Adapted from "Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising" by Ryan Holiday.
http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Hacker-Marketing-Primer-Advertising/dp/1591847389/ryanholnet-20
"Everything you thought you knew about marketing is obsolete.
We can see the incontrovertible evidence right in front of us. A new generation of multibillion dollar brands—Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, Evernote, and countless others—have been built without spending a dime on traditional marketing techniques. No press releases, no PR firm, no Madison Avenue, no billboards in Times Square.
It wasn’t luck that took them from tiny start-ups to massive success. They have a new strategy. It’s called Growth Hacking. And it works.
A Growth Hacker is someone who rejects what “marketing” is supposed to be and replaces it only with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. Growth Hackers rely on inexpensive tactics like e-mail, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs. They chase real results in a field that was dominated by gut instincts for nearly a century. They reject the traditional marketing worship of all things big: big budgets, big campaigns, big opening weekends. Instead, they embrace the opposite: taking a start-up from nothing to something, launching a Kickstarter project, building something that truly spreads.
Growth Hacker Marketing offers both a new mindset and a new set of rules. Bestselling author Ryan Holiday, the former director of marketing for American Apparel, will convince you of the urgency of this awakening. He shows why the game has changed forever and what to do about it—whether you are an aspiring marketer, an entrepreneur, or a Fortune 500 senior executive."
2. Growth hacker (noun) – one who’s passion
and focus is growth through use of a testable
and scalable methodology.
A growth hacker works within the parameters
of a scalable and repeatable method for
growth, driven by product and inspired by
data. A growth hacker lives at the intersection
of data, product, and marketing.
“#1
Aaron GinnHEAD OF GROWTH, STUMBLEUPON
3. Growth hackers have a common
attitude, internal investigation
process, and mentality unique among
technologists and marketers.
This mindset of data, creativity, and
curiosity allows a growth hacker to
accomplish the feet of growing a
user base into the millions.
“#2
Andrew ChenENTREPRENEUR & TECHNOLOGY WRITER
4. Growth hacking has a subtle message
of ‘what have you done for me today?’.
You never stop as a growth hacker.
Facebook still has a growth team
and they have a billion users.
“#3
BlakeCommagereFOUNDER, MEDIASPIKE
6. We might not have marketing budgets,
or a massive fan base… [But] we can
build for sharing. We can sample at
scale. We can give readers a stake in
distribution. We can open up exchange
between artist and fan, beyond the
sales transaction. And we can do this in
a way that drives creative profitability.
“#5
Matt MasonDIRECTOR OF MARKETING, BITTORRENT
7. The creative folks intuitively design
what’s best for the user, while data
folks provide great insights.
The true unicorns are those who can
go end-to-end designing, building,
measuring, analyzing, and iterating
with a combination of user intuition
and deep analytics.
“
Matt Humphreys
#6
CO-FOUNDER, HOMERUN
8. Growth hacking is more of a
mind-set than a tool kit.
“
Aaron GinnHEAD OF GROWTH, STUMBLEUPON
#7
9. 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.
“
Brian HalliganFOUNDER, HUBSPOT
#8
10. Virality isn’t luck. It’s not
magic. And it’s not random.
There’s a science behind why
people talk and share.
A recipe. A formula, even.
“
Jonah BergerAUTHOR OF “CONTAGIOUS”
#9
11. You need the kind of objectivity
that makes you forget
everything you’ve heard, clear
the table, and do a factual
study like a scientist would.
“
Steve WozniakCO-FOUNDER, APPLE
#10
12. Growth Hacking is the process
and mindset of searching for ways
that your product to grow. It’s kind of
like a mix between engineering and
marketing. The key is to find
untapped channels of customers that
are motivated to use your product.
“
Dan MartellFOUNDER, CLARITY
#11
13. Most traditional marketers spend the majority of
their time trying to buy the attention of prospects
in the marketplace to drive awareness and interest
in their product.
Growth hacking tends to be more “experience”
focused. This includes driving engagement and
sharing within a product or spreading a product
experience across networks. Effective growth
hackers are relentless about running creative
experiments and optimizing the components of the
experiment until finding something that works.
“
Sean Ellis CEO, QUALAROO
#12
14. The end goal of every
growth hacker is to build a
self-perpetuating marketing
machine that reaches millions
by itself.
“
Aaron GinnHEAD OF GROWTH, STUMBLEUPON
#13
15. In the absence of big budgets,
start-ups learned how to hack
the system to build their
companies.
“
Micah BaldwinFOUNDER, GRAPHIC.LY
#14
16. Marketing has always been
about the same thing —
who your customers are
and where they are.
“
Noah KaganFOUNDER, APPSUMO
#15
17. Our first idea is a grand opening,
a big launch, a press release, or
major media coverage. We default
to thinking we need an advertising
budget. Our delusion is that we
should be Transformers and not
The Blair Witch Project.
“
Ryan HolidayAUTHOR OF “GROWTH HACKER MARKETING”
#16
18. I prefer the discipline of
knowledge to the anarchy of
ignorance. We pursue
knowledge the way a pig
pursues truffles.
“
David Ogilvy“THE FATHER OF ADVERTISING”
#17
19. The short answer is you can't really “hack” growth.
Any attempts at artificially creating growth patterns
such as spamming friends on Facebook or Twitter, or
hacking App Store download charts may result in spiky
numbers, but rarely adds retained users. It's kind of like
eating empty calories.
“Growth hacking” is a recognition that when you focus
on understanding your users and how they discover and
adopt your products, you can build features that help
you acquire and retain more users, rather than just
spending marketing dollars.
“
Josh ElmanPARTNER AT GREYLOCK PARTNERS
#18
20. 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
e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead
of commercials, publicity, and money.
While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like
“branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly
pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those
users beget more users, which beget more users. They are
the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-
sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can
take a start-up from nothing to something.
“
Ryan HolidayAUTHOR OF “GROWTH HACKER MARKETING”
#19