Category Archives: Growth Marketing

25 Ways To Prioritize Growth Hacking Tactics

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Where should I start? What should I work on next? How do I prioritize my never-ending list of projects to grow my company? Why is that company growing so much faster than mine?

When I address these questions as they relate to marketing, or growth hacking, or whatever you want to call getting more business in the door, these are the buzz words and concepts I think about to prioritize which projects to work on next:

Move Fast

  1. Low Hanging Fruit
  2. Quick Wins
  3. Run Lean – Figure out what works fast!

Focus On Big Wins

  1. Highest ROI Investment
  2. Biggest Lever
  3. Free > Paid
  4. What Will Move The Needle?
  5. Analytics: Low Page Value & Time on Site. High Bounce Rates. By Browser & Device
  6. Will this improve LTV/CAC (Lifetime Value / Customer Acquisition Cost)

Target The Right Customers

  1. Marketing Funnel – Focus on getting more of your audience to the next stage faster
  2. Demand Capture > Demand Generation
  3. Work Up The AAARR Funnel : Revenue, Referrals, Retention, Activation, Awareness

Leave A Legacy That Lasts

  1. Conversion Rate Optimization
  2. One-Time Investment That Pays Off Forever
  3. Conversion > Traffic
  4. Automated > Manual
  5. One-Time Fix > Ongoing Work Required
  6. OMTM – One Metric That Matters (H/T Sean Johnson)

Your Product Is Your Marketing

  1. Hooked Model – (H/T Nir Eyal & his new book)
  2. Product Improvement > Advertising Dollars
  3. Balance what works (80%) with testing new tactics (20%)
  4. Don’t copy the competition. Why do you assume they know what they are doing?

Balance Risk With Reward

  1. Potential Impact * 1/Investment Required
  2. Test > Go all in – Test YouTube Ad before TV Ad (e.g. H/T  Casey)
  3. You can do it with existing resources > You need someone else to do it for you

That’s my personal experience growing 3 VC funded startups over the past 5 years, and mentoring many more on customer acquisition. What else am I missing? How do others prioritize growth hacking and/or marketing tactics?

UPDATE – This Post Hit #1 Trending Story on GrowthHackers.com

#1 Trending Story on GrowthHackers.com

#1 Trending Story on GrowthHackers.com

GEM MARKETING – Growth, Engagement and Monetization

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With 10,000+ hours of startup marketing under my belt, here’s an outline of how I’ve synthesized my own successes with several popular theories into one framework that I like to call GEM Marketing.

GEM Marketing stands for Growth, Engagement & Monetization. For a successful startup, you need all three legs of the marketing stool.

Growth is about getting people to discover your product and work their way through the traditional marketing funnel. By filling and widening the funnel as efficiently as possible, you grow your company faster. The Growth Hacker Funnel looks like this:

  • Acquisition
  • Activation
  • Retention
  • Referral
  • Revenue

The trick is to figure out for each step how to continually improve so you’re maximizing your growth. To learn more about growth, read Startup Metrics For Pirate and Growth Hacking Tactics.

Engagement, according to Nir Eyal, is about creating an experience designed to connect a solution to the user’s problems with enough frequency to form a Habit. You do this through the acronym ATARI:

  • A hook
  • Trigger
  • Action
  • Reward
  • Investment

Here are all of the detail about the Eyal’s Hooked Model for creating high engagement.

Monetization is about making money. This is a must have for most successful businesses. My favorite resource for this is Fred Wilson’s Web & Mobile Revenue Models List.

Ultimately, if you deliver growth, create engagement  and make money you’ve got a good shot at building a successful startup. Most companies that stumble do so because they are missing one of the three legs of the GEM Marketing stool.