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

This little feature changed everything. It meant every e-mail that Hotmail’s users sent would be an advertisement for the product. And that advertisement was effective not because it was cute or creative but because it showcased an amazing product that many people wanted and needed.

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

how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

“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.”

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.

3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay).

Growth hackers are pros at hypothesizing, testing, and iterating different versions of their products to create hockey stick growth for their companies.

You don’t go out with your marketing to everyone. You go to where there is a captive or potential audience that might be interested in what you do.

http://andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study

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