No hacks. Why “marketing growth hacks” don’t really work and what to do about it.
I’ve spoken with numerous colleagues about their experiences in growth. The abundance of advice on how to grow your customer base and scale your business is overwhelming. Folks often resort to gurus and influencers that have “cracked the code on [TikTok / Instagram / Facebook / Google / etc.]” and can tell you the “one secret that everyone else has totally overlooked when it comes to [insert objective here]”. It comes as no surprise that often these things don’t quite work as expected. But why? Is it about timing? Is it about your product? And what should you even “expect” to begin with?
Deconstructing a hack
Marketing growth hacks often tackle one of a few growth levers by providing tactical advice. “How to acquire new customers on Instagram Reels by promoting 10-second videos” or “How to retarget prospect who abandoned cart with a 10% off email coupon”. These are ways to reach a certain audience via a certain marketing channel with a certain creative asset.
There are a few challenges here.
First, this timely advice usually relies on some form of novelty. Novelty can be manifested in three ways: either many prospects or users haven’t been exposed to this tactic before, many marketers and companies are not currently using or overlooked this tactic, or it is keyed off a platform feature that is still relatively nascent (think: Spark Ads that TikTok released last year). This means that the tactic is time-bounded and its effectiveness will decline with wider adoption, while its cost will rise.
Second, it is unclear how any single tactic would fit or complement other things that you are doing to promote growth. Some may even inadvertently hurt your growth — you may overwhelm prospects with too many messages, your value proposition may be perceived as scattered and unclear, you may inadvertently alienate existing customers who will be exposed to aggressive offers trying to pursue new users.
Third, each tactic and experiment takes time and money and you can easily waste both pursuing a successful outcome (which you need to clearly define ahead of time). You will also need to find a way to effectively prioritize it all in a way that would make sense.
Fourth, most marketing advice ignores Product Led growth levers (PLG) and vice versa. It myopically focuses on shiny new approaches.
The result is often a track record peppered with scattered success, where entrepreneurs and marketers seek the next hack that would lead to a big breakthrough.
So, what can you do about it?
The first step is isolating the levers that you can pull to facilitate growth and understand how they can work for your product. Systemic growth comes from understanding how these levers can be combined to move the needle for your specific product or offer. The value proposition of your product is the thread that ties it together in a way that creates consistency in communicating with the outside world.
Second, you should identify and track the metrics that really matter for your business. These are not likes, fans, or followers. These are metrics that directly measure your growth across key product touchpoints (e.g., activations, purchases, etc.)
Next, you should consider taking a holistic approach to growing your user base. Tactics often focus either on prospects who never used/purchased your product or your existing users. The key is that one feeds off the other. What does that mean? Developing the value generated by your existing user base (i.e., increasing customer lifetime value) can help you extend your reach, fund your experiments, and enhance the time window you can operate within to examine strategic tactics.
Here’s a way to look at this. If we expand the previous illustration, we can pinpoint where the breakeven point is (the point in which our cost equals the customer lifetime value), but since the cost is likely to increase over time with further adoption of any tactic, by increasing customer lifetime value, we can expand the time horizon in which we can operate profitably. That in turn increases the likelihood of success.
If you’re curious to learn more, I created a cohort-based course and if you want to reserve a spot and join me, please sign up here.
More on me here. I haven’t used Twitter much so far, but I will also start posting more about this topic (and others!) with a good signal-to-noise ratio. If you’re interested, you can follow me there.
