Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Growth hacking basics
Lecture: Growth hacking marketing
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0:01
You built your business, you've deployed your application, you're up and running, but how do people discover you?
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What if no one shows up? Unless you already have a customer list of people who are waiting to get their other hands on your application
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you're going to have to do some legwork to go out and get customers. Previous chapter we talked about search engine optimization, content marketing,
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and that can form the foundation for drawing customers. But I'd like to go over some examples
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of how to think about acquiring customers for your business. I've titled this chapter growth hacking,
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but really, growth hacking is software developers rediscovering marketing
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and then rebranding it, because they didn't want to call themselves marketers. Although when you think about it, it's kind of ingenious for developers
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to rebrand marketing and do something may consider to be a hotter topic. That's kind of what marketing is anyway.
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Growth hacking can seem like one of those arcane arts just like search engine optimization, so I want to provide a simple framework to think about
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how you can get started acquiring more customers. And it all comes down to understanding your costumer funnel- what's the funnel?
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The reason we call it a funnel is because you can actually visualize it as a funnel; the first step is getting awareness for your product.
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Most people when they hear about what you've built aren't going to be ready to buy, but if you can at least get them on your site
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get them reading your content, get them to understand who you are, that's the first step towards them potentially becoming a customer,
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if they need what you're selling. There are many ways to visualize a funnel and a lot of it's going to depend on what type of business you're building.
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When you search for a customer funnel in google you'll see a lot of different variations on the customer funnel.
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I've just picked some steps that I think are likely to be the most appropriate
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for the types of businesses that are enabled by building a web application. Think about each of these customer steps throughout the funnel
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and then figure out how they apply to your specific business. Once a customer has awareness of your business,
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only a certain percentage of them are actually going to be interested in what you're selling,
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and that's fine, not everybody is going to be a customer of yours. In fact, being specific about who you're selling to
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is really important for making sure that you are actually delivering something of value to your customers.
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If they've got interest, they're likely going to evaluate what you have
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even if you have a free product or a freemium product that you upsell parts of it later,
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they're still going to evaluate whether they even want to take the time to use your product. There are so many web sites out there,
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so time is a valuable resource the prospective customers would need to spend in order to determine and evaluate what you offer.
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For those that evaluate and decide they want to take the time to try it out, then you get to the sign up phase.
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This is really where you can figure out if they've get through the sign up process whether your application and your business
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is going to suit the needs of prospective customers. After they've signed up, they'll start using it,
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and you can start getting feedback and engaging with prospective customers. If you have A freemium based business,
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the sign up and the payment could be two separate steps; if you have a customer that using a free version of your product,
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getting them to pay up whether for advanced features or just to continue after a free trial period
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is the ultimate goal for making sure that your business is generating revenue. The customer journey doesn't end here-
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you need to make sure that what you're delivering is a value to the customer and that they want to continue paying for what you are offering
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but typically, going from awareness to paying customers is a hard enough problem on its own
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and so that's what we're going to focus on with some specific examples throughout this funnel, I have some good ideas
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that you may want to try for your own business. Again, I want to emphasize you can't just blindly take other ideas
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and think that they'll work perfectly in your business; every business is different, so the way that you're going to market yours
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you really need to think through the implications of how you want to do that. But, seeing some other examples of how other businesses do it
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can be really helpful, rather than you having to start from scratch with a blank sheet of paper to do your own marketing efforts.
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Rather than just roll through a bunch of slides in the rest of this chapter, we're just going to work in the web browser
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and take a look at some examples of growth hacking- marketing. The first step for any business is to generate awareness
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and that's why I want to introduce a concept known as turkey carving
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as you're spending so much time creating content, trying to draw in perspective customers. As they're evaluating what you're building
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there is some tactical advice around email campaigns that's proven really successful for Michael, I'll show you what that details.
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Now you may have people that are aware of what you do and they're interested, but maybe getting them to use it is the really hard part,
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and that's where putting out either a freemium product or in some cases just open sourcing some code can be really powerful
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for getting people to take that next step, from being interested to actually using what you've got.
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If one of the problems is just getting people to sign up, take a look at some calls to action, how you can structure your landing pages
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to increase the chances of someone signing up for your application. Finally, we'll take a look at some pricing tables,
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break down some of the psychology behind the way that you may want to structure the pricing for your products and services.
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Let's take a look at some of the examples so you can figure out the best way to market your own business.