Marketing - Grattisfaction

9 Growth Hackers You Should Follow on Twitter

April 30, 2012 By Matt Leave a Comment

growth hackers on twitter
Image courtesy FAKEGRIMLOCK under Creative Commons

The Growth Hacker meme has finally taken off.

After a couple years of describing myself as a growth hacker and being met with blank stares, things are changing. I’m happy that people may now understand that a growth hacker is a person who can drive customer/user/MRR growth through a sophisticated combination of marketing, technical, and analytical skills. Basically, a growth hacker is a rain maker for the modern web company.

But where can a journeyman growth hacker like me look for advice? Fortunately, there are many prominent growth hackers that tweet, blog, answer questions on Quora, and otherwise share their wisdom. Here are some of my favorite growth hackers to follow on Twitter. (A number of them are CEOs and CTOs – that gives you some idea about how valuable this skillset is to the modern web enterprise.)

Sean Ellis – CEO – CatchFree

Sean is perhaps the original growth hacker – he coined the term. He also was the original VP marketing at some companies you might be familiar with – LogMeIn and Uproar – and helped accelerate growth at WordPress.com, Xobni, DropBox, and Eventbrite. (I suspect there’s some I’m missing.)
Now he’s the CEO of CatchFree – an amazing resource for finding free apps. He also writes the (aptly named) Startup Marketing blog.
Must-Read Posts:
Optimization Mistakes that Kill Startups
My Favorite Online Marketing Tactic – Doesn’t Work
To Pay Or Not To Pay To Acquire Users?

Noah Kagan – Chief Sumo (CEO) – AppSumo

Noah Kagan was the growth hacker behind Mint.com‘s initial growth. He was also an early product manager at Facebook, pushing out many of the features that everyone was incredibly upset about and soon recognized as better, like the newsfeed. (As a Facebook user since Fall 2004, I remember the incredible acrimony around the newsfeed, before it was recognized as superior.) He is now the CEO and Chief Sumo of AppSumo, a company that helps developers get distribution and entrepreneurs up their game. (And like me, Noah went to UC Berkeley.)
Must Read Posts:
Speech at UC Berkeley
How Mint Beat Wesabe
Quant-Based Marketing for Startups

Justin Briggs – Inbound Marketing Leader – Big Fish Games

Justin Briggs is the inbound marketing leader at Big Fish Games. He’s a gifted growth hacker, and has done everything from develop new techniques for visualizing link graphs & site traffic to get coverage in publications like Wired and MSN. Before Big Fish, he was a prominent consultant at Distilled.
Key Posts:
Business Metrics for Link Reporting
Building the Implicit Social Graph
How to Build Links and Drive Traffic with Infographics

Dan Martell – CEO – Clarity

Dan Martell founded Flowtown (acquired by DemandForce), Spheric Technologies, and now Clarity. He’s also an angel investor and a 500 Startups mentor.
Key Posts:
Hustlin’ for Conversions
Content Marketing for Startups
Why Building Great Admin Dashboards Can Lead to Amazing Products

Andy Johns – Product Manager, User Growth – Quora

Andy Johns is the Product Manager for User Growth at Quora. From Quora’s third-party traffic data, it seems like he’s doing a good job:

Before Quora, he worked on user growth at Facebook and Twitter. The scoreboard suggests he did a decent job.
Key Posts:
How Does Quora Manage to Get Such Good Google Search Placement for Its Questions?
What Are Some Top Strategies for Conversion Optimization?
Does Quora Research Its Users’ Behavior?
How Does Andy Johns Bring Traffic to Websites?

Dharmesh Shah – CTO/Co-founder – HubSpot

Dharmesh Shah is the founder and CTO of Hubspot, a large inbound marketing software company. He also wrote the ‘Get Found Using Inbound Marketing‘ book, and the author of OnStartups.com.
Key Posts:
Building a Startup Marketing Plan – Tips in 3 Words
Startup Lessons from 17 Hard-Hitting Quotes in “Moneyball”
Insider Tips from HubSpot’s Launch of Marketing Grader

Mat Clayton – CTO – Mixcloud

Mat Clayton is one of the world’s experts on driving user growth through open graph actions. His startup, Mixcloud, has seen 20% user growth month over month from clever Facebook & Twitter integrations.
Key Presentations:
The Next Level of Social Integration
Social Design

Danielle Morrill – Director of Marketing – Twilio

Danielle is behind Twilio‘s massive adoption and near universal marketing presence. She also mentors for 500 Startups, and shares wisdom about many growth topics, especially business development and successful event marketing. (There is a pervasive myth that PR & BD aren’t growth hacking. Growth hackers don’t exclude any tool from their arsenal.)

Key Posts:
Startup Marketing – 2nd Class Citizen, 2nd Rate Results
How to Hustle SXSW for Fun & Profit
Close the Loop on Your SXSW Campaign & Leads in 5 Steps

Neil Patel – VP Marketing – KISSMetrics

Neil Patel is currently the VP Marketing and cofounder of KISSMetrics, the leading customer analytics provider. (Customer analytics differs from web analytics because it integrates cohort data, CLTV, and other business metrics, rather than reporting on pageviews.) Neil also co-founded CrazyEgg & ACS (a high-performance SEO & digital marketing consultancy). He is also an angel investor, and frequently speaks at conferences.
Key Posts:
10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging
7 Business Mistakes That Nearly Broke Me… Literally
Design is Marketing
Are You a Hustler?

The Growth Hacker Twitter List

I’ve thrown all of these Twitter accounts into a Twitter list – you can follow it here. I’ll continue to maintain this list, and hopefully it will become one of the best sources of information on up-to-the-minute growth hacking strategy.

Follow the Growth Hacker Twitter List here.

I’m sure I’ve left some awesome people out – there are a number of great growth hackers at startups like Zynga, BigDoor, Cheezburger Networks, and many others. Who are your favorite growth hackers on Twitter? (Please leave a comment and I will add them to the Twitter list.)

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: growth hacker

Linkbranding and Influencer Engagement: How to Do It Right

April 27, 2012 By Matt Leave a Comment

John Doherty recently coined the term “LinkBranding” – moving beyond SEO oriented link building to get links that deliver sustainable brand value. Because these links are for people as well as search engines, they deliver more than just SEO value – they drive relevant, engaged traffic AND build brand equity.

What Does This Look Like?

In great linkbranding campaigns, marketers engage relevant influencers and deliver overwhelming value to them. This is a pretty abstract concept to wrap our heads around, so let’s look at an example.

I was reading one of my favorite startup blogs, Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries, and I noticed its great new design. (Eric’s blog is about the lean startup – basically ensuring startups build things people want by using customer development and market validation techniques to avoid the failure of the late 90s.)

But wait! In addition to a new design, there’s this badge from the design company, Digital Telepathy. (I’ve outlined it in red for visibility.)

Let’s take a closer look:

This is what great online marketing looks like.

In one fell swoop, Digital Telepathy:

Gets in front of an incredibly influential audience of founders, VCs, CEOs, and other executives.
Builds trust by associating themselves with a thought leader in startup theory.
Gets referral traffic from Eric’s blog.
Gets a site-wide exact match anchor text link (things SEOs’ dreams are made of) on a high authority site that will only get better with age.

All for the cost of one custom Blogger theme. And that, my friends, is linkbranding.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: linkbranding

Will Pictures Rule the Internet?

April 5, 2012 By SiteOwner Leave a Comment

Text rules the internet. It has for years. From the early days of BBSes and Usenet to modern SEO-driven sites, the web has largely been an interconnected series of text documents.

But now pictures are making a play for dominance. With the rise of Pinterest, Canv.as, and even more image-driven sites, a new era of communication almost entirely without machine-readable text is upon us.

(This is largely due to technological reasons and the increasingly wide spread of fast internet connections. As the web becomes more media-driven and dynamic, we’ll see structures based on text metaphors fade into the background. We’ll still have text, but we’ll see a growing number of services based on images and video communication rather that long form text.)

In this post, I’ll look at some of the trends in UI design and think about how marketers, product managers, and internet companies can take advantage of this shift.

Are Picture-Based Sharing and Curation UIs Becoming Ubiquituous?

Just about everyone is familiar with Pinterest at this point, but in case you’re not, it looks like this. The UI is basically a stream of pictures with minimal text.

Pinterest looks oddly similar to Canv.as, 4Chan founder Moot’s entry into the social sharing space:

We also see this design pattern on highly shared, curation-based non-social sites, like ThisIsWhyI’mBroke:

HackerThings, a curated site of merchandise for ‘hacker-type’ people, uses the same pattern. And I want to buy everything on the site:

What Opportunities Does This Shift Create?

For Entrepreneurs and VCs

There’s a massive ecosystem of companies devoted to the production, quality assurance, and data mining of text on the internet. All of this functionality will need to be ported to images, and it will be technologically complex functionality to implement.

There will be a generation of companies that extracts data from this new internet of images. These use cases will range from reputation management (is a negative image of your brand getting hot on Pinterest?) to plagiarism checking to Nielsen-style ratings and affinity data aggregation.

Effectively every tool we have for dealing with the internet is built on the assumption that the data on the internet is largely made of text or some sort of form field. As this becomes less true, we’ll need a new generation of image-centric tools, which will create opportunities for a new generation of marketing tools vendors, or at least a very robust M&A environment for these companies.

For Marketers

Every piece of content you create should have a shareable image badge. Where a magazine has a pull-quote, you should have a shareable image. See, for example, this image from Josh James’ blog:

If I had a female-focused consumer web app, I would think about getting users to create personalized images (like the Visual.Ly Twitter Infographics) and prompting a shareon Pinterest. I think there’s particularly a lot of potential here with quizzes – give people self-descriptive quiz images and a Pinterest button, and watch the traffic roll in.

For Agency Folk

Find some marketer-designers. Much like agencies of the past few years have found marketer-developers and marketer-quants very useful, marketers that know how to communicate with images will be in demand. (This skill will probably be included in the ‘social media marketer’ roll.) This is a channel that can drive a lot of traffic for marketers smart enough to embrace it soon.

Additionally, get the rest of your marketers some Photoshop classes and some design thinking training. We’re only going to see more data and complex ideas communicated through images to save time, so everyone will need to know how to make graphics work for them.

Increasingly people will link back to your site with an image rather than a headline. If you embrace the curated image, you’ll receive disproportionate returns for the next 6-9 months, after which point it will become pretty normal.

What do you think of image-based sites? Are they here to stay, or a flash in the pan?

Filed Under: Marketing, Product Tagged With: curation, images, pinterest, social

Thoughts on #Subcom (Subscription eCommerce)

March 28, 2012 By Matt 4 Comments

Subscription Commerce Subscriptions Are Like Getting Presents Every Month

There’s an interesting trend going in subscription ecommerce – where people order goods on quarterly or monthly subscription basis. This is a new reinvention of a very old idea, and lots of cool companies – from Shoedazzle to Guyhaus – are emerging in this market. In this post, I’ll share some thoughts about the nature of the #subcom market and the opportunities it creates.

For background, check out this infographic from KISSMetrics & Sean Percival:

Source: Box It Up – The Rise of Subscription Commerce

Curation versus Personalization

The most important part of the customer experience is the box and its contents. Every week when subscribers get their box in the mail, they must be absolutely delighted.

It seems that these companies are taking one of two approaches – either have experts curate the contents of the box, or enable users to select what goes in the box, often suggesting other items later.

There are major historical precedents for both of these models succeeding in media – the book of the month club, which became a huge business in the 1920s and 30s. The other model – of selection with computer aided personalization – helped NetFlix rise to prominence and millions of subscribers.

After a brief analysis of the market, it seems that services targeting a value proposition around deals tend to go with a curation-based model – companies like ShoeDazzle, Birchbox, and Stylemint deliver their value this way. By contrast, companies with a value proposition focused more around value and convenience tend to pick personalization – Manpacks and GuyHaus are examples of these companies.

Both of these models have consequences. With curation-based customer delight, companies have to source and deliver great merchandise that delights the customer. This merchandising skill is the main driver against churn – which is one of the biggest problems subscription commerce companies face.

By contrast, the personalization companies need to execute incredibly and are playing a game based on margins. This makes them vulnerable to players like Amazon.com, who can drive economies of scale with their size.

One Box to Rule Them All

There are a tremendous number of small players in this market, and a few larger ones like ShoeDazzle and Birchbox that are scaling. I imagine there are a number of large companies – both ecommerce companies like Amazon and BlueNile – and traditional companies – like Sephora and Walmart – that are watching this space with baited breath.

However, this sector creates great opportunities for consolidation and exits. I don’t see consumers subscribing to a large number of boxes – it seems like it would be easier for a company like ShoeDazzle to intrude into Birchbox’s territory, and create one box to rule them all. Similarly, I wouldn’t sign up for a subscription from GuyHaus, Manpacks, and a company that delivers razors – I would simply order all of them from one vendor.

Capital Intensity and the VC Opportunity

Subscription ecommerce businesses require inventory and massive subscriber acquisition to scale, neither of which are cheap. While these companies are inexpensive to start (especially if you store inventory, and pack and ship out of a spare room), they’re very expensive to scale.

This creates a major opportunity for venture capital investors to add value. While web companies are getting cheaper to start and scale due to the growth of open source software and free distribution platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, these subscription ecommerce companies are still costly to grow.

Expect to see some major venture wins in this space as ShoeDazzle and others get acquired by forward thinking retailers, or become large retailers themselves.

Economic Sensitivity

It seems to me that these companies as a whole are very vulnerable to the economic environment, and the onset of a double-dip recession in the United States could really hit this whole category. I don’t see people keeping a $40/month shoe subscription through tough economic times.

What Do You Think About Subscription Commerce?

(Image of Present Courtesy Fazen Under the Creative Commons License)

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: subscription ecommerce

Steve Jobs on Brand Marketing

July 22, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: apple, steve jobs

PayWithaTweet: Social Commerce for Content

July 11, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

I wanted to use PayWithaTweet.

So I made a Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, and I put it on my agency’s blog with PayWithaTweet. I asked my boss to tweet it (because he is famous on the internet), and the cheat sheet went viral – more than 200 people tweeted it.

(You can see the bit.ly information page. Tweets go off bit.ly’s (BackType’s, technically) radar in 48 hours, so you’ll only see the most recent. I would’ve used RowFeedr for tracking if I did it again.)

Now I’ve written a case study about PayWithaTweet – specifically, the search engine effects, but there’s something in there for everyone – for YouMoz.

The interesting thing about PayWithATweet is that it influences search engines – so if you were clever, you could create an almost self-perpetuating viral loop, with the visitors arriving via search engine and Paying With a Tweet, only to raise search engine rank further. It’s definitely worth playing with. (And you can get tons of social traffic too.)

Even if you’re not an SEO, you’ll still like it. I hope.

Filed Under: Marketing

The (Tweetable) Wisdom of Patio11

June 27, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

Patrick McKenzie, aka Patio11, is one of my favorite business/marketing authors. Patrick introduces himself as a “software engineer from central Japan” but he’s one of the savviest marketers and businessmen out there.

(In many ways, his introduction of himself as a “software engineer from Central Japan” enables him to build audiences that would never listen to him if he described himself as a “marketer/SEO/coder”. Remember, the best salespeople never appear to be salespeople.)

I’ve collected some of my favorite Patio11 quotes – hopefully this will introduce you to one of my favorite marketers in an easy-to-consume way.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: patio11, software

How to Get 1%+ CTR on Facebook Ads

June 19, 2011 By Matt 2 Comments

Facebook Advertising is the great untapped marketing medium of the current day. You can target users by almost any imaginable demographic or interest slice – if you want to target 45-year-old women in Indiana who like Victoria’s Secret, you can. (There are, in fact, 80 people you can reach with this targeting setting.)

The next huge direct marketing company will be based around this level of targeting. Just like QVC depended on cable and Quinnstreet depended on Google, the next direct marketing giant will be based on these facebook ads. Debatably, this has already happened with Groupon.

However, the average Facebook ad has a click-thru rate of .051 percent. The average CTR of a conventional banner ad is 0.09%. All this targeting, and no improvement over conventional banner ads?

This is pitiful. And this is because, frankly, marketers are doing it wrong.

Enter the Targeting Dragon

Marty Weintraub is the Facebook Ads targeting expert. He runs an agency called AimClear, and recently presented at SMX Advanced about advanced Facebook targeting tactics. While I can’t post his presentation here, it was awesome.

Marty has found that you can get more than a 1% CTR with appropriate targeting:

Yes RT @trevorjgeorge: @aimclear have you ever gotten a 1.0+% CTR with fbook ads? Just curious…less than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyMarty Weintraub
aimclear

@brianchappell Actually the 1% FB Ads CTR ad was picture of a burger, served to 45 year old males interested in AAless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyMarty Weintraub
aimclear

That’s pretty amazing. Marty also says you can sell birth control to people who like “Drinking” or “Drunken Weekends”, and Jaguars to people who like Rolexes.

Marty Weintraub has a book coming out about Facebook Ads – I will definitely be picking up a copy.

Have you used FB Ads? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: facebook

Understanding Older Organizations and Technology Adoption

April 21, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

As entrepreneurs and technologists, we always want to use the latest, whiz-bang tool.

Whether it’s mobile, social, location, SEO, or augmented reality, if it’s new and cool, we want it.

By contrast, many established organizations (and established operating executives) adopt technology when they have to. Frequently, it’s not a fun process, and people feel threatened by new channels and new ways of thinking.

Given the number of companies that give marketers new ways of reaching audiences (or measuring and optimizing messages’ effectiveness), it’s important that we understand how established organizations view new channels.

Enter Glieber’s Dresses by Kevin Hillstrom. Kevin writes the phenomenal Mine That Data blog. He has a deep direct marketing background but really “gets” the internet. Not the pundit blogosphere – but the real commercial potential of ‘our thing.’

Glieber’s Dresses is a series of stories about a staid direct-mail dress company trying to thrive in a world of Google, Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones and Androids. As you can guess, the company wins some and loses some.

Read Glieber’s Dresses by Kevin Hillstrom.

The conversations in these meetings are eerily accurate, which is the best thing about this series. Everyone in marketing or technology can learn from these.

(I haven’t found a good way to order the posts in reverse chronological order. If you figure out how, please share in the comments.)

Filed Under: Marketing, Reviews