Hire a Growth Hacker Not Marketer

Wired UK Haziran sayısında ilgili olduğum için dikkatimi çeken bir yazı oldu. Josh Elman (Twitter profiline buraya tıklayarak ulaşabilirsiniz) Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin gibi bildiğimiz birçok girişimde pazarlama ve büyüme çalışmalarını gerçekleştirmiş birisi. Yazısında internet dünyası için growth hackerlardan ve neler yapabileceklerinden bahsediyor. Beğenerek okuduğum bu yazısı sizler için burada paylaşmak istedim. Ayrıca yine Josh Elman tarafından yazılan ‘What is “Growth Hacking” really?’ başlıklı yazıya da buraya tıklayarak ulaşabilirsiniz.

Hire a growth hacker, not a marketer

“In the internet bubble of the late 90s, it was common wisdom that to grow the fastest, you had to raise more money and spend more money on marketing than anyone else. This strategy worked for a few, such as Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon. But most companies from that period are in the internet graveyard after burning through hundreds of millions.

In today’s Silicon Valley, spending money to acquire users or customers is usually seen as a last resort instead of a go-to option. To grow fastest and biggest, top companies today instead focus on building feature after feature that helps attract new users or more quickly convert them into active users. This is frequently called “growth hacking”. It relies on a particular combination of creative engineering and data analysis to find, test, build and optimise the right features that help a product grow. Many companies have started to realise that they can’t just build a great product and expect growth to happen, nor can they afford to pay for it, but that they have to engineer it.

Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox and Instagram have all reached over 100 mil-lion active users (Facebook over a billion), and with little to zero “traditional” paid advertising. Rather than purchasing banner ads, these companies have built features that encourage users to share the products virally with their friends and colleagues. Rather than running expensive TV commercials, they create viral videos that spread rapidly on YouTube and Twitter. Rather than mailing CDs to every potential customer, companies leverage search-engine optimisation to make sure the right users land on their pages and convert to active users when searching from Google. Each of the companies listed has a dedicated team focused on building and running these programmes. In contrast to a traditional marketing team with managers, analysts and agency relationships, these growth teams include engineers, designers, product managers and data scientists. Growth teams constantly think about how to get the users of their products to market the products for them, or in other words, to make them more viral. They spend a lot of time learning how products spread through Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS and more, and then build features to optimise that process. To keep producing these results, it takes a deep technical understanding of how those systems work and how to measure the effectiveness of the platform. Growth teams try to determine the optimal number of friends for someone to send a Facebook request to; at what time of day is best to tweet; or how to ensure an email reaches the inbox, and not the junk folder.

In the early days of a company, finding the path towards sustainable growth is crucial. LinkedIn started with Reid Hoffman inviting 1,000 trusted contacts to join. Dropbox grew fastest when it optimised a model where users received extra storage space when a friend signed up.

One of the most coveted hires for many startups now is someone who understands growth, often called a “growth hacker”. Many startups and internet companies are hir-ing these over a traditional VP of marketing. I believe these trends will spread from consumer internet companies back to most marketing departments and agencies. Marketing teams will include engineers and designers, and talk as much about “road maps” and features as about ads and budget. And we’ll see more people reaching 100 mil-lion users without spending a lot.

MANY COMPANIES HAVE STARTED TO REALISE THAT THEY CAN’T JUST  BUILD A GREAT PRODUCT AND EXPECT GROWTH TO HAPPEN”

Girisim.co’da yazmış olduğum Takip Etmeniz Gereken 20 Growth Hacker konulu yazıya buradan ulaşabilirsiniz.