Three common skills of Growth Hackers

A Growth Hacker is a compound talent who is a combination of an engineer, a data analyst , and a marketing expert. To become a Growth Hacker, you need to master a variety of skills and tools . The following are the details.

1. Marketing skills

The main purpose of marketing skills is to acquire new users or increase user activity, including search engine optimization ( SEO ), automated email marketing , viral marketing , content optimization, etc.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are the mainstream channel for people to obtain information on the Internet. If you cannot be crawled by search engines, then you do not exist. The higher your content appears on the search results page, the more obvious your advantage will be.

Commonly used search engine optimization (SEO) techniques include increasing the density and weight of keywords , increasing the number of long-tail keywords, establishing external links, optimizing interface structure, etc.

Twitter pages are now preferred by Google when searching for people's names

In the first half of 2014, the Twitter product VP responsible for growth organized a team to optimize Twitter's search engine, regularly and automatically submitting the 50,000 most popular tags over a period of time to the search engine. This optimization increased the number of off-site non-logged-in visits from 7.5 million to 7.5 million, a 10-fold increase.

2. Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation has become an important part of U.S. business operations and an essential marketing skill. By integrating EDM (email direct marketing) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems, we intervene in users' purchasing decision-making behavior through automated emails, greatly improving marketing efficiency and returns.

A report by Pardot shows that marketing automation generates 50% more sales leads for companies at a 33% lower cost.

Two marketing automation examples

Taking e-commerce as an example, the traffic is large but the conversion rate is low. Many users browse the products but do not buy them. The above picture (left) shows an automatically triggered promotional email that guides interested users to return and place an order. For users who have not visited for two consecutive weeks, a survey email (right) is automatically triggered to understand user interests and make timely adjustments to avoid user loss.

3. Virus spread

Viral Referral is an important part of the A AR RR model. It can make your product perform 10X, 20X or even 100X more powerful. A complete virus transmission process includes four elements: sender, receiver, transmission content and transmission environment. The most important of these is the transmission content, which must be contagious.

How Dropbox spreads virality

Dropbox is a cloud storage product that gives every new user 16GB of space for free. You can expand your space by paying or by inviting friends to join Dropbox. For every friend you invite, both the inviter and the invitee will receive an additional 500 MB of space. Through this mechanism, Dropbox's products were spread wildly and achieved an annual growth rate of 500%.

4. Content Marketing

Nerdwallet is an American financial website that gets a lot of traffic by writing a lot of blog posts with financial management tips. Nerdwallet recommends bank credit cards, insurance, investment and other products to users. Once users click on the corresponding link and purchase related financial products, Nerdwallet can obtain the corresponding commission.

Nerdwallet official website

The cost of acquiring customers is extremely low, and the average order value is extremely high; through a large amount of high-quality blog content, Nerdwallet has achieved rapid development. In 2015, Nerdwallet received $64 million in Series A funding , which put it halfway into the ranks of unicorns.

2. Engineering Development Skills

The biggest difference between a Growth Hacker and a marketing expert is that they are good at building growth engines from the product level. This requires support from technologies such as programming, development, and product design.

1. Application Programming Interface

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are predefined functions that allow developers to read and write data through predefined channels. Many platforms provide APIs for developers to use, such as WeChat official accounts , Amap, etc. How to make good use of API and leverage large platforms to achieve rapid growth is a question worth thinking about.

Sync Airbnb listings to Craigslist with one click

Craigslist is a famous third-party transaction publishing platform in the United States, similar to China's 58.com, with a large number of users, but the platform does not provide an API to the outside world. Airbnb was still in its early stages and desperately needed a lot of traffic. Their engineers studied Craigslist’s posting mechanism and synchronized Airbnb house posting information to Craigslist through reverse engineering. Through this new method, Airbnb gained a lot of free traffic and its user base grew exponentially.

2. A/B Testing

Empiricism is unreliable, especially when faced with multiple ambiguous options, such as whether a button should be red or orange. The best way to solve this problem at this time is to conduct A/B testing. Simply put, let some users use plan A and others use plan B, and then choose the plan by observing and comparing the data.

A/B test your copy

37Signals conducted A/B testing on its product registration page to improve its conversion rate . The difference between Plan A (above) and Plan B (below) lies in the page copy, which is "Start a Higrise Account" and "30-day Free Trial on All Acounts" respectively. Data shows that the latter's registration conversion rate is 30% higher than the former.

3. Data Analysis Skills

Data statistics and data analysis are essential skills for growth hackers and the basis of optimization.

1. Statistics

Data statistics and collection are the prerequisites for data analysis. How to efficiently use tools or programming languages ​​to do data statistics is a compulsory course for growth hackers.

Data Statistical Methods

For qualitative data, questionnaire surveys and user interviews are mainly used to obtain it. For quantitative data, it can be divided into two parts: product-inside and product-outside. For external data that does not have ownership, web crawlers are mainly used for crawling. Commonly used crawler languages ​​​​are Python and Java. For the data within the product, we now have a series of tools, including the traffic analysis platform Google Analytics and the user behavior data analysis tool GrowingIO.

2. Data Analysis

Data analysis should be based on actual business needs and avoid excessive pursuit of models and algorithms. Taking Internet products as an example, the following are common data analysis methods:

• Channel delivery optimization;
• Conversion funnel analysis;
• User retention analysis;
• User portrait /user segmentation;
• Behavior track/user review;
• Model predictions;
• A/B testing;
• Heat map analysis.

For example, when a user logs in to LinkedIn for the first time, LinkedIn will ask you to follow 5 friends. When you apply for a credit card, the bank will offer you a preferential condition of waiving the annual fee if you make 5 or more transactions. So how do LinkedIn and banks come to the conclusion of following 5 friends and making 5 purchases?

Magic number calculation results

It is an obvious truth that there is a certain relationship between user behavior and his retention , and retention can be improved by intervening in user behavior. With the help of data analysis tools, we can analyze the correlation between user behavior [how many times a certain action is performed within a certain number of days] and user retention. The more relevant the combination is, the more likely it is that we need to optimize it.

T-shaped Talent

The above are some common skills of growth hackers that we have summarized. It is very difficult to be proficient in everything, so "one specialty with multiple strengths" is the ideal skill configuration method. That is, you must have a basic grasp of the above aspects and be particularly proficient in one aspect, so that you can grow with ease.

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