Nate Barnwell or the rise of a growth hacking expert
Top growth hacking tips from Nate Barnwell: Traditional marketers are skilled at understanding traditional products, but the internet has created a radical redefinition of the word product. For thousands of years a product has been a physical good, but now they are invisible bits and bytes in the form of software products. Products used to only be things like cars, shampoo, couches, and guns. Now Twitter is a product. Your online accounting software is a product. Things you can’t hold, per se, are products. This transition is most responsible for the new age of growth hackers. The internet has given the world a new kind of product, and it demands a new kind of thinking.
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: Word-of-mouth is organic and effective. Recommendations from friends and family are some of the most powerful incentives for consumers to purchase or try a product or service. The secret of word-of-mouth’s effectiveness lies in a deeply rooted psychological bias all people have — we subconsciously believe the majority knows better. Social proof is central to most successful sales copywriting and broader content marketing efforts. That’s why businesses draw so much attention to their online reputations. They know in today’s customer-driven world — one where communication methods change and information is available to all — a single negative blog post or tweet can compromise an entire marketing effort. Pete Blackshaw, the father of digital word-of-mouth growth, says, “satisfied customers tell three friends; angry customers tell 3,000.” The key with word-of-mouth is to focus on positive user experience. You need to grow a base of satisfied customers and sustain the wave of loyal feedback that comes with it. With this method, you have to focus on delivering a spectacular user experience, and users will spread the word for you.
What exactly is growth marketing? Growth marketing is about (you guessed it!) growth. Specifically, growing whatever a business deems the key metrics in its funnel. That might mean click-through rate, monthly active users or revenue — growth marketers don’t confine themselves to top-of-funnel metrics. Driving revenue is particularly important according to Michael Griffith, a growth marketer with over 10 years’ experience in consumer tech and e-commerce. “A growth marketer’s core function is to identify marketing channels, solutions, ideas that will efficiently drive new customers to the brand and increase revenue,” Griffith told Nathan Barnwell. Ultimately, growth marketing is defined more by process than end results, though. In the immortal words of Miley Cyrus, “It’s about the climb.”
It is important to instrument for growth so that you can truly understand what is happening. Another important part of instrumenting for growth is testing tools such as Google Optimize, that allow you to implement a/b tests across your website and product. Finally, you’ll need a system to bring all of this information together so that your team can learn how to improve growth. Now you’re finally ready to start accelerating growth, which is level three of the pyramid. In this stage you should focus on building a growth team that can effectively execute a growth process. The purpose of this growth process is to uncover better ways to accelerate growth in the business. Your goal here is just to build a rhythm and habit of testing. Every test you run will lead to additional learning — even if it doesn’t directly drive immediate improvement in growth. It’s important during this stage to catalogue this learning so that the team keeps getting smarter about how to accelerate growth. See a lot more info at Nathan Barnwell.
Don’t hit the ground running without planning out and documenting the steps for your growth strategy. We recommend downloading this free Growth Strategy Template and working off the included section prompts to outline your intended process for growth in your organization. It’s great that you want to grow your business, but what exactly do you want to grow? Your business growth plan should hone in on specific areas of growth. Common focuses of strategic growth initiatives might include: Growth in employee headcount, Expansion of current office, retail, and/or warehouse space, Addition of new locations or branches of your business, Expansion into new regions, locations, cities, or countries, Addition of new products and/or services, Expanding purchase locations (i.e. selling in new stores or launching an online store), Growth in revenue and/or profit, Growth of customer base and/or customer acquisition rate.