Do you know what Growth Hacking is? [11 cases inside]
If not, then bad. Very bad friends. Growth Hacking is a very powerful addition to traditional marketing. It allows to “crack” the growth and enter a new stage in the development of the product / site / service.
I really liked how Denis Saveliev more than a year ago, at Zuckerberg Call, described this term:
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Growth Hacking is the answer to the modern realities of Internet marketing, which is changing faster than the site owners would like. The majority of entrepreneurs do not have time to master one or another marketing tool before it is released into circulation. Growth Hacking is a concept suggesting that the ability to master new tools and, importantly, the ability to immediately test them in action is more important than a thorough study of these tools.
This option seemed to me the most appropriate. Although I would also like to add some information from Wikipedia:
Growth hackers use cheap and innovative alternatives to traditional marketing (for example, organizing viral companies, using social media, referral systems, A / B testing ) instead of standard ways to promote and develop a project.
In general, one very interesting person pushed me to this post on the website Boosta.ru . This is Aladdin Shchaslyvyi , the creator of GrowthHackingIdea.com. Growthhackingidea is a closed online community that can be accessed by invitation only . There are no other ways to "enter". It already consists of more than 20,000 people (he managed to gather such a large number of interested people in just 4 months using the growth hacking methods). Among subscribers are employees of Microsoft, Coca Cola, Linkedin, Adobe and many other companies.
1 grove hack per day. Every day you will receive one short letter in the mail. It is made in such a way that you do not have to read large articles and think about how to implement this technique. All briefly, of course. Read - did. In my opinion, this is the best approach to providing content in the E-mail newsletter.
And if you are thinking now: “Subscribe or not,” then it is better to take a pause in your thoughts. Below are 11 incredibly cool examples of growing hacks by famous companies. I am sure you will like them. And after that you decide whether this topic is interesting or not. Let's start, friends!
I think that the project needs no introduction. But once about him no one knew. The project needed to be promoted to recruit the first users. And instead of the standard methods of Internet marketing, the guys from Dropbox made a video about their product, which attracted the attention of the coolest startup accelerator Y Combinator . This was the first step, which gave a large influx of users. After that, they made another video about their product and achieved posting on Digg.com (a social news portal). And this was a key moment in the development of the project. After posting on Digg in 24 hours, they received 75,000 users who left their E-mail address in order to be the first to access the service.
Get as many users for 1 day is impossible using standard techniques of Internet marketing. For them, a great product video and interaction with partners. By the way, people who watch videos on the site are 64% more likely to buy (Comscore research). Do not forget that most people are visuals. They are easier to perceive video and images. And if the video is very cool, then it can also become viral (it will begin to spread automatically using reposts in social networks, online media, mouth-to-mouth), with the result that the popularity of the product may increase by several times. It is likely that these factors turned out to be on the Dropbox side.
Linkedin
<img src = "
"alt =" image "/>
Social network for professionals: without cats, photos, music and video. This is a business network where you can find business partners, jobs or employees in a company and sell your services very well, especially when it comes to B2B. In our project Changeagain.me we use Linkedin as one of the main sales channels.
Although this social network is not at all common in Russia, over 300 million users are registered in it. And once in it there were no users. To promote the site, they used opinion leaders (or, as they call them abroad, Influencers). Opinion leaders who are popular on other social networks that many people subscribe to and from which others follow. They managed to create a situation where opinion leaders encouraged others to register with LinkedIn. The message was something like this: “This cool dude is already registered there. Why have you not created your profile in Linkedin and have not described all your merits? Do it faster. This is really cool and useful! ”
And in the early stages of development, this way of promoting the project allowed Linkedin to become one of the most popular social networks in the world. Moreover - one of the most useful. Unlike many others.
700,000 users in the first week after launch. Strong, yes?
They used a combination of hacks to create a huge buzz around the product.
1. Focus on PR. Using all possible information channels to create "noise" (now it can be blogs, thematic portals, news portals, forums, etc.)
2. Interaction with opinion leaders. They shared information about launching on social networks, recommended registering to be the first to access the service.
Relying on these two channels a large number of people learned about them. But this is not the main thing. This was the first stage - attracting visitors. In the second stage, the Mailbox guys used the effect of limitations. Even before registration, the landing page showed how many people had already left their information in order to access the service. And after registering, each user saw what his number was in the queue and how soon he would finally be able to use the service (a very good way to engage)
One of the most popular payment systems - 170 million users, $ 8 billion in revenue for 2014.
<img src = "
"alt =" image "/>
Before the system became popular, it was necessary to attract a critical mass of users. If a person has no one to send money or no one to receive it, he will not use this system. The same situation as with social networks. If your friends are not in the social network, then there is no sense from it. After 2 days you stop using it. In this case, a set of critical mass - the main problem.
They tried the usual ways of advertising - it turned out to be expensive. They tried to enter into partnerships with banks - no one agreed. They simply could not reach out to potential customers - payments via the Internet were something too new and incomprehensible.
Then Paypal did very simple. Each new user and the one who brought him into the system was given $ 10 per account. Yes, it is expensive. Yes, not everyone can afford such a hack (units of companies). In the short term - this is a big loss. In the long run, this is the construction of a multi-billion dollar company. And it was Growth Hacking that allowed to increase the necessary critical mass.
Not only did people register themselves and start bringing their friends around, an incredible “hype” began around this. Subsequently, it helped attract the attention of future investors and raise the next rounds of investment.
One of the first free postal services, by mid-2012 was the world's largest postal service. It was launched back in 1996.
To promote your product, a simple grow-hak was used. When the user sent someone a letter from the Hotmail service, there was a signature at the very bottom - “This letter was sent via Hotmail. Join the service right now ” (“ This email sent with Hotmail, Join Hotmail now ”)
Twitter
After the launch of this social network and continuous PR campaign, a lot of people registered, but did not become regular users. In this situation, usually use E-mail newsletters, which should return the user to the service. Or retargeting so that he does not forget about you.
Everything was different on Twitter. Instead of using standard tools, growth hackers of the company began to look for the “aha” moment (a turning point after which the user binds to the product). Was found. that the turning point for twitter users is a subscription for 5-10 people on the first day after registration. If a person subscribed to 5-10 accounts, then he is most likely to remain in the service and enter it every day.
What should have been done in such a situation?
It was necessary to help the "new" to subscribe to 10 people. For this, a block has been added with the offer to subscribe to several accounts. How the accounts were selected for the offers - I do not know. But I think that a smart algorithm worked there that selected people depending on interests, etc.
And to this day this thing hangs on Twitter. Screen from my Twitter account Boosta.ru :
After applying this gros hack, user retention has increased significantly. After all, you know that attracting new users will always be more expensive than keeping current ones.
Instagram
For promotion, they used already other popular platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr.
By posting photos, the user could choose which social networks to send this snapshot to. Naturally, when the photo was sent to another social network, there was a mention of the Instagram service.
This technique is good not only in terms of product promotion. This is user value. Many post the same photos in all profiles on social networks. Thanks to this functionality, Instagram has simplified this process. That's cool. User value is what really matters in any product. And that should be in priority.
Pinterest
Social Internet service, photo hosting, allowing users to add online images, place them in thematic collections and share with other users.
This service had the same problem as Twitter, and all other social networks - how to keep the user?
If in the Twitter example, the user was shown a recommendation block, then Pinterest went even further. When registering, the user automatically subscribed to the most popular people who post quality content. And now the problem with the lack of news feeds (in this case, photos) was automatically solved. It was possible to achieve the involvement of a new user immediately after registration. And then he himself decided on whom to subscribe or unsubscribe.
Pinterest used another grow-hack to retain users. If a person signed up via Facebook, then all friends from FB using Pinterest automatically became his followers . And he automatically subscribed to them. But this is not the most interesting.
The process of auto-subscribing friends from Facebook did not occur immediately, but stretched in time. For example, on the second day after registration, a notification came that a friend from FB had signed up for you on the 3rd, 4th, and so on. The user noticed such activity, saw the value in it (everyone loves being subscribed to), returned to the service and became more attached to it.
300 hours of video loaded every minute. 800 million users monthly. Worthy numbers.
Of course, in the early stages of development, everything was not so rosy. To promote their site, they used several tricks (all these hacks were implemented before 2007 and now they seem quite obvious, but then it was different):
1. Monthly video contests with their own good prizes
2. iPon Nano every day. People who added new videos had a better chance of winning.
3. Monthly video contests with partners. Youtube organizes the competition, the partner provides prizes (and PR)
4. Monetary reward the best channels. Youtube just started sharing revenues with those who made decent and popular content.
Personal Finance Management Application.
For the development of their application, they went in a way that is not standard for us - through content marketing and SEO optimization.
Why non-standard? Because we have taken in 99% of the cases just to sell, to try to sniff the customer. They had the opposite.
They started their own personal finance blog, where they constantly wrote cool articles on this topic. It was a continuous stream of benefits for the target audience. And they did not focus on sales, but on values. They benefited all readers, and readers became attached to the company and used their application. Building a loyal and dedicated audience in its purest form.
By the way, it was important not only to generate the correct content, it was necessary and properly promote it. Due to the fact that the articles were very high quality and useful, they constantly got to the top online platforms like Reddit, Digg, etc.
Personally, I use this approach with both hands. I really like this strategy - value forward.
Example from offline business. Very cool. I could not tell about it.
It was in 1970. Final World Cup. Only a few seconds remained before the referee's whistle, as Pele (one of the most famous players in the world) asked to postpone the start of the match for a couple of seconds so that he could tie his shoelace laces.
Of course, at this moment all the cameras were aimed at Pele and everyone saw him tying the laces of his Puma King boots. Incredibly cool idea!
It was only some of the interesting cases about Growth Hacking, which I plan to talk about on Buste in the future. The next article will be devoted to the classification of growth hackers and the skills that a cool specialist should possess (and in another 2 weeks I will publish a batch of new Growth Hacking cases - 10-20 pieces with a detailed description)
If briefly about the skills, they are as follows:
Agree that it is not easy to combine all these skills. That is why there are very few steep grove hackers.
By the way, if you forgot to join the GrowthHackingIdea private community, here is your personal invitation . Click on it, then you can get access to daily grooves.
I would be very grateful for the repost of this article. I am sure that your friends and colleagues will like it. Buttons for repost from below.
I really liked how Denis Saveliev more than a year ago, at Zuckerberg Call, described this term:
')
Growth Hacking is the answer to the modern realities of Internet marketing, which is changing faster than the site owners would like. The majority of entrepreneurs do not have time to master one or another marketing tool before it is released into circulation. Growth Hacking is a concept suggesting that the ability to master new tools and, importantly, the ability to immediately test them in action is more important than a thorough study of these tools.
This option seemed to me the most appropriate. Although I would also like to add some information from Wikipedia:
Growth hackers use cheap and innovative alternatives to traditional marketing (for example, organizing viral companies, using social media, referral systems, A / B testing ) instead of standard ways to promote and develop a project.
In general, one very interesting person pushed me to this post on the website Boosta.ru . This is Aladdin Shchaslyvyi , the creator of GrowthHackingIdea.com. Growthhackingidea is a closed online community that can be accessed by invitation only . There are no other ways to "enter". It already consists of more than 20,000 people (he managed to gather such a large number of interested people in just 4 months using the growth hacking methods). Among subscribers are employees of Microsoft, Coca Cola, Linkedin, Adobe and many other companies.
What is the use of this community?
1 grove hack per day. Every day you will receive one short letter in the mail. It is made in such a way that you do not have to read large articles and think about how to implement this technique. All briefly, of course. Read - did. In my opinion, this is the best approach to providing content in the E-mail newsletter.
And if you are thinking now: “Subscribe or not,” then it is better to take a pause in your thoughts. Below are 11 incredibly cool examples of growing hacks by famous companies. I am sure you will like them. And after that you decide whether this topic is interesting or not. Let's start, friends!
The most famous Growth Hacking Cases
Dropbox
I think that the project needs no introduction. But once about him no one knew. The project needed to be promoted to recruit the first users. And instead of the standard methods of Internet marketing, the guys from Dropbox made a video about their product, which attracted the attention of the coolest startup accelerator Y Combinator . This was the first step, which gave a large influx of users. After that, they made another video about their product and achieved posting on Digg.com (a social news portal). And this was a key moment in the development of the project. After posting on Digg in 24 hours, they received 75,000 users who left their E-mail address in order to be the first to access the service.
Get as many users for 1 day is impossible using standard techniques of Internet marketing. For them, a great product video and interaction with partners. By the way, people who watch videos on the site are 64% more likely to buy (Comscore research). Do not forget that most people are visuals. They are easier to perceive video and images. And if the video is very cool, then it can also become viral (it will begin to spread automatically using reposts in social networks, online media, mouth-to-mouth), with the result that the popularity of the product may increase by several times. It is likely that these factors turned out to be on the Dropbox side.
<img src = "
"alt =" image "/>Social network for professionals: without cats, photos, music and video. This is a business network where you can find business partners, jobs or employees in a company and sell your services very well, especially when it comes to B2B. In our project Changeagain.me we use Linkedin as one of the main sales channels.
Although this social network is not at all common in Russia, over 300 million users are registered in it. And once in it there were no users. To promote the site, they used opinion leaders (or, as they call them abroad, Influencers). Opinion leaders who are popular on other social networks that many people subscribe to and from which others follow. They managed to create a situation where opinion leaders encouraged others to register with LinkedIn. The message was something like this: “This cool dude is already registered there. Why have you not created your profile in Linkedin and have not described all your merits? Do it faster. This is really cool and useful! ”
And in the early stages of development, this way of promoting the project allowed Linkedin to become one of the most popular social networks in the world. Moreover - one of the most useful. Unlike many others.
Mailbox
700,000 users in the first week after launch. Strong, yes?
They used a combination of hacks to create a huge buzz around the product.
1. Focus on PR. Using all possible information channels to create "noise" (now it can be blogs, thematic portals, news portals, forums, etc.)
2. Interaction with opinion leaders. They shared information about launching on social networks, recommended registering to be the first to access the service.
Relying on these two channels a large number of people learned about them. But this is not the main thing. This was the first stage - attracting visitors. In the second stage, the Mailbox guys used the effect of limitations. Even before registration, the landing page showed how many people had already left their information in order to access the service. And after registering, each user saw what his number was in the queue and how soon he would finally be able to use the service (a very good way to engage)
Paypal
One of the most popular payment systems - 170 million users, $ 8 billion in revenue for 2014.
<img src = "
"alt =" image "/>Before the system became popular, it was necessary to attract a critical mass of users. If a person has no one to send money or no one to receive it, he will not use this system. The same situation as with social networks. If your friends are not in the social network, then there is no sense from it. After 2 days you stop using it. In this case, a set of critical mass - the main problem.
They tried the usual ways of advertising - it turned out to be expensive. They tried to enter into partnerships with banks - no one agreed. They simply could not reach out to potential customers - payments via the Internet were something too new and incomprehensible.
Then Paypal did very simple. Each new user and the one who brought him into the system was given $ 10 per account. Yes, it is expensive. Yes, not everyone can afford such a hack (units of companies). In the short term - this is a big loss. In the long run, this is the construction of a multi-billion dollar company. And it was Growth Hacking that allowed to increase the necessary critical mass.
Not only did people register themselves and start bringing their friends around, an incredible “hype” began around this. Subsequently, it helped attract the attention of future investors and raise the next rounds of investment.
Hotmail
One of the first free postal services, by mid-2012 was the world's largest postal service. It was launched back in 1996.
To promote your product, a simple grow-hak was used. When the user sent someone a letter from the Hotmail service, there was a signature at the very bottom - “This letter was sent via Hotmail. Join the service right now ” (“ This email sent with Hotmail, Join Hotmail now ”)
After the launch of this social network and continuous PR campaign, a lot of people registered, but did not become regular users. In this situation, usually use E-mail newsletters, which should return the user to the service. Or retargeting so that he does not forget about you.
Everything was different on Twitter. Instead of using standard tools, growth hackers of the company began to look for the “aha” moment (a turning point after which the user binds to the product). Was found. that the turning point for twitter users is a subscription for 5-10 people on the first day after registration. If a person subscribed to 5-10 accounts, then he is most likely to remain in the service and enter it every day.
What should have been done in such a situation?
It was necessary to help the "new" to subscribe to 10 people. For this, a block has been added with the offer to subscribe to several accounts. How the accounts were selected for the offers - I do not know. But I think that a smart algorithm worked there that selected people depending on interests, etc.
And to this day this thing hangs on Twitter. Screen from my Twitter account Boosta.ru :
After applying this gros hack, user retention has increased significantly. After all, you know that attracting new users will always be more expensive than keeping current ones.
For promotion, they used already other popular platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr.
By posting photos, the user could choose which social networks to send this snapshot to. Naturally, when the photo was sent to another social network, there was a mention of the Instagram service.
This technique is good not only in terms of product promotion. This is user value. Many post the same photos in all profiles on social networks. Thanks to this functionality, Instagram has simplified this process. That's cool. User value is what really matters in any product. And that should be in priority.
Social Internet service, photo hosting, allowing users to add online images, place them in thematic collections and share with other users.
This service had the same problem as Twitter, and all other social networks - how to keep the user?
If in the Twitter example, the user was shown a recommendation block, then Pinterest went even further. When registering, the user automatically subscribed to the most popular people who post quality content. And now the problem with the lack of news feeds (in this case, photos) was automatically solved. It was possible to achieve the involvement of a new user immediately after registration. And then he himself decided on whom to subscribe or unsubscribe.
Pinterest used another grow-hack to retain users. If a person signed up via Facebook, then all friends from FB using Pinterest automatically became his followers . And he automatically subscribed to them. But this is not the most interesting.
The process of auto-subscribing friends from Facebook did not occur immediately, but stretched in time. For example, on the second day after registration, a notification came that a friend from FB had signed up for you on the 3rd, 4th, and so on. The user noticed such activity, saw the value in it (everyone loves being subscribed to), returned to the service and became more attached to it.
Youtube
300 hours of video loaded every minute. 800 million users monthly. Worthy numbers.
Of course, in the early stages of development, everything was not so rosy. To promote their site, they used several tricks (all these hacks were implemented before 2007 and now they seem quite obvious, but then it was different):
1. Monthly video contests with their own good prizes
2. iPon Nano every day. People who added new videos had a better chance of winning.
3. Monthly video contests with partners. Youtube organizes the competition, the partner provides prizes (and PR)
4. Monetary reward the best channels. Youtube just started sharing revenues with those who made decent and popular content.
Mint
Personal Finance Management Application.
For the development of their application, they went in a way that is not standard for us - through content marketing and SEO optimization.
Why non-standard? Because we have taken in 99% of the cases just to sell, to try to sniff the customer. They had the opposite.
They started their own personal finance blog, where they constantly wrote cool articles on this topic. It was a continuous stream of benefits for the target audience. And they did not focus on sales, but on values. They benefited all readers, and readers became attached to the company and used their application. Building a loyal and dedicated audience in its purest form.
By the way, it was important not only to generate the correct content, it was necessary and properly promote it. Due to the fact that the articles were very high quality and useful, they constantly got to the top online platforms like Reddit, Digg, etc.
Personally, I use this approach with both hands. I really like this strategy - value forward.
Puma
Example from offline business. Very cool. I could not tell about it.
It was in 1970. Final World Cup. Only a few seconds remained before the referee's whistle, as Pele (one of the most famous players in the world) asked to postpone the start of the match for a couple of seconds so that he could tie his shoelace laces.
Of course, at this moment all the cameras were aimed at Pele and everyone saw him tying the laces of his Puma King boots. Incredibly cool idea!
It was only some of the interesting cases about Growth Hacking, which I plan to talk about on Buste in the future. The next article will be devoted to the classification of growth hackers and the skills that a cool specialist should possess (and in another 2 weeks I will publish a batch of new Growth Hacking cases - 10-20 pieces with a detailed description)
If briefly about the skills, they are as follows:
- Data driven - focus on statistics, not on people's opinions and intuitions
- Knowledge of basic programming
- Customer orientation. A gray hacker who does not know his target audience will not be able to do something super efficient
- Teamwork skills
- Constant search for new receptions / opportunities, trend tracking
- A consistent approach to the implementation of the grou-hacks
- Exposure
Agree that it is not easy to combine all these skills. That is why there are very few steep grove hackers.
By the way, if you forgot to join the GrowthHackingIdea private community, here is your personal invitation . Click on it, then you can get access to daily grooves.
I would be very grateful for the repost of this article. I am sure that your friends and colleagues will like it. Buttons for repost from below.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/295916/
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