When it comes to growth hacking, everyone’s interested but not everyone is aware of what it really means. Some books and articles are overpromising, while others are simply not in-depth enough. But one book that has made it to our list of the best marketing books is Hacking Marketing by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.
The book elaborates the idea of experiments-culture and the notion of decision making on the basis of statistical data.
Hacking Growth starts with explaining the details of building a team for experiments and structuring work. The team should consist of:
- A growth lead who heads meetings, moderates discussions, and functions is the manager of projects. This person need not be a specific part of any department, he/she could be unanimously working and must have excellent organizational and leadership skills.
- Next is the project manager who should be a person with an in-depth knowledge of the product.
- A developer who can prudentially tell if an experiment is possible and also will be in charge of conducting the experiment.
- A customer success manager who is well versed with all the information and techniques that can enhance the customer’s experience and also gather their feedback.
- A marketing specialist who is in charge of specific channel in the funnel of the process.
- A designer who is responsible for speeding the process and taking it to a successful conclusion.
- A data analyst who is a catalyst for experiments and works on the basis of metrics.
This may feel like too much investment in human capital, so to reduce this investment, one person can take over several roles to perform. An essential element is to give adequate freedom to the growth team for fruitful results.
“Growth cannot be a side project. Without a clear and forceful commitment from leadership, growth teams will find themselves battling bureaucracy, turf wars, inefficiency, and inertia.”
Hacking growth further elaborates that a growth team is set up to conduct tests on the ongoing process. The tests in this scenario mean the various changes made to campaigns or processes that start to impact the overall results in a period of two weeks.
Precisely two weeks, because regular iteration is vital to get feedback from the users and understand the market.
There is a cool idea in the book on the topic of conversion rate. The concept says that conversion rate is the outcome of the customer’s wish to use your product and the friction of actually using it. This is a neat and logical way to perceive conversion rate and the smartest move here is to reduce the fiction for more conversions.
An extremely important thing from the book that is worth mentioning is the topic: Your product is the key to growth. The authors here say that once you have your viable product, identify the main goal and the components that influence the goal. There are many experiment ideas discussed in the book for growth at every stage.
In a nutshell, we recommend reading this book irrespective of what stage your business is at. Whether you’re exploring a new idea, starting a new business, or want to change the processes in an existing one, we recommend reading this book to give yourself a better perspective to hack growth.
