In the early days, companies used to hire ad agencies to market their product using traditional marketing methods and platforms such as billboards and newspapers. In those days, product developers and marketers used to operate distinctly and siloed. Developing a product was a separate task from marketing the product. Companies used to think that having a huge advertising budget would make up for a mediocre product. However, in this age, customers are now more savvy than ever, and besides, start-ups often don’t have enough budget to market the heck out of their product.

The Lines Between Product And Marketing Has Become Blurred

However, start-ups are now focusing on growth hacking where the product itself is built with marketing mechanisms in mind. Growth hacking is cheap, scalable and works incredibly well if thought well. You can see successful products and services all around you that were built using growth hacking. Such as Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram and even Liquid Death. Start-ups now focus on getting their product out fast, get feedback and then improve the following versions. This helps them understand how the users behave and then use that data to improve their product thus raking in more users.

Growth Hacking Comes In

And lastly, I would also like to add that in order for your product to go viral, try to make your customer look cool. People on the social media love sharing novelty. Can you design your product in a way that adds some kind of novelty to your customers’ lives? If you can, believe me, your users would love sharing it with others and once there’s a ton of social proof, others would love to jump in on the trend thus generating more word of mouth and virality for your product.

How do you growth hack successfully? You choose the right people to focus on. However, the problem most start-ups face is when they try marketing and presenting their products to everyone.Selling to everyone cannot just be possible as interests are now more different than ever and you cannot possibly run enough variations of your ads to target all the right kind of people.Instead, you need to target a small but specific and interested group of people who would be the perfect fit for your product.

Targeting The Right Customers Is The Key Here

You can test giving away different incentives to your users in order to understand what clicks with them. From offering some dollars to gift cards, free subscriptions to free goodies, you can offer incentives and then measure what incentive results in the best performance for your product. You can also think out of box like Apple did when it decided to go against the grain, painted its headphones white when every (or most of the headphones) on the market were black and turned its customers into walking advertisements for its product.

Incentives Can Be Varying

Marketing has always been about the same thing—who your customers are and where they are.

Virality at its core is asking someone to spend their social capital recommending or linking or posting about you for free.

If we talk about Dropbox, they knew exactly what kind of audience they wanted to attract and therefore when Drew Houston recorded a demo video, he added a few Easter Eggs that only the targeted community would find. The exclusivity factor drove hundreds of thousands of people to Dropbox’s site thus signing up for the beta. By making exclusive access to their betas, companies like Dropbox and Uber managed to find critical success and mass market for their product to gain traction.

Dropbox Here?

”Some” traction may not be enough for your business to succeed or even survive in today’s cut-throat competition. To get explosive growth, your product will need to be everywhere and that’s where the buzzword of this century comes in—virality.But how do you make your product go viral? Ryan Holiday has two tips:<ul><li>Make your product shareable.</li><li>Tell them to share it.</li></ul>By giving the users some incentive to share your product, your customers can turn into ambassadors and thus start marketing your product effectively. “Just like Dropbox gave away free storage to both the referral and the referring.”

Turn Your Customers Into Ambassadors

Growth hacking at its core means putting aside the notion that marketing is a self-contained act that begins toward the end of a company’s or product’s development life cycle. It is, instead, a way of thinking and looking at your business.

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself.

Find Ryan Holiday’s 4-step framework to understand how today’s businesses break the barrier between marketing and product development and make the product the best way to gain new customers.

A primer on the future of PR, marketing and advertising — now revised and updated with new case studies "Forget everything you thought you knew about marketing and read this book. And then make everyone you work with read it, too." —Jason Harris, CEO of Mekanism Megabrands like Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Airbnb were barely a blip on the radar years ago, but now they're worth billions—with hardly a dime spent on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they relied on growth hacking to reach users and build their businesses. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions. Bestselling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for many successful brands, authors, and musicians, explains the new rules in a book that has become a marketing classic in Silicon Valley and around the world. This new edition is updated with cutting-edge case studies of startups, brands, and small businesses.  Growth Hacker Marketing is the go-to playbook for any company or entrepreneur looking to build and grow.

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Ryan Holiday is media strategist for notorious clients like Tucker Max and Dov Charney. After dropping out of college at 19 to apprentice under the strategist Robert Greene, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multi-platinum musicians. He is the Director of Marketing at American Apparel, where his work in advertising was internationally known. His strategies are used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google, and have been written about in AdAge, the New York Times, Gawker, and Fast Company. He is the author is *Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator*, which is due out in July. He currently lives in New Orleans, with his rebellious puppy, Hanno.

TALHA MUMTAZ

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