As growth continues to evolve from its hacker-roots into a full-blown profession, there is one thing that will always stay constant.
Growth is experiment-driven marketing.
I got a great look into how big companies are building growth teams in one of my episodes of SaaSquatch Radio when I was talking with Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot.
We went over the importance of building a growth team and how to create a place for structured and process-driven growth. He’s had previous talks and articles that go in-depth on how he applies the scientific method to their growth initiatives.
Ride-Sharing apps are no strangers to world of referral programs.
They’re leading the way in the sharing economy and injecting life into cities across the world. Harnessing the power of word-of-mouth is crucial for the success of these companies.
Check out how they approach building their referral programs after the jump.
“..the average player faces a dilemma where attractive rewards like Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch are prohibitively difficult to obtain..”
“We understand that the current refer-a-friend reward structure isn’t ideal for the average player.”
“We found that the majority of League players refer between one and five friends, and we’ve designed the refer-a-friend update to reward you for bringing those friends into the game.”
Fraudulent Behavior
“…70% of accounts with 10 or more referrals are abusing the Refer-a-Friend program.”
“…99% of accounts with 100 or more referrals are abusing the Refer-a-Friend program”
Andrew’s the CEO and Co-Founder of Kuhcoon an ad platform that helps companies manage and optimize their social ads. We talk about the overall trends in the retargeting/native ad industry and the growth strategy for Kuhcoon.
Some companies like to think it’s a solution they can build themselves but the truth is, referral programs are complex.
They take a ton of effort to implement and maintain just like any other marketing platform would need.
At the same time, you know your company needs a referral program. So where do you start?
We’re here to help you out with some best practices that we’ve picked up in our day-to-day so you can start to understand the approach you should take to implement and improve your referral marketing strategy.
There’s always room for improvement just like there is with any other marketing channel.
Do you test different versions of your Landing Pages? Email Campaigns?
Of course you do!
So why do referral programs not get the same attention?
Usually the top two reasons for this is the programs are hard-coded into the system or don’t have analytics built-in.
That’s why one of our core objectives is to teach everyone how to properly think about referral programs. Nothing gets us more fired up than finding a referral program that could be doing better.
So in this post we’re back to doing what we do best. Showing you some examples of referral programs so you can get a better idea of what we’re talking about.
Asking ourselves, do we have the right people? Do they have the skills? How do we show them the ropes?
Well, if you’re like most teams you don’t necessarily have the exact mix of people to work on Growth. Fair enough, It’s not like these people are easy to come by. They have a rare mix of marketing and product know-how that isn’t taught in the classroom.
You can’t pick up these skills in a classroom or by reading a few blog posts.
People who work on growth have an inner hunger to combine data and creativity. They can’t be pinned down and defined by traditional business.
They sit at the intersection of your marketing, product and data science teams.
Morgan Brown is a growth guy. He’s been working with startups for years and understands how valuable it is to work at the intersection of marketing, product and data.
By meshing his creativity and experimentation he’s been able to unlock growth for companies like ScoreBig and Qualaroo among many others.
We all think about growth. We sit at the intersection of our product, our marketing and our data. Thinking about how we can grow.
Growth comes from a creative and scientific skillset that isn’t easily taught. So where do we go to learn? Well luckily, there’s a few places online like GrowthHackers.com.
There was a recent discussion on what the best one-liners are to describe this new industry. We decided to visualize the very best quotes from that discussion and a few others from around the web.
What do the likes of Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox have in common?
Billion-dollar valuations? Check.
Slick Office Space? Check.
Customer Referral Programs? Check.
Wait what was that last one..That’s right.. Customer referral programs. They’re used by all three of these companies.
Now I’m not saying that these programs were the silver bullet, I don’t believe any company grows from a single tactic. These companies grow by using a playbook of different growth tactics and create a culture of innovation where creative and analytical people can thrive.
I thought I’d do the rest of you a favor and compare the options side-by-side so you can pick for yourself. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the advertising options these companies offer, but it’s a great jumping off point for tech media buyers that are looking to throw upwards of $10K into a campaign.
Growth is experiment-driven marketing.
I got a great look into how big companies are building growth teams in one of my episodes of SaaSquatch Radio when I was talking with Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot.
We went over the importance of building a growth team and how to create a place for structured and process-driven growth. He’s had previous talks and articles that go in-depth on how he applies the scientific method to their growth initiatives.