
Examples of marketing tactics - vinnyglennon
https://johnmcelborough.com/growth-hacking-strategies/
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milesward
Great growth hack my grandfather did, inspires me still: He opens a
restaurant, on a bet, against a competing restaurateur, that he can succeed in
an awful location with no signage or parking. On opening night, he hands a wad
of money to my Dad and his adorable girlfriend, instructs them to dress nice,
take a cab to the airport, tip, and rave about the dinner. upon arriving at
the airport, get another taxi, tip, inform them that you've just flown in from
SanFran and have heard the food at the 13 Coins is divine and to take them
there post haste :) He won the bet.

~~~
cf498
If I recall correctly, participants of Egypts Arab spring mentioned the same
tactic to spread the information about the location of upcoming
demonstrations. A few people took cab after cab and kept mentioning that a
protest will take place that evening in place xyz. In a few hours the
information had spread through the city.

~~~
agumonkey
We need open mob HTTP routers that decorate all requests with X-ANARCHY:
<date> <time> <gps>

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colbyh
I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most
of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few
novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.

~~~
threeseed
Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition
is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg.
user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with
different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction.

It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again
so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.

~~~
gk1
Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-
functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge.
Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a
growth hack.

This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for
these particular companies/individuals.

~~~
TeMPOraL
"Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just
rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a
purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker"
was seen as more cool than "marketer".

~~~
Hoasi
In other words, this is marketing applied to itself.

~~~
ekianjo
meta-marketing.

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pc86
Who thought webpages giving you notifications was a good idea?

~~~
ceejayoz
There are plenty of legitimate use cases - calendar apps, issue trackers,
online games, news sites.

They just tend to be stupidly implemented. If I'm a first-time visitor to your
news site, and I haven't even read the article yet, there's about a 0.00%
chance I'll allow notifications. Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only
once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me.

~~~
guitarbill
It's not great when the notification box is styled like native UI to make it
seem more legitimate, although it is nice that the page doesn't just flat out
request notification permissions.

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c1utch1
I'm really tired of the phrase growth hacking.

~~~
zachruss92
Agreed. While the tactics are great and undoubtedly effective it should be
classified as a lesser used word these days - Marketing.

~~~
threeseed
I think you might be confused.

1) Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10
years ago etc. Especially with the rise of SaaS tooling there has been a lot
of innovation and interesting work coming out of this space. And let’s not
forget influencer and content marketing both of which are relatively new
concepts.

2) Growth hacking is not just about marketing. It is a cross functional system
bringing in expertise from engineering, data science, sales, marketing,
finance etc. It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity but could be growth
hacking against a range of business metrics.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10
> years ago etc._

Although it might seem that way[1], I'm curious what you'd point me at to
persuade me that that's true.[2]

> _It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity…_

By most definitions (and regardless of title), marketing is anything
associated with buying and selling a product or service. It's a pretty wide
net.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)
[2]
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0g4gr)

~~~
threeseed
Growth hacking is predominately about online businesses. And it's a pretty
solid fact that there are more of those every year than in the preceding year.

And not sure what you mean here. Growth hacking is not just about marketing.
There are plenty of growth hacking initiatives for improving financial or
business metrics e.g. employee retention.

Might want to read the book about Growth Hacking to understand the discipline
and why it is getting more and more popular. It actually isn't just some lame
name to describe a few marketing tricks.

~~~
uoaei
Marketing departments everywhere do the same thing you are using to describe
"growth hacking." They convene with members of other departments to construct
the brand in a way that is cohesive with how the product or service operates
(and should be perceived).

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CM30
A few comments on these examples:

Buffer:

> The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact
> of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder Leo Widrich.

Was a good idea in the olden days, works a lot less now that Google has
started cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices.

Facebook:

> To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the
> message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate
> to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook
> messaging masterplan.

This is certainly 'effective', but it really, really annoys users, and will
probably not work as well for a company with decent competitors. Network
effects and being a near monopoly helps Facebook get away with this stuff, but
if your small service tries it... well good luck there.

TripAdvisor:

> For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by
> displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges
> also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels
> reviews higher in their own search results.

Ah, the old 'have people display a widget that links back to your site' trick.

It's an okay strategy if your reputation is somewhat good or you got in early,
but Google has worked to discourage such things in recent years too.

[https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-
widge...](https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widget-links-
webmaster-guidelines-258393)

Pokemon GO:

> There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game
> actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available.

This was also why the game died out so quickly too. Niantic was terrible at
communication, and spent weeks seemingly doing nothing to address issues
people had with the game. No comments online, no social media posts, nothing
about updates with features people were looking forward to...

The result was a huge die off, with things only recovering a bit when they
actually opened up and spoke to their customers again.

Either way, the advice is simple:

Remember that what works for a large company or certain brand may not work for
you (or others), that a lot of tactics used in the past have been
disincentivised after SEO abuse and that your marketing trickery may be your
downfall if you don't realise when a change in tact is needed afterwards.

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DisruptiveDave
I feel like I'm in 2012 again.

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paulcole
One of my favorites that's missing from here is the Just Mayo story:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-
star...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-startup-ran-
undercover-project-to-buy-up-its-own-products)

Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws but who ever said that growth
hacking was a game where you always keep your hands clean?

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toomuchtodo
> Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws

> but who ever said that growth hacking was a game where you always keep your
> hands clean?

This is called fraud.

~~~
ggg9990
Would it have been fraud if they disclosed it to the investors? Ie is going
into a store and buying your product to create an illusion of demand, by
itself a criminal fraud?

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troydavis
No. It might have violated their contracts with retailers, but any recourse
from that would have been civil, not criminal.

An interesting question is how long it’s material for. Clearly it’s material
while it’s a meaningful portion of their total revenue or per-store sales.
There’s an argument that buying your own product is material long after real
revenue has grown, though, because it’s likely to have an impact if publicly
discovered. Basically it becomes a skeleton in the closet, and as long as that
skeleton is (a) known to the company and (b) newsworthy (and thus likely to
impact the company’s perception and valuation), there’s an least an argument
it still needs to be disclosed.

