Book Club: Growth Hacker Marketing - Ryan Holiday

I am certainly not one to believe in the traditional marketing industry.  It always seemed to me like large corporations take the shotgun approach to advertising, and spend more and more without any real method to what works.   Maybe that’s not true, but bloated marketing budgets and staff undeniably exist.  I suppose companies like Pepsi couldn’t really do it any other way considering they sell a product that anyone can make and is bad for people.  Hard to really ‘hack’ that for efficiency.

I picked up Ryan Holiday’s book “Growth Hacking for Marketers” with jusssst a hint of skepticism, mostly because it had the word ‘marketing’ in the title.  However the tone of the booked surprised, and I plowed through this dense little guidebook in a day or so.

Holiday was a typical marketer, and talks about how his perception of the industry changed once he stopped buying into the traditional paradigms of how to market.  Marketing is sales, the whole point it to sell more of whatever it is that you make to people that want it.  Both myself and Holiday feel that not enough people in the marketing industry realize the distinction. Anyways.

Holiday’s book is full of detailed case studies about some of the most successful companies of our era. The Dropbox/AirBnB/Uber clan are all critiqued and broken down under this newly coined methodology of marketing called Growth Hacking.  

Growth Hacking is essentially the art of exponentially growing users/sales without spending any significant money.  Easier said than done when your competition is spending millions, you might say.  Holiday would argue that companies like the aforementioned aren’t even playing the same game, and that’s precisely why growth hacking can be so damn effective.  The results speak for themselves.

So what are the basic tenants of growth hacking?  Here are the few big points of the book that I found significant.

Product Market Fit

Don’t waste your time making a product that no one wants.  Plain and simple yes, but there are countless examples of products built and money spent for no consumer base.

Target your customers specifically

Find the people most likely to buy your product or use your service and target them aggressively.  This eliminates need for massive campaign launches in attempt to ‘sell the world’ your product.  Holiday goes it great detail in the book with some excellent case studies.

Build a system into your product so customers can refer new customers

This is a huge concept in growth marketing!  You want your customers to do your marketing for you, so figure out a way to let them easily refer their friends.  Exponential growth is the name of the game here.

Use metrics to optimize

How effective is whatever growth ‘hack’ you chose to pursue?  Figure out how to quantify results.  You essentially need a tight feedback loop with data so that you can continue to refine and improve your growth hacking technique.  Without attention to this, you’re just another corporate marketer lobbying for an ‘increased budget’.  

Recommendation

Now those are brief and generalized to give you a taste for what the book talks about.  Holiday goes into impressive detail and gives readers actionable suggestions for their own businesses.  I was expecting fluff (especially from such a small book) and instead I came across a dense but efficient guide to what all entrepreneurs should think of when they think ‘Marketing’.

If you’re starting a company, buy it.  Read it. Tell me what you think!

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising