Growth Hacker Marketing

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising is the second book by the bestselling author Ryan Holiday.^[1] It explains how growth hacking is cheaper and more effective than traditional marketing, and provides case studies of companies like Twitter and Facebook to illustrate the efficacy of growth hacking techniques.^[2]

Background

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising was released as 10,000 word e-single by Penguin/Penguin in September 2013, a bestseller on Amazon, then expanded and released in print by Penguin in September of 2014.^[3][4] Prior to the release of the printed edition, free copies were available to marketing and coding students and professors upon request as an example of growth hacking.^[3]

Overview

In the book, Holiday argues that the most important aspect in marketing is to produce a product or service that consumers actually want and that adds value because those products are easy and cheap to successfully market.^[5][6][7] In the book a growth hackers is defined as “someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like ‘branding’ and ‘mind share,’ growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth.”^[8] Growth hacking also uses a variety of techniques from SEO to A/B testing to create a lower-cost alternative to traditional marketing.^[9] The importance of coding skills and the ability to target highly interested users is emphasized in growth hacker marketing as well.^[10] Holiday points out that, although growth hacking techniques are often associated with technology startups, well established companies in other industries can also benefit from this type of marketing given the right mindset; specifically, focusing on gaining actual customers instead of simply generating leads.^[11][12]

In addition to providing case studies of Facebook and Twitter, Holiday also featured Instagram, Uber, Airbnb, and Dropbox among other companies.^[13][14] Holiday credits the exponential growth of Hotmail to a simple growth hack in which a line was added at the end of each message that encouraged the recipient to sign up for a free account.^[15] He also drew from his experience with Tim Ferriss, the bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, as well as several other expert interviews with growth hackers, including Noah Kagan, the CEO of AppSumo.^[2]

Reception

Growth Hacker Marketing received mostly favorable reviews, and sold over 20 thousand copies by October, 2014.^[16] Simon Swan of Smart Insights has commented that "it’s a book that resonates perfectly with the connected, digital economy we are all operating in and more importantly provides you with a four-step guide in the key attributes to consider to apply growth hacking techniques for marketing."^[17] In his review, Guillaume Delloue described the book as "a wakeup call for conservative marketers stuck in the old ways."^[18]

References

External links

• GrowthHackerMarketing.net
• Ryan Holiday on Growth Hacking With Harlan Kilstein
• RyanHoliday.net