The Truth about Growth Hacking in B2B - Vishal Sunak (ProductCamp Boston 2015)
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The document outlines the concept of growth hacking specifically for B2B businesses, emphasizing the growth funnel and the importance of organized experimentation. It discusses various tools and techniques used by the growth team at Backupify, including SEO optimization, A/B testing, and data analysis to enhance conversions and visitor engagement. Additionally, it emphasizes the need for continuous iteration and learning from failures to drive growth.
The Truth about Growth Hacking in B2B - Vishal Sunak (ProductCamp Boston 2015)
- 1. The Truth about Growth Hacking in B2B Vishal Sunak Director of Operations, Backupify (acquired by Datto) @TheSunak, vsunak@datto.com
- 2. What you can expect today Today you will learn: ● The Growth “Funnel” ● How to get started ● Tools of the Trade ● Resources I love ● Questions
- 3. About Me ● Vishal Sunak ○ BS in Computer Engineering, Northeastern University ○ MS in Systems Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute ○ SIB Graduate, WebDev, Fall 2012 ● Current: Director of Operations, Backupify (acquired by Datto) ● Past: Senior Systems Engineer, BAE Systems ● Contact: ○ @TheSunak ○ vsunak@datto.com
- 4. What is Growth Hacking? Term coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 ● Its not a replacement for marketing or better than a marketing ● “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth." - Sean Ellis
- 5. What is Growth Hacking?
- 6. Its widely known in B2C Businesses
- 7. Today we show B2B some love The Untold Growth Story
- 8. The Growth Funnel for B2B Visitors Conversions Leads Set out to move the needle on one of these three things
- 9. The Growth Funnel for B2B Visitors Conversions Leads Increase visitors to your homepage, landing page, app store listing, etc Getting the person visiting your page to take the action you want (schedule a demo, take a trial, contact us, download content) Become a qualified prospect for your Sales engine
- 10. Lift - The Metric of Growth This is the metric that you are trying to improve… and shows the progress of your growth activities
- 11. Now what? Well you get the basic concept of focusing your efforts to a particular part of the funnel Now you need to get organized and get a few people to help you with some specific skills
- 12. Growth Team Composition Growth Team Inbound Marketing Web Developer Analytics Knowledge of web page design, SEO, content, Social Media Implement HTML/CSS/Javascript, deploy to your production site Understands data, where its stored, how to get it out and analyze it with tools (like Excel)
- 13. Quick Aside about Channels / Lift This is a the desired lift This is the channel (mechanism) to achieve that lift
- 14. Quick Aside about Channels / Lift Let’s do an example together... Growth experiment: “Get more visitors to our webpage” Channel: Via tweeting out a link to our followers on Twitter
- 15. Let’s get organized Agile/Scrum methodology: ● Backlog - List of things to do your “experiments” ● In Progress ● Done Trello is my preferred tool. Its free and easy to setup. Or use a spreadsheet.
- 16. Tools of the Trade We use many tools at Backupify on our Growth team: ● SEO ● A/B Testing Software ● Google Analytics ● Website Hacks ● Moz ● Google Spreadsheets ● Google Webmaster tools
- 17. Tools of the Trade - SEO Goal: Get more visitors to your web pages via Google by ranking on Page 1 Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage: Basic Principle: Content Landing Page Blog
- 18. Tools of the Trade - SEO I joined Backupify in February 2013… and then a few months later, something weird happened with our blog visitors: What happened, we wondered...
- 19. Tools of the Trade - SEO Hey, maybe it will go away… let’s keep blogging weekly. It didn’t go away, it got worse.
- 20. Tools of the Trade - SEO As we continued to research it… we discovered via Moz that Google did a Panda algorithm update in March 2013 and started to hand out penalties: Google will penalize any pages that violate these principles: ● Pages with thin content ● Duplicate pages ● Multiple domains pointing to the same IP address
- 21. Tools of the Trade - SEO Then we started looking around at the blog and the content and quickly discovered, we literally violated all the rules and were getting penalized majorly So, we hired an SEO consultant (like a real one, not someone who emails you with broken english) This is what he found: ● Identified that we had been penalized ○ Thin content ○ Duplicate pages ○ Multiple test domains pointing to a single IP ● He told us to create a list of all blog pages and do an audit ● As a result we de-indexed many blog pages (noindex meta tags) ○ Verified in Google Webmaster Tools ● Updated robots.txt file to tell Google not to index those Trust me, I got this
- 22. Tools of the Trade - SEO 5x We managed to fix our blog’s issues and let Google munch on some beautifully SEO’d content that led to a 5x increase!
- 23. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks Goal: Implement HTML/Javascript that gets people to convert on some call to action Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage: Basic Principle: Add some HTML/Javascript on your website that can increase conversions Open Source, $0
- 24. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks Scroll down the page, this flies out Goal: Get more blog subscribers
- 25. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks 7.5x Increase in our Blog Subscribers with the Fly out (#upAndToTheRight) 7.5x
- 26. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks A few more: ● Bounce monitoring Live Chat
- 27. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Homepage 1 Web Traffic Homepage 2 Split your website traffic to 2 versions and measure activity on each split through a Javascript snippet you install on each page Goal: Run experiments on our website to see if we can generate more conversions (clicks) Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage: Basic Principle:
- 28. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Anatomy of a Homepage Headline Subheadline Primary Call to Action Hero Image To generate a backlog of A/B Tests - use these four attributes
- 29. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing In addition to Trello, we keep a A/B Testing Program dashboard: CMOs / VPs of Marketing love to see this view - make it part of your monthly metrics collection
- 30. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - Objective
- 31. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - Supporting Information
- 32. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - The Test in Graphics
- 33. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - The Results Google Analytics helped us collect Bounce Rate (Integrated with Optimizely)
- 34. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing In the last 2 years we have ran tests related to: ● Headlines ● Subheadlines ● Button Call to Action text ● Button Color ● Button Style (ribbon vs. button, round button vs. square) ● Button Placement ● Button thickness ● Hero Images
- 35. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Example, main Button Call to Action text we tested: ● Start a Free Trial ● Schedule a Demo ● Try it Now ● Try it Free ● Sign Up ● Get Started ● Learn More → Most popular in B2B SaaS companies by research After many tests, ”Learn More” was the worst and “Try it Free” performed the best for a free Trial CTA (its the one we use today)
- 36. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing How long should your test run? ● Lots of opinions out there ● It should be based on your web traffic so scale accordingly ○ Hubspot’s homepage traffic is slightly different than yours :) We test everything 30 days minimum based on our traffic
- 37. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Let’s talk about results… Game of small numbers
- 38. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Multivariate tests: ● Testing two variables at once ● For example: Headline + Call to Action on a Button ○ Combinations: ■ Headline A + CTA A ■ Headline B + CTA A ■ Headline A + CTA B ■ Headline B + CTA B ● Your traffic needs to be split 4 ways Multivariate is really interesting, but remember more splits… means less traffic to each combination, which could mean longer tests and inconclusive data
- 39. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Example of Multivariate test results Click tracking on the Homepage Trial Button Testing 2 headlines and 2 button colors simultaneously
- 40. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing Let’s talk about results for A/B Tests: ● Not all tests give you super conclusive, actionable results ● More likely its the Game of Small numbers ○ 1-2% improvements ○ Can be more frustrating than helpful ○ Give you doubt about making a change My advice: ● Stay true to your original baseline (use common sense) ● Little percentages can add up (better up than down) ● Multivariate testing is great, but keep in mind the split traffic scenario ● 30 days minimum (unless you have a compelling reason otherwise) ● Get in a rhythm and keep experimenting!
- 41. Today’s Session Summary ● You can do it - I promise you, you’re going to be great :) ● Think about the growth funnel when setting up experiments ● Channels / Tactics - create experiments with clear objectives on both ● A/B Testing is the lifeblood of growth - get one running! ● Fail often, try different things ● Shamelessly steal ideas from other companies :)
- 42. Growth Reading ● The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking, Quick Sprout ○ http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth- hacking-chapter-1/ ○ @neilpatel ● Coelevate, Brian Balfour VP of Growth @ Hubspot ○ http://www.coelevate.com/ ○ @bbalfour ● growthhackers.com ○ @growthhackers ○ @seanellis