Marketing Hackers is a new media and digital marketing consulting company that focuses on growth hacking through marketing automation. The company co-founders have extensive web development, content creation, digital marketing and website operations management experience in addition to strong programming skills. The Marketing Hackers philosophy is work smarter, not harder. Programming a flexible, automated solution is generally preferable to traditional operations management which throws written processes and warm bodies at problems.
Growth hacking is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. What it really means is to audit marketing funnels, then setup a bunch of A/B tests to quickly figure out what is working. What works with a positive ROI is then scaled as quickly as possible. The process then repeats.
Growth hackers develop distribution through marketing channels at exponential levels. While a traditional marketing manage would be content with let’s say for example, 15% growth year-over-year, a growth hacker would be trying to double the same metrics every month for a year. This makes growth hacking particularly appealing to startup businesses.
Marketing Hackers’ Growth Hacking Example
Often businesses will be surprised at how simple it can be to “hack” growth. For example, let’s say you wanted to make an app that aggregates all the data from every restaurant in the United States. You would make money off the app by running B2B sales to the restaurants and generate ad revenue by showing ads to the app’s users.
What is the hardest part of this business model for an entrepreneur to turn his idea into a real startup?
The answer is not the website, the app or the social media. It’s getting that list of every restaurant in the United States with all their information up-to-date and then managing that list. This list would be used for marketing automation for B2B sales to the restaurants and also used to develop all the content on the app and accompanying website. It could even be augmented with all the social media information about each restaurant.
While a traditional marketing manager would be focused on the list development and outreach, the traditional operations manager might be tasked with developing that list as their first goal. To accomplish this, dozens of people would slave away for weeks, if not months, compiling the list in a spreadsheet or database. The idea, while national in scale, would probably have to launch in a smaller target market like a state or metro region. Buying lists, scanning in phone books, and old-fashioned telephone calls might have worked in the past. But today that is completely ridiculous.
All of this business information is freely available on Google and other Internet services. A Marketing Hacker would write a simple program that queries Google against a list of all registered businesses in each state and fills in all the details. This is called “data scraping.”
That data is then checked for accuracy, and all of it put into a big, shared list. Both the B2B and the B2C marketing teams work from the same list. For the B2B marketers, the list is a lead generation goldmine.
Automated emails can be sent to each restaurant and the most promising ones can be sent sales letters automatically. Calls can be automatically scheduled and sales closed. Everything can be tracked from one central place.
For the B2C team working on the app and website, all that data from the list can be converted into restaurant entries. Using open graph data, search engine optimization and social media marketing, the startup can go from no product to a full list of every prospect in the country and start selling right away, all while dominating the SEO rankings and developing their brand name.
Marketing automation can even recommend what needs to be written in each blog post based on analysis of the search engine market, competitors, and current rankings. The entire social media narrative around both the startup and the individual restaurants on the list can even be observed and shaped. What once could take a year or more, can be done in a matter of weeks now.
Conclusions on Marketing Hacking
Marketing hacking takes the basic ideas of growth hacking and better combines the operational management and marketing management parts together with strong programming skills and big-picture thinking. While the above was just an example of how marketing hacking can benefit a simple tech startup with an idea, similar thought processes and marketing automation can be setup for a multitude of startup ideas and even existing businesses struggling to grow their marketing channels quickly.
Can marketing hacking benefit your startup or existing business? If your product or service is scalable and you haven’t already saturated your target market, then the answer is probably yes.
