What is explosive growth? Growth hacking is a fashionable concept among marketers, but many still don’t know what it means or how it works.
If you're one of those who don't know, don't worry, you're not alone. Today we'll help you understand what explosive growth is and the impact this strategy has on companies and their customers. Through explosive growth and shortened user journeys, you can significantly outperform your competitors.
We invite you to learn what explosive growth is and how you can use it effectively.
What is explosive growth?
Defining the concept of “explosive growth” is not easy. IN general view it's the rapid-fire experimentation of different marketing tactics, advertising opportunities, web design solutions, and more to quickly convert leads and increase sales.
More importantly, when using an explosive growth strategy less attention is devoted to analyzing the effectiveness of costs associated with marketing and advertising, and other indicators.
By definition, explosive growth is, you guessed it, focused on growth.
First, explosive growth occurs very quickly. The goal is to try experimental techniques, accept or eliminate them, and move on to the next. No long term goal other than growth.
Why does this matter? Because growth can make or break a small/young business. You may have heard of restaurants that close within a few months of opening. That's because they didn't grow enough to make a profit.
There is a common misconception that a growth hacker must be a marketer. In fact, the mindset of many marketers is not suited to executing an explosive growth strategy.
Marketers are taught to cut costs, focus on conversions, and run long-term experiments, which are detrimental to explosive growth. A growth hacker is someone who prioritizes growth across all metrics. Instead of focusing on specific metrics, a growth hacker tries to achieve growth on as many metrics as possible, often using low-cost marketing to achieve good results.
For example, a startup can grow quickly due to paid advertising. At the same time, growth hackers don't count costs to decide how to act—they can't spend money they don't have.
Strategies for explosive growth may include content marketing, steep discounts on products or services, incentives, social media and similar tactics. But their main resource is usually creativity.
The creator of GoPro, for example, built his company on creativity. Specifically, the company solicits user-generated content to instill more trust among potential customers. In addition, they hold competitions, the last of which gave away $1,000,000.
3 examples of explosive growth
Companies are constantly looking for ways to innovate in the marketing space and often create a sales funnel within their products or services. It's important to be able to focus on what Gary Vee calls "pursuing attention."
In a nutshell, his message is that you can't achieve explosive growth without literally chasing your prospects. If you just sit quietly in a corner, you won't find clients and won't attract their attention to you.
Reach out to your audience. If your potential clients are online 24/7, you should be there too. If they love videos, you need a YouTube channel and an Instagram account. Maybe many of your potential clients follow one of the celebrities? Collaborate with them.
Now we'll give you some inspiring examples of how to use an explosive growth strategy.
You're probably familiar with this home booking service, but did you know that Airbnb's success began with posting ads on Craigslist? Stalking in action: Airbnb's creators realized that most of their target audience was using Craigslist to find housing. And in order to tap into this market, Airbnb offered users who posted their offers on the startup's website the opportunity to publish them also on Craigslist.
The company has already proven its creativity during the 2008 US presidential election. But the real growth came when they started posting their ads on Craigslist. Using Craigslist, Airbnb grew from 50,000 to 550,000 listings.
Google+ isn't the most popular social network, but the company has used some interesting tactics to achieve explosive growth. At first, the company offered to create Google+ accounts only for a select few. In other words, you could register for Google+ by invitation. And people responded to the invitations. And some companies took advantage of this limitation for their growth:
is a great technique for explosive growth when you can't handle a large influx of customers during a launch and if you want to increase demand for your product or service. People tend to want things that are available in limited quantities.
Dropbox is another example of explosive growth. The company offered additional free storage space for each person referred to help convince customers to talk about the service.
In essence, a typical marketing method: Getting customers through product distribution. But Dropbox upped the ante by placing Refer a Friend CTAs almost everywhere and increasing rewards for participating in the referral program. It worked, and Dropbox is now associated with the leading cloud storage service.
If you're ready to try an explosive growth strategy, here are 12 techniques to get you started. Use these techniques to speed up conversions, as well as growth in all other areas of your business.
Growth is often related to sales, but other metrics are also important. For example, depending on whether the number of your subscribers is growing in in social networks, the number of email addresses or the number of blog comments, your business grows differently.
Let's look at the 12 best techniques for explosive growth. Choose any of them or all at once.
1. Find social networks that your competitors aren't using.
If your industry is highly competitive, you won't be able to dominate on Instagram or Facebook. Consider looking into smaller social networks, such as ones for stock traders or creative people.
When you dominate your competitors on any social network, you have unlimited access to target audience. Additionally, you can redirect traffic from to one of the social platforms and vice versa, creating a pleasant environment for interacting with potential clients.
2. Partner with another company to share your audience
When it comes to audiences, partnering with other companies is a great way to explode in growth. If your audience is 50,000 and another company in a related field also has 50,000, you can work together to reach an audience of 100,000.
Don't look for a direct competitor. Look for a company whose product or service complements your offering. For example, let's say you sell pet food. You can partner with a company that sells pet toys or personalized collars.
Meet potential partners e-mail or by phone. Prepare for the meeting, think about how to organically combine your audience. For example, tagging each other on social networks, offering sets with your products, or simply leaving links to each other's sites.
3. Give something for free
Freebie is a proven and reliable way quickly attract people's attention to your brand.
Or you can offer your customers a special bonus when they purchase a product. Let's remember the example of animal food. Let's say everyone new client can receive a free sample for your pet.
It is very important if you are using an explosive growth strategy. If something doesn't work, you won't know why until you try two options.
- landing page
- Homepage
- end of blog posts
- price pages
- Contact Information
Focus on one area of each page to avoid skewing your results. If you change more than one element, you won't know what made the difference.
Use to distribute traffic and set up split tests on your landing page. When you have statistics, your changes are much more effective because you know what works and what doesn't.
5. Change the layout
If your landing page isn't engaging your audience, it might be time to start over. This is especially important if you've run a split test and continue to experience low conversion rates.
Take a fresh look at your landing page. What would convince you to convert if you were a customer?
You may be targeting a younger audience who prefers video games. By setting up your landing page in this style, you will make it more attractive to this audience.
6. Invite your audience to email you with questions.
This tactic can be very effective. You can invite your subscribers to send you an email with questions, comments, and answers to the questions you asked them.
Unanswerable emails cut off connections with potential customers. Such letters seem to say: “I don’t care what you think about this.” By opening this communication channel, you will be able to communicate and collect interesting information from your audience.
7. Attend small local events
A true growth hacker does not miss a single potential opportunity that leads him to his goal. Which also involves going offline to drive growth.
If there are events in your area related to your industry, attend them. You can come as a guest or reserve a booth for your company.
By meeting people in person, shaking their hands and asking about their needs, you can build trust and offer more compelling solutions than a faceless company online.
8. Offer interactive content
Interactive content is hot right now. From infographics and quizzes to calculators, people love to interact with content online.
Why don't you offer them this kind of content?
There is nothing easier than hiring specialists to create interactive content for your website. Sites like Freelancehunt, Youdo or Fl have many offers of freelancers who will do whatever you want. Read reviews of performers, chat with them and order interactive content.
9. Offer a challenge
A great way to connect with your audience and increase your authority is through a challenge. It may be related to personal development, charitable cause or creative endeavor.
For example, stock trader Tim Sykes launched the Trading Challenge. He has used his curriculum to train several millionaires as well as many traders.
The secret to success is to make the challenge available to a limited number of participants. Tim invites people to take the challenge, not join it.
Likewise, celebrities who are involved in philanthropy like you can help bring your company to the attention of audiences. Participate in what interests and excites you, naturally will attract the attention of like-minded people to you.
We mentioned Gary V above. Many of his fans and followers don't even know that he started out selling wine. People love Gary Vee for his personality. No matter where he interacts with the audience, he remains himself.
If you have a strong personality, use it to your advantage. Become the face of your brand, inspire and help others. Explosive growth often involves finding out what you can do for others before asking for a conversion or sale.
11. Offer freemium
if you have software or SaaS company, you might want to consider developing a . This is great for applications of all kinds.
Offer something for free. It may not have a big impact on sales, but it will definitely attract people. Once they see that they can benefit from your product, they will want more. Some users will never upgrade to a paid version themselves, but you can focus on their onboarding process.
It's easier to retain customers than to acquire them. This is why the freemium model works so well. You already have users, you just need to convince them to use the paid version of the product.
12. Create a free, useful tool
Growth hackers are starting to realize the benefits of free tools. You will improve them every day when you realize that they generate traffic.
Start Using Explosive Growth Strategies Now
Are you ready to become a growth hacker? Explosive growth does not come easily or naturally for everyone. Start with a list of the best techniques for your business, based on this or other articles on our blog. Once you've chosen a few techniques, implement them quickly. Don't doubt yourself.
To test your theories and monitor performance. Perhaps you have good traffic on landing page, but it doesn't convert. You need to find out why the landing page is not working.
The problem could be in the sentence, design or headline. But you won't know until you check.
Some explosive growth tactics will be ineffective. This is fine. Just stop using them and move on to another tactic immediately. This is the mindset of a growth hacker.
Conclusion
Explosive growth is often confused with conversion marketing and lead generation. Actually it's completely different.
A growth hacker doesn't care about insignificant numbers. He or she desires to cause explosive growth in as soon as possible. Sometimes this will require spending a lot of money on advertising, giving out gifts and free bonuses. In other cases, events and challenges will work better.
Only you know what's best for your business. Try at least three of the explosive growth techniques we described and share your impressions in the comments below the post.
We cannot guarantee your success, but we can at least explain to you the new rules of the game and show you right direction. This is your plus own initiative will give you a good chance of becoming a winner in the new world of exponential organizations.What is the book “Explosive Growth: Why Exponential Organizations are Tens of Times More Productive than Yours (And What to Do About It)”
Until recently, it took companies decades to make a billion. Today, many businesses such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Uber go through this process in a couple of years. We have entered an era of high speed, now, in order to survive and succeed, companies are forced to grow rapidly. The key question is: how to compete successfully in this new world? How to avoid the notorious growing pains? The answer is to become an exponential organization.This book is a practical guide to creating and managing exponential companies. The authors talk about business experiences that have adapted to new conditions and give advice on how to adapt existing organizations to changes. With Explosive Growth, any company, from a startup to a huge corporation, will learn to use new technologies in order to achieve exponential growth.
Why Explosive Growth is worth reading:
- The authors examined dozens of companies that managed to take advantage of new realities and achieved unprecedented growth rates as a result.
- More importantly, they conducted in-depth analysis and developed practical principles on how established organizations can adapt to change.
- The book is a "survival manual" for executives and entrepreneurs because if you fail to become an exponential organization yourself, you will eventually disappear from the face of the earth like the dinosaurs.
Who are the authors
Salim Ismail - co-founder and executive director of Singularity University, where is he oversees many academic programs and is also its Global Ambassador. Previously, he was a vice president at Yahoo, where he created and managed its internal business incubator Brickhouse. His last company, Angstro, was acquired by Google in August 2010. In total, he has personally founded and led seven startups.
Yuri van Geest - Singularity University graduate, world leading mobile technology expert and passionate researcher of exponential technologies and trends.
Michael Malone – respected world-class journalist writing about high technology . Also, Michael developed two widely recognized organizational models that were predecessors to the ExO concept.
The book “Explosive Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown was awaited by many businessmen who are experiencing the pressure of difficult market circumstances. Crises, increased competition, increasing consumer demands - these are the factors that complicate the implementation of new business ventures for many entrepreneurs. After all, there is an opinion that only companies with a long history and a strong brand are able to succeed in the market in such difficult times.
But in the book “Explosive Growth,” the authors debunk this myth, using numerous examples to show that by using certain, non-standard, and sometimes quite bold approaches, you can both revive an existing business and open a truly successful and profitable startup, which through a short time will win huge audiences. Explosive growth, or Hacking growth - from the word “hack”, in computer jargon “an ingenious solution to a problem.” In this book, “hacks” are the very approaches that can be used to change the traditional path of development and get significant results ten times faster.
In a rapidly changing environment, only those who know how to make quick decisions can succeed. Companies today often don't have the time to slowly implement long-term strategies. The fundamentalization of big business, which is associated with the complication of processes and the growth of bureaucracy, today often turns out to be inconsistent with the realities of the present time. Explosive growth is, in a sense, an “oppositional” solution that provides for maximum simplification and acceleration of all business processes. Often using effective creative approaches.
It is not the strongest or the smartest who survive, but the one who best adapts to change
An example is " pop-up» – a rapidly developing format retail. Named from the English "to appear unexpectedly", the shops pop-up suddenly open on some city street, and just as suddenly close, providing significant discounts to customers during their operation. Typically, such stores are located in special temporary structures. The absence of the need to spend money on rent or serious construction makes the choice of this trading method very attractive, and the “word of mouth” method attracts many buyers to the store.
From a promotion point of view, such a retail outlet is aimed at stimulating sales and can solve the same issues that traditional promotions are usually aimed at: seasonal sales, getting rid of leftovers, etc. But for the consumer, such a format is also interesting because it brings itself a certain element of the game. It is not known in advance: where exactly a store will appear where you can buy your favorite brands of goods at a significant discount. Such information is tracked and quickly transmitted by word of mouth among buyers. In many European countries, including the UK and Germany, pop-up stores have already become familiar to local buyers. In Russia, this format is still new.
In order to find ideas and develop a business in the direction of “explosive growth,” the authors show how it is necessary to form special teams. These divisions complement organizational structure enterprises, their main task is to set up systematic growth processes. For example, just as retail chains traditionally use “launch teams” that deal with all aspects of opening a new store and then move on to other stores in the chain, so here “growth teams” are used to constantly work on establishing processes and algorithms that ensure explosive growth .
The key point that the authors highlight is that when searching effective solutions There is no need to limit yourself to the number of ideas, even if they end up being incorrect. Research shows that the ratio of correct and incorrect ideas in ordinary people and geniuses are almost the same. It’s just that geniuses generate such a large number of them that some definitely “shoot out” and change the world around us. For example, in 1879, the famous inventor of the incandescent lamp, Thomas Edison, according to various sources, conducted up to 10,000 experiments before he got the same light bulb that the whole world uses.
This is the “hacker spirit” of the business approach itself: in the search for original and super-effective solutions. It is necessary to constantly test emerging ideas, promptly implement those that have confirmed their value, avoiding the inertia of past experience, so that it does not turn out as in the well-known saying, “you buy a gun, you have to shoot yourself.” In this case, a certain scheme of “prioritization of experiments” can be used, which allows you to rank ideas and experiments by importance and implement them in strict order, albeit at a very fast pace. The authors call for a speed of decision-making that would ensure not quantitative, but qualitative changes. As in the situation with the Helmet Basilisk, a lizard that, due to its super-fast kicking, is able to run on water. Thus, the achievement high value running speed allows you to achieve an amazing new quality result.
When choosing areas for development, the authors suggest looking for ideas from consumers themselves, which can be helped by operational surveys, and also focusing on micro-nuances consumer behavior. But it is necessary to understand that the whole “explosive growth” approach can only work effectively if the company has a truly worthwhile product. In addition to being needed by the consumer, this product must also be marketing-active, i.e., contain elements of promotion. It should contain a certain value that will ensure not just consumer satisfaction, but also a viral effect: the desire to advise and promote the product further. Communication tactics are also aimed at this: the idea of stimulating consumers to attract other clients is used, who in turn will also receive additional benefits when ordering a product, which forms the so-called customer loop.
Much attention must be paid to increasing the conversion rate of marketing tools. Practice shows that this is a huge resource for increasing efficiency. Increasing conversion at each stage of the sales funnel has a much greater effect than investing resources in the initial acquisition of customers.
The book also suggests using simplified (not in terms of quality, but in terms of time and effort expended) methods for assessing work effectiveness, including by recording and analyzing successful and unsuccessful experiences.
From a marketing perspective, the explosive growth approach can be called a new, "experimental form of marketing" that has emerged as a response to the conditions of a rapidly changing environment. In him Special attention focuses on tactics and makes adjustments to the understanding of marketing opportunities and goal setting. Its task can be called ensuring a scalable, accelerated iterative process of growth, and within the framework of the development of the marketing paradigm, “explosive growth” is the next round of its evolution based on the convergence of modern theories of marketing and management.
Views: 1,694
It’s hard to believe, but Airbnb was once the “secret weapon” of tourism fans and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche website visited only by chefs and craftsmen, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for top managers and recruiters top level, Facebook is the flawed free brother of MySpace, and Uber is an upstart with no system or organization and, of course, no chance of success against such a Goliath as the New York Yellow Cabs.
How did these companies grow from humble newcomers to market leaders? Contrary to popular belief, they achieved enormous popularity by not simply developing a brilliant product and then crossing their fingers and hoping it would stick. The fantastic success of these companies is based on a carefully thought out and implemented methodology. This methodology is called explosive growth, and its proponents include not only best startups modernity, but also companies such as IBM, WalMart and Microsoft, as well as millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the GrowthHackers.com community.
Explosive growth is to market growth what Lean Startup is to product development, and Scrum is to productivity. Explosive growth involves cross-functional teams, speed testing, and iterative cycles that focus on customers: how to attract, retain, engage, and motivate them to come back and buy your product more often.
An accessible and practical set of tools that teams and companies from all industries can use to increase their client base and market share, this book guides readers through the entire process of creating and implementing their own personalized explosive growth strategy. This is a must-read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator, and manager who wants to replace wasteful, big-picture projects and finger-in-the-blank methods with more consistent, repeatable, cost-effective, and data-driven impactful methods.
The work was published in 2017 by Byblos Publishing House. On our website you can download the book "Explosive Growth. How modern fast-growing companies make successful breakthroughs" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper version.
The book "Explosive Growth" helps to understand completely new principles of "organizational culture"; see what makes some crops more effective than others. Often lessons that seem simple at first glance are very difficult to put into practice. And thanks to the fact that this book, for the first time, shed light on the hidden processes of creating global fast-growing projects, it will definitely become a classic of business literature.
This sounds especially relevant because there is not a single company on the world stage with domestic roots that has revolutionized its industry, changed the business paradigm, and grown to a capitalization of $1 billion in 1–2 years. And this is the challenge facing the Russian-speaking business community! And it will definitely be accepted, because the book “Explosive Growth” appeared in Russian. Every time I enjoy meeting people, life path which led them to similar ideas, and, as a rule, this does not happen by chance.
One can only envy those who start reading the book: they are in for an exciting intellectual adventure.
Preface
Welcome to the era of exponential change - in my opinion, the most amazing era in all of human history.
In the pages of this book, my colleague and friend Salim Ismail, one of the leading theorists and practitioners in the field of the future of organizations, offers his view of the world of the future - and how it will change the way we live, the way we think, and the way we approach work and business. Salim has studied dozens of companies that were able to intelligently take advantage of the new set of realities and, as a result, achieve growth rates that were many times higher than the normal growth rates of traditional companies. More importantly, he provided insightful analysis and practical principles on how established organizations can adapt to these changes. I believe that the book you are holding in your hands is the best guide for leaders and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to ensure their companies thrive in an era of transformational change.