I know I recently said I would be reading less and learning less in favour of more building and business development this year but I still have some books to finish off reading and a few on my reading list..

One such book i've finished reading is Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday, so here is a very short review..

Growth Hacking

I've been fascinated by the concept of growth hacking and its relation to traditional marketing for a while as whilst I can build any product (cloud, web, mobile, desktop, AI, XR), building awareness around them can often be difficult.

It almost seems too good to be true.. the promise of growing an audience and business using non-traditional techniques that are cheaper and faster than traditional marketing by changing ones mindset about how to market to audiences.

The premise is that traditional marketing is a) expensive, b) safe and boring, c) pretty much done in the same way by everyone, d) hasn't evolved with customer/audience behavior.

And having worked closely with marketing departments, i'd have to agree. Their budgets whilst eye watering and resources/headcount abundant, seem stuck doing the same thing over and over again just as their competitors do.

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got"

Something I said so much during my time as a Developer Relations Lead, my voice went hoarse. Lateral thinking just doesn't seem to be a pre-requisite in corporate marketing, which is pre-occupied with perpetuating the "corporate brand" in a consistent manner to think about much else. Great for maintaining the status quo / "professional image", bad for anything else like grabbing attention, making waves, or growing an audience.

Perhaps growth hacker marketing is an antidote to this common marketing affliction?

Note: I'm reading an interesting book called How Calm Whipped Up A Storm that has some fascinating case studies of massive PR / marketing wins from doing things differently from its competitors. I will write a review when finished.

Being Remarkable

Personally, when I think marketing, I think about being "Remarkable", standing out from competitors and doing things differently. Purple Cow by Seth Godin is a fantastic short read all about this and ranks highly on my all time favourite book list.

Growth Hacker Marketing

The book starts with a great question. If you just started a new business and had zero marketing budget, what would you do to get the word out?

It also starts with a reminder that if you don't have PMF (Product Market Fit), no amount of marketing in the world whether it is traditional or of the growth hacking variety will make your business successful - So make sure you have PMF before turning up the marketing dial.

"A great product is the best marketing tool"

The right audience

"Not all people are the right people" - Like Crossing the Chasm and other product development books, Ryan highlights that to get maximum return on your efforts, you need to target the early adopters that will become your champions, not the mainstream.

Go where your audience are. It's about best focusing what little energy & resources you have and once you have an interested audience, creating feedback loops with them to continually improve your product.

Encouraging virality & Finding your growth hack

Wherever possible, building viral mechanisms into product development is a good idea.

Examples include DropBox providing more storage space when inviting other users, PayPal providing free money into peoples accounts on signup, and Hotmail including a link in email footers inviting others to sign up for a free email account.

Retention

"Retention trumps acquisition" - Bronson Taylor (Growth Hacking TV)

Ryan highlights the importance of retention and optimising current customers.

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

According to Market Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, while to a new prospect it's just 5 to 20 percent.

Return on investment

"Growth hacking is about maximising ROI - about spending our energies and efforts where they will be most effective"

Ryan highlights that traditional marketing which can include large expenditures on big campaigns can often miss and that growth hacker marketing can provide a greater ROI by being, smaller, more focussed, and faster on specific audiences and better data driven resulting in fewer (and cheaper) misses and more hits.

Experimentation

Experimentation is at the heart of growth hacker marketing. Something can always be improved. Growth hacking relies heavily on A/B testing, analytics and experimentation.

Eating his own dogfood

Avoiding any possible accusation of a "do as I say, not as I do" situation, in the conclusion of the book Ryan highlights how he used the techniques he describes to help with the successful launch of his book including laser focused targeting of the target audience, greatly empathising with an understanding them. Experimenting with the content in electronic/online MVP format to see how it was received before publishing the end physical book.

Conclusion

Having published a book of my own, I know the pressures authors are under to pad out their book to make the book longer/have more pages. At only 100ish pages long, I think Ryan has provided a book with a high value/advice density and avoids any "filler" that many similar books suffer from.

At the end of his book Ryan includes some takeways in the form of FAQs and resource lists to help you get started and answer some common questions. This highlights his purpose to provide this book not as a tome on growth hacker marketing but a stepping off point for people to get started with growth hacker marketing by providing actionable guidance.

I've certainly learned about techniques I want to apply when I next create products I want to market. And considering it is such a short book (around 100 pages) I recommend you read it.

PS. I'll be ranking this highly on my all time favourite book list and assign it an appropriate rank, and if you are looking for your next read, check out GoodBusinessBooks.com.

-- Lee