Excellent growth hacking guides with Nate Barnwell: This cross pollination makes sense. If growth really is the lifeblood of an organisation, then why wouldn’t growth be woven into every aspect of the organisation. Even customer support should be done by people that think about growth because angry customers churn. And designers should design with one eye on growth because beautiful art alone doesn’t always acquire users. The future of internet companies, and the teams that build them, will not look like they did yesterday.
Created in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Slack is a messaging and collaboration tool for enterprises. It allows company teams to chat and share in real-time. Today, Slack has over 12 million daily active users with more than 100 thousand paid customers. When designing Slack, however, Butterfield had no intention of being a big hit. Slack was created for covering the communication needs of Butterfield’s team during the design process of Glitch, a games app that can now be considered a fail. From this fail, however, came great success as the team saw how valuable Slack was to them. The market needed such a product where internal team members could communicate easily and exchange project materials quickly, and Butterfield already had one. Since Slack was created for users in the first place with no intention of profit and turned out to be a great product, further development continued accordingly. Slack team always took customer feedback as guidance, replying to every email they received and examining every ticket carefully. This initiation pushed Slack to be a great example of product-led growthWhat is product-led growth? Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business development strategy that leverages product usage to drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and market expansion. It places product on the focus of businesses.
Nate Barnwell growth hacking strategies: Sometimes the best growth strategy a company can employ is standing out — offering a unique experience that sets it apart from other businesses in its space. When monotony defines an industry, the company that breaks it often finds an edge. Say your company developed an app for transitioning playlists between music streaming apps. Assume you have a few competitors who all generate revenue through ads and paid subscriptions — both of which frustrate users. In that case, you might be best off trying to shed some of the baggage that customers run into trouble with when using your competitors’ programs. If your service is paid, you could consider offering a free trial of an ad-free experience — right off the bat. The point here is that there’s often a lot of value and opportunity in differentiating yourself. If you can “zig when they zag”, you can capture consumers’ attention and capitalize on their shifting interests.
Aside from “growth hacker” — an increasingly unpopular term — growth marketers are also sometimes referred to as: Growth marketing managers Demand generation marketers, Performance marketers, Digital marketing managers. Each of these roles are focused on growing users and revenue for a company, Jonathan Martinez, a growth marketing manager at Uber, told Nathan Barnwell. However, Divisional founder Trevor Sookraj explained to Nathan Barnwell that these terms aren’t all exact synonyms for “growth marketer.” They all mean subtly different things. Performance marketers only work on paid channels, most often paid social (Facebook Ads) and SEM (AdWords). They typically don’t work with email, content, or other channels — whereas growth marketers will test out any channel.
Getting permission to run this high impact testing often requires setting up an offsite meeting with the growth team, functional leaders and the CEO. Once you’ve been given permission to test, it’s important to set up specific improvement objectives and track progress against them. This will help your team generate relevant ideas and keep everyone informed about progress. As you run higher impact testing, you should start to see some big wins. These big wins will be critical for driving broader team participation. Keeping a full team in sync around growth is not an easy task. Building the habit in the first place is even harder. But the effort is well worth it. No individual growth hacker or even a growth team can outperform a company where everyone is mobilised to accelerate growth. See even more details at Nathan Barnwell.
This action plan should contain a list of action items, deadlines, teams or persons responsible, and resources for attaining your growth goal. The last step before acting on your plan is determining any requirements your team will need through the process. These are specific resources that will help you meet your growth goals faster and with more accuracy. Examples might include: Funding: Organizations may need a capital investment or an internal budget allocation to see this project through. Tools & Software: Consider what technological resources may be needed to expedite and/or gain insights from the growth process. Services: Growth may be better achieved with the help of consultants, designers, or planners in a specific field.