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

by Ryan Holiday

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

Growth hacking is not a 1-2-3 sequence but instead a fluid process.

You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.

the best marketing decision you can make is to have a product or business that fulfills a real and compelling need for a real and defined group of people—no matter how much tweaking and refining this takes.

imagine your product from someone’s perspective other than your own. That’s the best way to get to PMF—because ultimately this isn’t about you; it’s about the people you’re trying to turn into customers.

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.

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible.

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.

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

half strategy, half engineering.

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 BERGER

The growth hacker has a response: Well, why should customers do that? Have you actually made it easy for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth talking about?

not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread

virality at its core is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.

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.”

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 WOZNIAK

Everything can be improved. The reality is that your product is probably broken in at least one way.

According to Bain & Company, a 5 percent increase in customer retention can mean a 30 percent increase in profitability for the company.

With tools like Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa, it was easy to research potential sites we wanted to appear on, cross-check their traffic, and then reach out.

It didn’t feel like I was selling, because I wasn’t. I wasn’t pushing, because I didn’t need to. I’d built those aspects into the product. I’d hacked marketing and product development and sales together into a perpetual motion machine.

Who are my ideal early adopters? How can I make my platform particularly enticing to them right now? Why is this service indispensable? Or how do I make it indispensable to them? Once they come on board, does the service provide/encourage/facilitate them inviting or bringing more users with them? How willing and prepared am I to improve based on the feedback and behavior of these users? What kind of crazy/cool thing can I do to get attention—something that, ideally, no one has ever done before?

reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users.

Find a subreddit (a topic-driven niche on the reddit site that addresses the market or space you plan to launch in),

You can get the mindset for growth hacking by reading. You learn the techniques by doing.