During the first year of leading the Startup Leadership Program, we included the obligatory class on marketing. In the second year, we broke that down into acquiring buyers (entrepreneurial selling) and acquiring users (more akin to traditional marketing). We talked about SEO, retargeting of ads, and virality.
It was good stuff, but somehow didn’t seem to fit with the group of startups in the room. SEO can be a long term play, and retargeting of ads implies that you had an ad budget. Virality, as we learned, is super hard to predict and almost impossible to engineer. How then is a startup, with no budget, supposed to be effective at getting the word out?
I’ve spend the last week reading about Growth Hacking. Mattan Griffel has a great SlideShare on what Growth Hacking really means (the 172 slides fly by).
I’m sure there will be more blog posts on the topic as I learn more. I’ve spent most of my week on the HubSpot blog, reading articles on Twitter CTA’s and social media marketing tips from the HubSpot team.
For marketers of all types, there are some great resources there. To quote Moo Kim, “If you read and retain all the information on their blogs, you’ll be a marketing expert.” It may be my new most favorite place to hangout online.
