Speaker 1: First off, what is growth hacking? The term growth hacking was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, and Sean played a key role in the startup growth at Dropbox and Eventbrite and Uproar. And if you know the story of Dropbox's growth, then you know that this stuff works. In its simplest form, growth hacking is finding the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies when you are limited on resources and funds, like, you know, pretty much every startup out there. So if you wanna grow your business quickly and capital efficiently and retain customers for the long term, then growth hacking is probably going to work for you. So, how do you actually growth hack in 2023? I'm gonna lay out some of the best strategies that you can use today, and then in the last one, we're gonna talk about how we can use artificial intelligence not only as a growth hack on its own, but also how we can like 10x all of the ones that we talk about throughout this video. So the first one is to create customized brand experiences. So the days of creating like a one-size-fits-all solution are long gone. That kind of stuff used to work, but now we live in an era where everybody wants a very personalized, hands-on experience. And if you can do this, you have an edge on very large companies, simply because they don't have the resources to custom tailor a solution to every single individual. Now, the reason that you wanna do this is because yes, you get a leg up on larger businesses, but also this builds customer loyalty and builds relationships with customers because they know that you care about them enough that you're putting in the time and effort to give them a custom solution. And people are more likely to buy if they have a closer connection with the company. And so if they feel like what you're offering is custom tailored to them and fits them directly, then they have a much higher likelihood of buying from you. So some examples of this played out at even very large companies are things like Starbucks and Amazon and Spotify, because Spotify takes your existing music preferences and they'll custom tailor you playlists. They'll give you playlists that are like, hey, you listen to this kind of music, here's a playlist that's made just for you. And that keeps people constantly coming back to the platform because they know that Spotify is making custom solutions for their particular music taste. And then Amazon is honestly scary accurate sometimes with their product recommendations. They know everything you've ever bought on the platform and so they can look at that stuff and a new product comes out or they see a product that might fit what you want and they just slide it into your recommendations. And a lot of the time people just buy stuff right out of the recommendations. And so they increase revenue and increase customer connection because people know if I go to Amazon and I look through my recommended, like that's really good stuff. And even here on YouTube, you're gonna see your recommended. And so if your recommended is good, which not for everybody, but if it is good, you're gonna keep coming back to the platform because you know that those algorithms are producing that customized feel that you get. You have the customized algorithm that knows you and your preferences. So it's very similar to Spotify's algorithm where it knows the kind of content that you want and it's going to continue to give that to you. So you keep coming back to the platform over and over and you keep making YouTube a ton of ad revenue. So a way to implement this in your business would be to go even more hands-on, right? Not just make a huge algorithm, but actually have more conversations with your customers and build custom solutions and tailor it specifically for individuals. Another great way to acquire customers and get leads in a very cost-effective way is to look at the data. And you need to understand the segmentation that your audience lives in. And so a report that was done by McKinsey showed that data-driven organizations, so like businesses that only base decisions off of the data that they have on their existing customers in the market are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. They're six times more likely to retain those customers and they're 19 times more likely to be profitable. So if you don't already have any customers, then the best way that you can use data to make decisions is to just jump into keyword research, right? What are people searching for on the web? And you can use tools like Ahrefs, you can use tools like SEMrush, you can even just go to Google Autocomplete and type stuff in and see what Autocomplete tells you because those are actual searches that were done by real people. And so you can see what kind of questions are people asking on the web. These questions can be a route for a business. And so if you are in a particular niche or market, you need to be doing research and you need to understand what your customers are thinking, what kind of problems do they have, not just the problems that your business can solve, because I think that's a mistake that a lot of business owners make is they just focus on the problem that their specific business solves, but they neglect the larger, broader problems that the market might have. And even if you can't solve the larger, more broad problems, you can at least have conversations about it with customers, show that you know that those problems exist, and then offer advice on how to solve them. That's gonna make you more of an authority in a space, in a particular niche, and then your product will be seen as a great solution for those smaller problems that maybe your business solves for. And if you already have existing customers, then you can turn to things even as simple as just Google Analytics to know very basic information about your customers. But there's a lot of tools out there like Survey Sparrow, where you can send surveys to customers in the broader market and determine what kind of things they like about your product. You can always ask for feedback, seeing people offer gift cards in exchange for feedback. So there's all sorts of ways that you can gather and aggregate data on the market as a whole, as well as existing customers you already have. It really goes back to just having conversations with your customers, understanding their needs, and then making decisions based on those needs. That's data-driven organizations. And as you can imagine, a lot of very large companies basically rely entirely on data. And so I already mentioned YouTube's algorithm, but even Netflix is pretty famous for using user engagement on particular content, not only to drive its recommendation engine, but also to drive the type of content that they make for Netflix originals. So they know the type of content that people are watching all over Netflix, and they can use that information to make new movies and shows that they have a very high likelihood of being watched by the broader market as a whole. Now, it's not going to fit everybody. In fact, a lot of Netflix originals I don't personally like myself, but honestly, I'm kind of an odd fish in that way. I can totally see how it definitely appeals to the broader market as a whole though. So next up is to actually leverage and utilize a social media content strategy. And notice I didn't say just post on social because that's what a lot of businesses think that they need to do when they're going to use social media. What you actually need to do is you need to have a plan, and you need to not only have a plan, but you need to have an end goal. You need to have KPIs, like, what are you doing here? Like, why are you posting content? What is that content supposed to be doing? And you need to have an actual strategy. And of course, then you need to actually implement that strategy on a consistent time moving forward. The great thing about social is that it's free to post, at least for now. So you can just post a bunch of content that fits into your overall content strategy, and then you can see the posts that rise to the top, that get a lot of engagement, that get more views, and you can take those and you can run them as ads on the same platform. And so this is a really cost-effective way of basically testing ad copy. So you see what performed the best organically, and then you can use those, tweak them a little or change them, but you get that idea of what a really good ad might look like, and then you can run that as ads. So instead of spending a bunch of money on ads to test all this ad copy, you can use the social platforms to test that engagement organically. And then, of course, you can always capitalize on growing trends, particularly if there's a new trend in your niche, you can be there. And this involves keeping your ear to the niche, right? You need to know what's going on in the market so that you can respond quickly, get posts out on a particular growing trend, and you can really gather a lot of followers and buyers and customers and leads using social media. In fact, I've grown a lot of my businesses on social media, even just here on YouTube, just because as long as you stay connected with the niche, you know what's going on and you create content consistently, over time, you're gonna build yourself up as an expert and people are going to buy your solution, they're going to join into your business. So a larger company that did this relatively recently that has worked really, really well is Canva. Canva is not that old of a business. And in 2022, they launched the Hashtag Canva Design Challenge. And what this was, was they had a panel of judges which were probably just random Canva employees that would judge submissions that people would make using that hashtag all over social media. And then they would choose the best ones and they'd give them prizes every week. And so you basically had all of these people using the tool, right? Using Canva to design stuff, and then they would win prizes, they would post about it, their followers would say, oh, wow, you won this cool prize, or you're participating in this contest, people love contests. And so that just drove a lot of growth for Canva's entire platform. And so yeah, Canva was free at the time, it still has a free plan, but they're driving tons of traffic to their platform, getting a lot of new users using it. And now Canva's like the go-to for designing stuff. And it wasn't like that just a few years ago, people were using Photoshop or people were using other tools, but Canva has basically taken over the design industry as a whole because of their leveraging social media as well as several other growth tactics. So a great way to implement this into your business is to maybe do something similar and just do challenges and do contests that get people involved and then post about that all over social media, get people posting about it on their own profiles so that their followers see it, and then you kind of have this ripple effect that brings people into your business. Up next, you can also just build a community. And so instead of being more broad all over social media, you can create a more intimate, exclusive community that allows people to feel like they're more involved in your business. And you get a lot of benefit out of this, not only having more engagement with your potential customers, but also you get the power of user-generated content and testimonials. Now, a lot of people still just use Facebook groups and I still think Facebook groups are the way to go. You can build communities off of social media, but it's harder to drive engagement on platforms that are not where people just already are. There's still people that just hang out on Facebook all day. And so if your group is on Facebook and it's a free group and there's engagement going on there, people don't have to leave and go somewhere else to engage with your business. And this creates a ton of user-generated content that you can actually then use in your marketing, right? People talking about your product in the group, people talking about, hey, why is this product better than this product? Having real conversations from real people is honestly some of the best marketing material. Just showing that regular people like you and me use this product or tool shows that, hey, maybe that will work for me or that will be a great solution for me as well. And so it's one thing to say, hey, we're a business and this is a great tool, but to say, here's all of our customers or here's all of these people in this particular group that have used our tool, here's what they have to say as well. And so you get all of this user-generated content that you can then use in your marketing. And so an example of a company that does this pretty well is actually Sephora. They're not a tech company or anything like that, but they do have these more exclusive groups like the Beauty Board and the Beauty Insider Community. And this creates a cohesive and more immersive experience for their customers. And they also have conversational sales and marketing in the group. And conversational sales is taking off right now. It's just having normal conversations because more younger generations don't really like to be sold to. In fact, I would argue that no one really likes to be directly sold to. But when you have a conversation with someone like you're just friends, just hanging out, and then you would determine that maybe your product would be a good fit for their problem, then you can recommend your product and then you can talk about why your product might be good. But just having a legitimate conversation with somebody is incredibly beneficial to drive sales. The reason that this works so well in social communities is because these are in threads that everybody in the community can see. So you might be having a conversation with someone, like for example, in Sephora, you might be wanting to talk about what would be the best for perfume for a particular event. Obviously, I know nothing about Sephora. But you might be having that conversation with someone that's an admin in the group and you have a back and forth and you determine that a particular product from Sephora would be a good fit. Well, then that's not just one conversation that you had because someone else might come along with a similar problem, search through the group, find that thread and end up buying the same product. And so you have these conversations. And the more conversations you have, you get this flywheel and you build up all of this content. Like I said, user generated content, you build up all this content that can be used for other customers that might be searching throughout the group to find answers. And so that can drive a lot of sales or drive a lot of new leads and engagement for your business. And the last one that I have is just plain old referral programs. I think people just forget the power of word of mouth. And we have all these digital marketing tactics and all these hacks and stuff. But honestly, just word of mouth, making your product so good that people just talk about it. It's still an insanely powerful way to grow a business. And even if you don't have people talking about your business organically, you can incentivize them to talk about it. And this is actually what Uber did. They just offered a $5 credit to everybody that used a referral link. So if I refer a friend to use Uber, I get $5 to use in the app. And this allowed them to acquire customers for, well, $5, which is insanely cheap compared to their lifetime value. I mean, how much money have I spent on Uber over the years? I don't even know, like hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. Like I've spent a lot of money on Uber over the years and they potentially acquired me for $5. And so that cacked LTV ratio is wild. And although Uber only recently became profitable, there's no denying that they are a massive multi-billion dollar company that has a huge market share in the ride-sharing industry. In fact, they've paved the way that all, pretty much all of the other ride-sharing apps use this referral-based program to drive their own acquisition. And so Uber's kind of set the trend in the ride-sharing industry, and they continue to basically dominate the whole marketplace. Now, like I mentioned at the beginning of this video, let's talk about how we can use artificial intelligence to boost all of the things that we talked about and use it in and of itself as a growth hack. So the reason that a lot of people are using AI is because honestly, right now it's novel. And so novelty is something that people are drawn to. And the way that this has worked in the past, even before AI is you have companies like Airbnb, who basically were competing with Craigslist at the time. And if you're thinking about renting a room from Craigslist and you're thinking, that's kind of shady, like, yeah, I would agree. I would never rent a room off of Craigslist, but that's kind of was the go-to at the time. And Airbnb knew that. And so what they did is they created this internal tool that allowed users in Airbnb that were making listings to cross list in a single click onto Craigslist. And this was like new tech at the time, like it was not possible to do that. And so it was novel. And a lot of people utilize it. And then people on Craigslist were coming in, they were seeing these Airbnb listings, which were also novel to them. And they would come to Airbnb and they'd say, wow, this website looks a lot safer and more legitimate than Craigslist. I'm just gonna come here to find my rentals from now on. And that's how they basically siphoned all of Craigslist customers right out from under them by just creating a new, more novel platform. It ultimately pretty much does the same thing, but it was new and it was fancy. And it was the cutting edge technology of the time. And so right now, artificial intelligence is that new novel cutting edge tech. So implementing AI in some way, shape or form to your business is probably going to add novelty to it. In fact, a lot of founders are just starting AI tech companies and then getting millions of dollars in funding just because they use AI somewhere in their business. And so it doesn't even have to be used as a growth hack. It in itself is a growth hack. But you can also take artificial intelligence and implement it in a way that will allow you to growth hack and continue to grow your business. And so I'll give you some examples of ones that I've seen recently. Things like at Warby Parker, which is a glasses company, they have this AI algorithm that basically will put the glasses on your face. And this isn't like totally new, but it is very, very useful. If you're shopping for glasses, particularly online, you can't try them on in the store if you're at home. And so the ability to wear them and see what you'll look like wearing them is very powerful. And a lot, pretty much across the board, glasses companies are implementing this technology because it drives sales and it works. And people are more comfortable buying if they know what the glasses look like. And it's not only glasses, but trying on clothes, trying on anything that you would normally have to go to a store for, AI has the capacity to render images on people and see what you would look like wearing particular outfits, clothes, glasses, hats, whatever. Now, another growth hack that I think is going to be huge over the next few years in regards to AI is gonna be AI-driven chatbots. Now, chatbots aren't particularly new, but actually leveraging artificial intelligence and training the AI on all of your business content is going to be huge. And there are some companies that are already doing this. And it's so useful because like we talked about earlier, we have the personalized sales and we've got communication and we've got these groups and conversational sales. And that's a lot of bandwidth, right? That's a lot of people that you'd either have to hire to run that whole thing or you're doing it yourself is unthinkable. But having all these conversations is very time-consuming. And so what you can do is you can gather all of the conversations you've ever had in your business or all of the content that exists in your business or in your entire market as a whole, and you can train an artificial intelligence on that information. So then you can just put that on your website or wherever, and then that AI can have an infinite number of conversations with an infinite number of potential customers at any given time. It's obviously not actually infinite, but you get the point. It's a lot more scalable and it's a lot cheaper and more cost-effective than hiring employees or doing it yourself. And so it's not just chatbots. You can use AI to do basically everything we've talked about in this whole video, right? Like if you wanted to create a social media strategy, you could literally just ask an AI to do that, give it information about your business and have it make a social media calendar that would drive more leads and more traffic and revenue to your business. So leveraging artificial intelligence, I think in this day and age is a necessity. It's kind of almost like when the internet first started and businesses didn't jump on the bandwagon early on. It's very hip to be on the internet right now. A lot of those businesses did not exist 10 years later. Allison, can you explain what internet is? I think that this tech is revolutionary to a point where the doors are open right now and it's new tech and so new businesses are growing with it and existing businesses are jumping on with it. But I think over the next few years, if you're not using artificial intelligence in some way in your business, you're gonna start falling behind. So you wanna make sure that you're implementing this kind of tech in your business so that you can at least stay competitive and if you're on the cutting edge, then you can use it as a growth hack to really blow up your existing customer base or even start a brand new business from scratch. Now, how can you take some of these strategies and actually implement them for you and your business? And I think the best way to do it is to just pick one of these and then see if you can implement artificial intelligence into that particular strategy. So if you wanted to, again, build like a social media calendar or you wanted to have some kind of referral system, can you implement artificial intelligence in a way that would be beneficial, that would not only make it even more cost-effective, but it would also alleviate the time constraint that you would have on it, right? Because a lot of these are relatively time-consuming. That's why they're so cost-effective is because it takes time and energy to implement them. And so if we can use AI to basically circumvent that altogether, then we have not only a cost-effective way of acquiring customers, but a time-effective way of acquiring customers as well. And so you can train custom AIs, you can just use base models like Chad GPT or whatever, and you can utilize artificial intelligence in your business to implement all these different growth hacks. So I hope this was a very helpful and enlightening video for you. If it was, drop me a comment with any more questions that you might have about growth hacking, or if you've tried some other types of growth hacking, leave them in the comments for other people to try out too. That's all I have for this video. I'll see you in the next one, bye.