Author: Ryan Holiday
Publisher: Profile Books
Reviewer: Maria Burpee, marketing consultant
Growth Hacker is an easy read that has become a movement that disrupts ‘normal marketing’. Although it is focused on lean start-ups, apps and consumer online services, it has some salient points I believe should still be recognized by B2B marketers.
The Growth Hacker approach is fundamentally based on Product-Market Fit (PMF). Create a product that fills a genuine need for a specific group of people and tweak your product as much as you need, do whatever it takes, to get it right. Pay close attention when Ryan Holiday talks about the need to build marketing into the product development cycle, rather than treating it as something you ‘do’ to a finished product. This, I believe is an important (and uphill) battle in most B2B corporations, pushing for early integration into development and not allowing product design to happen in the absence of marketing who represents the customers’ needs.
The other fundamental point of Growth Hacker is its focus on analytics, again relevant regardless of your industry. Holiday pushes us to dive deep, question everything, reexamine data, and make sure things are “testable, trackable and scaleable”. I like the part when he talks about how ‘seductive it is to do new marketing initiatives but it’s better to retain and optimize what we already have’.
Star rating: 4/5
