This document outlines strategies for growth hacking with little to no budget. It discusses developing customer personas to identify target markets, analyzing competitors, crafting an internal and external brand identity, marketing through community engagement, content creation, and social media. Metrics like form submissions and shares are prioritized over vanity metrics. The customer experience is emphasized through optimizing for moments of truth and demonstrating the relative advantages of the solution through trialability and observability. Pricing, customer service, and reviews are also addressed.

1. Growth Hacking
Customer Development with Little to No Budget
Erik Snyder | Parlance Creative

2. Agenda
1. Intro
2. Personas
3. Competition
4. Branding
5. Marketing
6. Experience

3. Why Strategy Matters
The victorious strategist
seeks battle after the victory
has been won, whereas he
who is destined to defeat first
fights and afterwards looks
for victory in the midst of the
fight.
-Sun Tzu

4. Intro
Marketing is...
● Advertising
● Lead Generation
● Sales
● Anything Else?

5. Intro
Marketing is a love story between you and
your customers.
● Meet
● Date
● Fall in love
● Get married
● Build a life together

6. Personas
What kind of person are you looking for?
● Be intentional
● Be specific
● Be selective
● No scrubs
● Read Return on Design

7. Personas
Persona Outline
● Person, Problem, Implication
● Want, Need, Solution
● Seeking, Alternates, Decision

8. Personas
Person
● Name
● Picture
● Age
● Marital Status
● Lifestyle

9. Personas
Problem
● Situation: What is their
daily life?
● Impetus: What creates
the problem?
● Pain: What is the
pain?

10. Personas
Implication
● Personal: How does this
impact my life?
● Professional: How does
this impact my job?
● Societal: How does this
impact everyone around
me?

11. Personas
A Path Forward...
● Want: What they think they need
● Need: What they actually need
● Solution: Promise what they want, deliver
what they need.

12. Personas
Awareness
● Urgency: Do I need it soon?
● Importance: Do I need it?
● You can have either, neither,
or both. But both is the sweet
spot.

13. Personas
Seeking Solutions
● Direct Competition: Does what you do
● Indirect Competition: Solves the same problem
● Ignoring the Problem: Sometimes the biggest
competitor is nothing

14. Personas
Decision
● Relative Advantage: Is it better?
● Compatibility: Does it connect with my
current understanding of problems and
solutions?
● Complexity: How hard is it to understand?
● Trialability: Can I try it?
● Observability: Can I easily observe that it

15. Competition
You’re not the only one vying for their
attention.
● Know the enemy
● Learn from their mistakes
● Choose to be different

16. Competition
The Competitive Matrix
Define competitors on:
● Brand Archetypes
● Tagline: Just Do It, Think Different, I'm Lovin' It
● Color Palette: Major & Minor colors used in logo and design elements
● Messaging Tone: Aggressive, Friendly, Polished, Dry, Folksy, Etc
● Target Market: Who are they trying to sell to?
● Features: What does the solution do?
● Benefits: How does it improve user's situation?
● Advantages: Why is it better than similar solutions?
● Packaging: Price, trials and how the features are broken up

17. Competition
Sample Competitive Matrix

18. Competition
Where to Look
● Search like you don’t know the solution
● Exhaust the results and look at ads
● Use AngelList and CrunchBase
● Use Open Graph to find competitor’s
audience
● Demo

19. Branding
How will you stand out?
● Be unique
● Choose how you will be
perceived
● Don’t be passive
● Read Zag

20. Branding
Internal Identity
● Mantra: Why do you deserve to exist?
● Vision: What will you accomplish?
● Defining Statement: How are you “the only?”

21. Branding
Future Obituary
● How do you want to be remembered?
● Write the obituary for your your company.
● “After 50 years of successful operation...”

22. Branding
Archetypes
● Choose your
personality
● Avoid the
competitor's
● You can be a
combination

23. Branding
Messaging Palette
● Write down all your features, advantages
and benefits in plain English
● Now state them in your brand voice
● Rewrite until they are as short as possible
● For help, read Elements of Style

24. Branding

25. Branding
Okay, let’s build your brand!

26. Marketing
How will you get that first date?
● You can’t spend your way to success
● You don’t have a reputation (yet)
● You have to build a relationship
● Read The New Rules of Marketing & PR

27. Marketing
How to Be a Cheap Marketer
● Listen: Build your community
● Test: Turn strangers into promoters
● Measure: Ruthlessly judge your efforts
● Iterate: Double down on success but keep
testing

28. Listen
Find Communities
● Where your persona is
● Where your problem is
● Where your competitors are
● Online and offline
● Suggestions: reddit, meetup.com, quora

29. Listen
Blend In
● Respect above all
● Answer first
● Don’t sell
● Pretend it’s a party: would you act that way
in a party full of people you don’t know?

30. Listen
Making the Ask
● Wait for the right time
● Be transparent
● Ask for stories
● Ask follow-up questions
● Don’t ask for free work

31. Listen
Stay Involved
● Don’t have a one night stand
● Keep them updated
● Be their biggest fan
● Activity: Find your communities, discover
discussions to get involved in, and make
your first post.

32. Test

33. Test
You have two audiences:
● Your Personas
● The Startup Culture
● Play to both, but don’t get caught up in
startup culture

34. Test
Publish Your Own Content
● Any question you’ve ever been asked in your
industry is prime fodder for a post
● Blog is good, Video is better, Both is best
● Publish 3 times per week, one should be
long

35. Test
Blog Guidelines
● Repeat problem and solution keywords
● 300 is short (Seth Godin style)
● 1,000 is long (Moz style)
● Do both
● Always finish with an offer (more later)
● Follow on-page SEO best practices...

36. Test
On Page SEO Best Practices
● Alt text on links and images
● Keywords in H1 tags
● Images as links
● Link to respected content: Wikipedia, NYT,
Other Blogs (they’ll get a pingback)

37. Test
Guest Publish
● Google “guest post” + your
industry
● Get involved intelligently
● Pitch the idea to their audience
● Ask for advice
● Never abandon your post

38. Test
Let’s draft a blog plan and a post!
● List topics and rank them
● Find places to guest blog
● Find sources for your post
● Create bullets for main points

39. Test
Social Media Power: Regular Fuel
● Snippets of your content
● Your offers
● Re-posting good stuff you’ve found
● Transparent sharing: fun, intelligent, charity
● Memes/cats/game of thrones/etc

40. Test
Social Media Power: Rocket Fuel
● Wade into a controversy: industry, political,
but never personal
● Call out your competition (Dollar Shave
Club)
● Alternatively, give them free advice
● Activity: Social media calendar

41. Test
Remember, we are after engagement. Don’t
count on:
● Contests
● “Viral videos”
● Buying likes
● They will never care

42. Test
Offers get you contact info. Good offers are:
● Solves an expressed need
● Unique
● Not time consuming for you

43. Test
Put your offers on landing pages
● Unbounce is your friend
● Keep forms super short
● Always have a thank you page
● Auto-send the first e-mail
● Activity: Create an offer

44. Test
Product Pages Matter
● You must answer the basic questions first
● Long form copy is good...under the fold
● Make these pages a resource for your blog
posts
● Examples: Nest, FitBit, Rolex

45. Test
Advertise if You Must
● Start with the landing page and work
backwards
● AdWords is low hanging fruit, but there isn’t
much of it
● Facebook has potential, but measure
carefully

46. Test
AdWords Tutorials
● Blackstone Tutorial 101
● Blackstone Tutorial 202
● Activity: Build out your first campaign

47. Test
Facebook Ad Tips
● Pictures of people are best
● Action-oriented headlines
● Use the social component
● Boost your posts
● Getting likes will always be cheaper
● Activity: Observe setting up ads

48. Measure
Don’t Make Vanity Metrics Your Goal
● Visitors
● Pageviews
● Bounce rate

49. Measure
Metrics Worth Tracking
● Good: Time on Site, Recency, Pages per Visit
● Better: Form Submissions, Shares,
Comments
● Best: Segment, Segment, Segment

50. Measure
Google Analytics From the Start
● Use a plugin
● Set your goals
● Give it time
● Activity: Observe metrics in action

51. Experience
How will you turn a few dates into a lifetime
commitment?
● Stay focused on what matters: the
experience
● Constant improvement
● The grass is not greener

52. Experience
Understand the Ultimate Moment of Truth

53. Experience
Optimize for UMOT
● Track all moments of truth
● Create interventions to move people along
● Keep watch on your reputation

54. Experience
How will potential customers decide?
● Relative Advantage
● Compatibility
● Complexity
● Trialability
● Observability

55. Experience
Relative Advantage
● The degree to which an innovation is
perceived to be better than current solutions
● Can be measured in terms of economics,
social prestige, convenience, quality and
satisfaction.

56. Experience
Compatibility
● How consistent an innovation is with existing
values, past experiences and social norms.
● Anything that requires the adoption of a new
framework for understanding the problem
will require additional effort

57. Experience
Complexity
● The degree to which something is perceived
to be difficult to understand.
● UserTesting.com yourself
● Now your competition

58. Experience
Trialability
● The degree to which an innovation may be
experienced on a limited basis.
● Trialability represents less less risk to the
user, speeding initial adoption.

59. Experience
Observability
● The degree to which the results of using an
innovation are obvious to others.
● Visibility of position results to peers is a
conversation stimulant, sparking viral
growth.

60. A Few Tips
Pricing
● Use a decoy
● Price is perception
● Zero is worth less than nothing
● Read Predictably Irrational

61. A Few Tips
Service
● Offer free phone support to your first users
● Remind them you care
● Solve problems publicly

62. A Few Tips
Reviews
● Make it easy: a button in the app
● Remind them: with an email
● Use a service: ResellerRatings.com

63. Thank You
Erik Snyder
erik@parlancecreative.com
Twitter @eriksnyder