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If your product doesn't suck and it won't sell you suck at marketing. "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. It wasn't a start-up but a

• nanijoe 10y ago
  What did you do to turn things around though?
  • 79d697i6fdif 10y ago
    1) Remade website to be more professional looking, faster, more focused towards SEO, mobile friendly. I could write many pages on this :) but following online guides will get you in the ballpark 2) Started writing interesting content. Truly good content is a PITA and you need to be a decent writer to make something compelling, but our first good article got us more traffic than the entire site with over 100 content pages. 3) New tools. everything linked together to see where our sales were coming from. Phone system, website, live chat, in person. All of our leads funneled into one system. We could see what was getting people and what wasn't 4) Online advertising. Locally first, expand AD reach as campaign becomes more nationally competitive. Make sure all the tools you setup continue to track where all these leads are coming from 5) Better "convincing" of clients that we're legit. Company T-Shirts and swag. Hotel-type exaggerated pictures of our team and office. Meet the team page. Professional website like I mentioned earlier. FB, google maps, yellowpages, wherever we could get a free listing. Automated scheduling systems for client meetings, phone tree for calls, tons of previous work repurposed as marketing material for clients to see. Listing our bigger clients on our website. 800 phone #. All the hallmarks of a big successful business even though we weren't exactly gave clients a much bigger confidence in our abilities and enabled us to charge more. 6) Marketing toward high value targets-- we needed to get the ear of C level and VP's. Concentrating on the fact that we were a US company without outsourcing. Marketing to wealthy areas "doctorville" we called it. Targeted marketing to business corridors. We went deep, going as far as checking the AS of your IP address and whether any services were running on it. A surprising amount of the time would could link an IP back to a company, so we could quietly market to your company just from you visiting our site. 7) competitive research. Found our biggest local competitors. Quietly outbid them on all their ad keywords. Even more quietly made sure we had all the backlinks they did on search. Got a list of their clients one way or another, marketed directly to their clients already knowing their weaknesses from our clients who previously worked with those competitors. One competitor hosted their own servers, so I figured out who owned the IP and tracked ownership of the company through their email server. Another put their email address at the bottom of all public sites they wrote, a simple targeted google search returned all/most of their clients' sites. Another had a "client login" page setup on all of their sites that had a redirect to their main page. Searching for backlinks using SEO tools revealed most of these client sites. Lots more. It took a lot of creative thinking and some failures :)
    • DenisM 10y ago
      Are you open to consulting? Either to help in hiring a person like you or in getting your help directly? My email is in profile.
      • 79d697i6fdif 10y ago
        only for free, current job prevents me from doing anything outside work :). I'll email you when off work
        • adamqureshi 10y ago
          email me too. In profile. I wanna show you what Im working on.
        • brilliantcode 10y ago
          please email me too! mine is in profile.
        • kekimchi 10y ago
          Could you please also contact me? Thank you !! :)
        • Radim 10y ago
          Ping me as well please, radim@rare-technologies.com. Love your no-nonsense pragmatic attitude :)
    • adamqureshi 10y ago
      Daym! its a free strategy brief! Thank You.
      • devopsproject 10y ago
        Isn't most of this common sense stuff? 1) Modern website with seo 2) produce compelling content 3) reduce redundant tools and streamline processes 4) advertise your product 5) advertise your business 6) knowing your customers and decision makers and advertising appropriately 7) understanding your competition
  • brilliantcode 10y ago
    I highly suggest this thread to be "stickied" or made aware of in someway. It's literally gold and this is exactly why toiling the jungles of HN comments is worth it-you discover gems that you can put into action.
    • throwawaydbfif 10y ago
      :) I checked out your site, looks great...Very similar to our setup. Two things I noticed. Your site can be made more optimized for highly impatient types. I recommend always showing a phone number that leads directly to a sales line with no wait, and a live chat bubble for those too skittish to give you any information. I always found best results putting the phone number big at the top of the page and again near the contact form. Make it show a special tracked number when users come through ads and the business is open for calls, your regular office number for visitors that didn't come through ads, and a disposable phone number to your cellphone for people that originally came through an ad but tried to call when the business is closed. Make all calls coming through ads go directly to a real person. The justification for all this work is that you already paid good money for anyone that comes through ads so its financially worth a little spam to give them a direct line to a real person. You want your conversion rate as high as possible once you've already paid. If you are a local business use a local area code, 800 # for anything advertised nationally. For the live chat bubble, make it automatically come up and say something friendly to anyone that has browsed site for more than X minutes or seen more than X pages. Make sure it only shows up when real people are available. Add something near to contact form like "or chat with us now" that automatically opens the bubble and notifies a real person of an incoming request. In my experience you'll get around 20% of initial contact from calls and maybe 30% from live chat. A decent percentage of these will be people too lazy, paranoid, or old school to fill out your contact form. Email forms are increasingly used for annoying stuff like permission to view the rest of an article, so many users are weary of giving you a direct contact without knowing if their please will go into a black hole. The ability to contact immediately, through phone and especially live chat alleviates these concerns. It makes you real, legit in their minds, immediately.
      • brilliantcode 10y ago
• molsongolden 10y ago
  Any top tips to get going in the right direction?
• shostack 10y ago
  As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there. The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers (particularly a technical audience such as this one) and that there are in fact good marketers who have ethics and deliver results.
  • throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    It's true, but on the other hand I can't think of a term for "good marketing person" that hasn't been ruined :).
  • kristineberth 10y ago
    The problem with finding great marketing people is that there's no barrier to entry into the profession. Anyone can (and does) say that they're a 'marketing expert,' a 'growth hacker' or a 'marketing guru' [gag]. To be great at it, yes, people need to have technical ability. But they also need a sort of sixth-sense intuition (visual sensibility, language skills, an understanding of psychology) that can't be taught or bought. In my decade in the field I've observed almost zero correlation between marketing-specific education and ability. Experience yes, but education no. It's a frustrating profession to be in sometimes because often only great marketers can spot other great marketers. Meanwhile sh*tty ones ruin the field's rep for everyone else.
    • shostack 10y ago
      Most solid digital marketers I know are entirely self-taught because when they were getting started there was no real digital marketing industry. "Digital" was just the new channel people had to try out. And yes, I agree it takes a great marketer to spot others. It would be a like a designer interviewing someone for a coding position. They might say lots of technical jargon type stuff and you'll have no idea what is made up, what is buzzwords, and what are signals that say a person is good at what they do. I wonder if companies would pay for a marketing consultant to help them hire.
• twothamendment 10y ago
  I'll agree with your statement - "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. Growth hacking = marketing. Life hack = common sense - or what used to be common.
  • ameister14 10y ago
    It didn't used to be. Growth Hacking used to mean Marketing+Coding+Statistics Now it just means marketing.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      But good marketing pretty much always leveraged statistics. Growth hacking seems to be simply marketing applied to marketing itself - a rebranding to include the word "hacking", because word "hacking" is hot, and all the cool kids these days like it.
      • ameister14 10y ago
        While good marketing leverages statistics, usually the marketing personnel themselves do not understand statistics. They'd turn to the engineers to design a landing page for them and to the data analysts to do the statistical modeling for them. They won't think of writing a script to work for them or build a program to handle their reporting. In my understanding, a growth hacker should basically be able to do all that themselves in addition to having the more traditional marketing skills.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Depends. In my dictionary, "common sense" mostly means suboptimal things people do because they don't bother to think about what they're doing. A lot of the "live hacks" I've seen are things that fly in the face of lots of people, who would implore you to "stop doing silly things". Or maybe I just grew up in a bad, uninventive environment.
  • siquick 10y ago
    Growth Hacking is more a technical version of marketing/user acquisition using techniques that a 'standard' marketer wouldn't be able to able to use because of a lack of programming skills.
• Gustomaximus 10y ago
  Rehashing a previous comment on how I look for good marketers: 1) Look for someone that has experience working big and small companies. Big brands will train comms, project management, procedure and how to think at scale. Small brands give 'getting it done' skills, generalist experience and show they can get technical/dirty hands. Larger brand experience typically looks more impressive but often work has been project management for agencies and doesnt suit hands on efforts or creativity. Likewise if you're business is big enough to run agencies if someone has always been hands on they often struggle as project managers and understanding how to communicate needs in a way that translates effectively downstream. 2) Dig into exact contributions for past roles. Ask for logic that lead to decisions. Often marketers talk about great campaigns results but really they were a body in a room with little input. Dig for detail and motivations to decisions and you will find out who is who. 3) Look for initiative with intelligence. Many solid looking marketeers repeat what is always done, optimising here and there. That suits some roles and businesses. There's an unrecognised value in the solid citizen employee. But for smaller business looking for exceptional results you need someone who will see the world independently of the compaineis previous activites, and most likely their previous roles. In this repeating and optimising wont work. Ensure you find people that introduce campaigns and activities with originallity if you need new oppurtunity and delivery. 4) Experience counts. It's easy to be attracted to enthusuasm but confidence/enthusiasm and ability are often confused. Look for someone that has done things. When looking at people with higher level expereince ensure they can get thier hands dirty. Make sure they have the ability to learn and adapt vs puely strategise. 5) Don't go cheap. I often see startups advertising low paid marketing roles, while they pay for experienced developers. Half the price sounds great but they will bring a fraction of the value. 6) Find someone that can analyse data vs report it. There's a big difference in the 2 and the former is surprisingly rare. 7) Avoid anyone that shows narcissistic tendency or is generally 'me' focused. This personality tends to be bad comms people (especially with social) as they see the world from their POV, not the customers. Also your risking a tough working enviroment. Look for things like how they delivered on a job they felt was wrong or lacked value as well as the usual egocentric viewpoints when they discuss marketing examples. 8) Look for someone that lives marketing beyond thier job. A person that can talk about companies beyond their own and the role they've likey researched for. Look for interest in the wider industry/technologies vs focusing only on thier job. 9) Dont stress about direct inductry experience. Unless there is incredibly niche market knowedge or contacts needed a good marketer will be good regardless of product. Thats said you need the right marketing category. A EDM specialist can likely shift to PPC, but events, PR are entirly different. So people lump marketing together but the fields are entirely different. 10) Sales and marketing are not the same thing. Know what you need. They dont often come all-in-one. 11) While not an absolute I usually check linkedin contacts to skill endorsements ratio. Typically this ratio is higher for the people I know are good marketers. I wouldn't make my decision by this but is seems one of those soft indicators. 12) When you interview give a 10min exercise before to discuss and cover up real-time actual skills. E.g. show them some relevant to role campaign materials (e.g. landing pages/EDM's) and ask them how they would improve. Ask them what they would do with $50k. Typically I add in some spelling/grammar mistakes to also look for attention to detail as it tends to be a 'you have it or you dont' skill (like initiative) and not something you can train up. Once onboard; 13) Make sure they have a budget. Dont think the salary is the budget and then they can write viral blog/FB posts. Generally I'd say a 10-20x marketing salary would be a good rule of spend if bringing a permanent marketing role in. 14) Give marketers product input. They should have their finger on the customer pulse and valuable views on what sell/motivates users. Dont let tech side shut out marketing. With the coding thing, I have to disagree there. In 15 years of marketing I've never seen that correlation. 100% agree being tech savvy is useful, especially in setting up testing and tracking tools but an actual coder... not from my experience.
• ux-app 10y ago
  So c'mon man, don't leave us hanging. What are your marketing strategies? I'm the dev of a really cool product, we have very little money for marketing and we're looking for ways to gain new customers. Our numbers seem good to us, but we're new to this so not sure. Our visitor to registered user conversion is 4% Our registered users to paid user conversion is approx 10% This seems ok to me, but not sure. What we really need is a cost effective way to move forward. What do we do!! Thanks for your help :)
  • throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    I use different throwaways on my devices, sorry. I'm 79d697i6fdif as well :)
• urahara 10y ago
  What specific coding skills do you think a marketer should have and what kind of things to code?