- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel
and today's another day of Growth Hacking Unlocked.
If you miss any of the previous lessons
you can find them at neilpatel.com/training
and just click on Growth Hacking Unlocked.
In today's lesson, we're going to be discussing
the principles of growth hacking.
So why use growth hacking?
Well, it saves on advertising costs.
It's more efficient,
and it's a much quicker way to grow
than just using the traditional channels.
And in many cases, when you just use
the traditional marketing channels to grow,
it costs a lot of money
and you have to raise venture capital,
which is why we discussed that in the previous lessons.
But if you use growth hacking
you can be much more efficient
and you don't need as much capital to grow faster.
The first step with growth hacking
is about having a product people want.
It doesn't matter how good you're at marketing.
If people don't like your product
or they don't like your service,
you're not going to do well.
So make sure you always fine-tune your product.
Even if it's not perfect, that's okay.
You can always continually improve it over time.
Growth hackers, they think differently
and they're focused on creating a product
that truly satisfies a specific group.
And the reason they do this is,
when you figure out who are your super fans
and you figure out, all right,
this is what they're looking for,
this is the messaging that appeals to them,
it's much easier to target them,
and it's much easier to grow and scale faster
than just doing a blanket approach and targeting everyone,
which gets very, very expensive.
There's three disciplines that I want to cover
in today's lesson:
psychology, technology, and marketing.
Growth hacking is when you use marketing, psychology,
and technology, and you combine them all
to achieve business growth
for maximum users, revenue sales.
And to give you a rough idea of this,
let's say you are a software company.
Well, your sales team can help you grow faster.
Your design team can help you grow faster
through onboarding.
Your customer success team can upsell, right?
Customer success is also another word
for support or a variation of it.
Not necessarily the same exact thing,
but they're similar.
So other departments and top of marketing
can help you grow in many ways.
Now let's dive into psychology first.
With psychology, a lot of people are like,
all right, this product was $30,
now it's 10.
And in essence, they're doing a sale,
and that creates a lot of movement in the product.
And when you have sales, that works out well.
But you're like, Hey, I don't always have the sale running.
That's okay.
You can use psychology in different ways with pricing.
For example, when you go to the movie theater
the small popcorn, maybe three bucks,
the medium-size, which is double the size,
could be $6 and 50 cents,
and then the large one, which would be probably
like three-four times the size of the small one,
would be like $7.
And they do this why?
Because you're like, wow,
that's a really good deal.
Let me just go buy the $7 one.
The medium one doesn't seem like a good deal.
The small one, you know,
eh, not that much popcorn.
The large one, it's not that expensive
for how much popcorn you get.
I use psychology within my own websites.
A good example of this is social proof
on the Neil Patel Digital site.
And that's worked out quite well for us.
Intercom, they have custom landing pages.
That's really helped them boost their conversions.
In many cases, it's tripled their conversion rates.
Here are some examples of the landing pages.
And the reason this is important when you're using
psychology within your copy, within the images
is when you're driving things like paid traffic,
if your conversion rate isn't as high,
well, your ROI is not as good and you can't spend as much.
If you optimize your landing page with copy,
maybe even use some direct response lingo
within your landing page,
using survey data, running AB tests,
if you're now tripling your landing pages
through things like personalization,
well, it allows you to continually spend more
and acquire more users.
The big thing that I want you to take away
when using psychology,
it also needs to be logical.
If it's not logical, it doesn't work as well.
Yes, you want to play against emotions
but you want to play against emotions and logic.
For example, I use free trial offerings
within my NeilPatel.com site
with my Ubersuggest app.
Works extremely well
because people can try it out for free.
That's logical, boosts my conversion rates.
Yes, some people drop off the trial,
quite a bit actually, which is normal,
but in total I make more money
versus not having the free trial.
And what's even better than that
is the power of free.
Uber gave away free rides
at South by Southwest in 2013.
At this event, it was, you know,
a lot of influential people were speaking there
and it really helped put people,
or more so Uber on the map and be like,
wow, this is amazing.
And it was cheaper to do that
than it was to pay for advertising.
Another company that has done really well is Cymatics.
I've worked with one of the founders, Steven, there.
And they've generated over $4.5 million
from over eight product launches,
and their subscriber base has grown
through a million plus users,
technically 1.1.
And they did this through a lot
of competitions and giveaways.
And Cymatics has built a great following
and they're growing their business
from doing a lot of competitions
and giveaways such as,
and here's the example of this,
Hey, we're giving away $12,000 worth
of music products and prizes
for our 2-year anniversary,
just put in your email address.
Or they'll do ads with the competitions.
With the interactive video,
they ask for a like and share to be entered,
and they request you to tag two friends.
And that's really helped him grow fast.
Another strategy is product demos
and explainer videos.
We used to use them on crazyegg.com years ago.
We used a company called Demo Duck
back in the day to create them.
There's tons of options.
Now I don't know if Demo Duck still exists or not.
And you can do it for more
than just software companies or technology companies.
You can also do it for eCommerce products.
73% more visitors who watch product videos will buy.
Videos appear in roughly 14%
of internet search results.
So it's a great way to get extra traffic.
And 71% of consumers think videos
explain the product better.
And 57% are less surprised
by products with the video,
which causes less refunds.
And 58% of shoppers think companies
with product videos can be trusted.
So you should really consider creating a video
if you don't have one.
Another quick and easy way
that you can grow as well,
similar to, you know, using product videos as a hack,
this one is exclusivity.
Gmail did something similar when they first came out.
Dropbox did something similar
and they incentivize users by providing them
500 megabytes of free but if you wanted more,
just keep inviting more people.
And this just worked out really well,
and they had those viral flows with Twitter
which just allow them to grow super fast over time.
And it helped create the viral word of mouth.
They also created a video
on the Dropbox home page to explain
how Dropbox works, how to use it,
and that helped them as well.
If you're wondering how to create one of these videos
you can use Animoto, it's really simple.
I also recommend that you use humans
in your video to explain things.
Just keeps things really simple.
I recommend you keep it short.
Don't have 20-30 minute videos if you don't need to,
if you can have a 1-minute video,
even better 30 seconds.
Anything that you can do to imply urgency.
And the best product videos
tend to tell a story as well as demo.
So those two things are super important.
I also want you to try progression
as a psychological hack.
And here's what I mean by this.
You know video games.
You keep wanting going
to get to the next level and win.
And people are obsessed with making progress.
And the idea of helping them
achieve their goals is great.
So whatever they're doing,
help them level up and achieve more.
And that's a great way to get them
to really stick with it
and continually pushing forward.
I also want to show you advanced sales funnel
that I use to generate more leads and sales.
I use a lot of psychology in one of my funnels.
I know it's a little bit hard to see.
You can get copies of all this kind of stuff
at NeilPatel.com/training.
Click on Growth Hacking Unlocked
and go to week two.
It's the first video lesson in there.
And you can see I drive traffic
to a landing page, collect a lead,
send them a thank you page, and through email,
I get them to go to a sales page,
download reports.
Eventually I try to get them
on the order page, even offer one-time upsells,
and then I'll continually have more emails
to get them to the sequence
in case they didn't click through
on the first email as well.
Here's another variation of it.
Don't worry about, you know,
looking at each and every single step.
Again, you can get this at NeilPatel.com/training.
Click on Growth Hacking Unlocked,
and in there click on week two.
It's the first video lesson in there.
A lot of people use advanced funnels.
Good example of this, my buddy Timothy Sykes,
helped him grow to 15 million per year.
He's much bigger than that now.
And Timothy really grew through funnels.
It just worked really, really well for him.
So imagine combining traditional marketing with technology
and psychology, and that's where the power comes from.
That's how you grow a business.
Now in the next video lesson,
I'm going to be covering the other aspects
of growth hacking that we didn't really discuss
too much on today's lessons,
such as technology.
If you need any help, email us
at support@neilpatel.com
or you can just leave a comment below.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it,
tell other people about it,
make sure you subscribe to the channel.
And if you want my team to just do
their growth hacking for you,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
Thank you very much.