In episode #1427, we talk about growth hacking and what it can teach you about growing your company. You’ll hear where the term ‘growth hacking’ came from, what it means, and some examples of growth hacking strategies used by companies like Dropbox and Facebook. Our central message today is that growth can come from other places within your company than its marketing team! Tune in and hear about the value of having a north star and looking in unusual places to make your business better and bigger!
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Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to talk about what you can learn from growth hackers. Ooh, so, Neil, what is growth hackers? Sean Ellis has a good definition of it. I don't know what the definition is off the top of my head, but I know he always talks about it's people who look at their true nord star. I would say a dumbed down version of growth hacking that I view it, And I'm not trying to say anyone's dumb. It's more so how I look at it, it's anyone within a company who's trying to drive more revenue. See marketers. A lot of our goal is traffic or conversions or specific metric. There's a lot of people within a company who can help drive growth or more revenue. What I mean by that is salespeople can sell more. Designers can make the usability more better so you have people coming back and doing repeat purchases. You can have engineers who speed up the website, which could in theory, increase your conversions as well. It's whatever you can do in the business to generate more revenue, and it doesn't have to be related to quote unquote SEO or content marketing or social media. And a great, live, real example of this is Dropbox. Dropbox screw into a multi billion dollar company by saying, hey, want more space, Invite your friends, and the more friends that sign up, the more space you'll end up getting. The way I look at growth hacking, the term was first coined by Sean Ellis and I think Jaw had to say in it as well, it was okay to do that. It was like a new term and it was cool. It was basically the new way of saying, this is how you do data driven marketing. And what happened was a lot of people started to pervert the word and everyone just started calling themselves a growth hacker. Like you had people that are doing unethical things just say I'm a growth hacker. And when you have the word hacker in a word, it's not the best thing and it can be perverted. So nowadays these people are actually called growth marketers, so they don't want to be associated with the growth hackers anymore. That's right, because hacking has a negative connotation. Yeah, hacking naturally implies that you're trying to do things that are short term focused and you're looking for little pockets that you can optimize. It doesn't really imply that you're innovating. But that wasn't the initial intention of the term. Going back to Neil's point, Sean Ellis worked at drop Box and then they made the product viral because of the referral program that they had, and so to me, growth hacking in its purest form is basically saying, hey, we're really data driven marketers. And if we know that at Facebook, we know that if people make ten friends and they're going to become an active user, like a really active user, if we can get to that number, that's data driven market and you're going to do everything you can to optimize towards that. Right. So I think having the north star those types of things and being much more data driven and look at the numbers a lot more and being high temple with your testing, that is what a growth hacker is. You know, the biggest thing that I've learned over the years from growth hackers or growth marketers is there's a lot of leverage inside of a company outside of marketing. In and of itself, design and user experience has such a big impact. Or think about Amazon. Amazon grew to being such a large company because of their prime shipping. Yes, there's other factors that made Amazon successful, but that one thing not only caused more people to sign up and spend money on Amazon, but it caused more people to come back and continually have repeat purchases. So there's many different ways that you can grow your brand or your traffic, row your sales and revenue through divisions and channels that aren't quote unquote marketing. Yep, I'm kind of to double down on Neil's point. Internet market is really focused on Internet marketing. We're talking about all the things you can do with ads, all the things you can do with SEO. But when we talk about growth hacking, that's a component of it. But product marketing that's a component of growth hacking. Creating a great user experience that's a piece of it too. So what happens now is, I would say, part of growth hacking. What goes above it. The umbrella piece is the growth team. And you know for Facebook they had growth teams, Twitter they had growth teams. A lot of these silicon value companies have growth teams because when you have an engineer and you have a product person, and you have the combined efforts of these people moving in one direction, it's a different story. And back in the day when I worked at Treehouse, we actually formed a growth team and it was myself, it was the CTO, and it was the marketing team that reported to me, and we had data scientists and all that. That That was a completely different story than any other Internet marketing campaign. That I've tried in the past. Neil and I were in a unique position here because we can straddle the line between being on the tech side or being on an Internet marketing side. So that's why we want to bring you these perspectives. In other words, all Eric and I are trying to get you to do is open up your eyes and look for opportunities outside of just the norm. And if you do that, you'll start finding more ways to grow your company and it all helps each other. The biggest key lesson here though, if you're going to take something from this podcast episode, is don't just have people in the marketing department focus on ways to grow the business. Have everyone within the company focus on growing the business, because if everyone has that growth mindset, you'll see more revenue. Yep. Actually that goes back to the earlier point. If you have a north star for your company. Again with Facebook, everyone needs to get to ten friends. If you can have that north star, I'm not saying it's easy to get that, but if you can have that, everyone's aligned when they wake up for work. It's just going to become a lot easier to get things done. So that is it for today. Go to marketing school dot io slash live that's live to fill an application for the Growth Accelerator Virtual Event. If it looks like it's a good fit, Neil and I will reach out to you. But we got some great speakers confirmed, really excited about it and copywriter pros, Facebook ads pros, conversion pros, M and a pros, just pros across the board. All right, So that is it for today and we'll see tomorrow. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool dot io until next time. Class dismissed