter.”

You can use your own internal data to create captivating infographics and visualizations, like OkCupid did with its massive data set, launching OkTrends, which has been a marketing gold mine attracting visitors with its fascinating insights about dating.

Growth hackers’ main task is to build great marketing ideas into the product during the development process.

marketing as we know it is a waste of time without PMF.