McKeating Advice on Growth Hacking

Everything in Moderation

In a past post I mentioned my grandfather, Dr. Phil McKeating, the man who built our family on strong principles and life lessons.  He’s the inspiration for my business and many of the ways in which I live my life today.  We learned a lot of lessons from him, and through his children after he had passed.  It was the way he had raised them, that many of my cousins, myself included, got to know him as he passed when we were still pretty young.  One of the lessons that stuck with me, was how he believed in moderation.  I apply his thoughts on moderation to a great many things in life – Growth Hacking being one of them.

“Everything in Moderation” 

Allow me to tell a quick story to drive home this important lesson.

Phil McKeating was a great man, and a great doctor.  He worked hard to raise his eight children while serving the hardworking community of Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood.  Just as it is today, Pittsburgh was a melting pot of nationalities.  Oakland was primarily Italian.  Phil was Irish.  Normally they’d live alongside each other in peace and tolerance, but Phil McKeating was accepted and loved by his patients.  He was one of the last traveling doctors of the time and wouldn’t hesitate to rush out and see someone, even if it was getting late.  To this day I’ll meet people and through talking, when they find out that I’m his granddaughter, they’ll regale me with stories of him.  Man is it something.

One of the reasons that he was so loved, beyond his ability to listen to them, and threat the person rather than the ailment, was that he never admonished them.  Rather than saying you shouldn’t drink, he would caution them with moderation.  Rather than tell them not to eat unhealthy food, he would say that it’s okay, in moderation.  He never made them change who they were, because he never took away their traditions or their customs.  Instead he gave them a healthy way to live with them.  We were raised in this same way and it’s served me well in everything from health and wellbeing, to marketing.  Yes, marketing.

How does moderation apply to growth hacking and marketing?

Growth hacking and it’s proponents are much like Christmas.  When you meet people who like Christmas, they normally really, really like Christmas.  Growth Hackers are similar in my experience.  When you talk to someone who is interested in growth hacking, they typically love strategy, the challenge and the success that it can bring.  I see growth hacking work in some instances, but I also see startups and established companies suffer the perils.  The biggest or most dastardly of all is the running the risk of becoming impersonal.

The rise of social media, email marketing and many other forms of tech have trained customers to expect hyper personalized messages.  Companies and startups embraced these messages and when they saw the success that stemmed from them, strived to find ways to do it better and faster.

Better and faster are not always synonymous.  Let’s take a look at an example to demonstrate what I mean.

Look at Twitter:

Yesterday in a Buffer Twitter chat, a side conversation developed around the annoying automated direct messages that plague our accounts.  Automated direct messages on Twitter have become so popular that the majority of accounts I interact with are using them, even though people hate them.  Why? Someone figured out that sending a nice, personalized message to new followers was well received.  It made them feel appreciated and started a conversation between them and the brand.  Naturally people sought to do this on a grander scale, while saving time.  So they found a way to automate it.

The thing about automation though, it’s neigh impossible to achieve automation while preserving the personalization of your messages.  As a result now we get blanketed with messages thanking us for the following, accounts swearing that we matter to them despite us knowing that this an automated messages, with links that they cram into our inboxes promising free things.  There is so much noise created by these impersonal messages now that as the people in this side conversation admitted, the personalized messages are getting lost in the cacophony.

Not all Growth Hacking is bad

I’m not writing this post to say that you should never embrace a single growth hacking strategy.  This post, and the McKeating advice on growth hacking, is to question each strategy as to whether it will risk impersonalization.  If so, the risk of it being detrimental to your brand is great.  If not then learn more about the successful implementation of that strategy and go for it.

Tips for which growth hacking strategies to use:

Find those in the Disruption Phase: 

Disruption is the term for when a tool, profile or platform first comes on the scene.  Gary Vaynerchuk has built a very successful career on disruptive media, identifying new tools that will become popular and investing time and energy into them.  Gary identified YouTube as one of these disruptive media when it first launched and he put a lot of time and energy into the platform which earned him a lot of success.  Growth hacking tools and strategies are the same way.

It’s easier to become successful when you are an early adopter.  Jumping onboard late means that there are a lot of people that have already done what you are just now starting.  If you start sending automated direct messages on twitter now, after they’ve already lost their luster, won’t get you very far.  In fact, it may push you back a few steps.  As people stated in yesterday’s Buffer Chat conversation, they immediately unfollow accounts that use automated direct messages.

Do your research:

When it comes to making business decisions, even those that need to be made quickly, each decision should be fully thought through.  Rash decisions have a knack for coming back to bit you in the…well you get it.   Each audience is unique just as each brand is unique.  The same strategies will not work for everyone.  If you are interested in exploring growth hacking, do some research first.  Find out what options are out there and then you can look into the ones that seem to make the most sense for your brand, your audience, and where you are with getting the two to know each other.

Read articles, search social media for profiles and chats dedicated to this strategy.  There is a wealth of information out there you just have to find it.  The Buffer Chat yesterday was on “If this, then that” recipes and there was a whole profile dedicated to the automation strategy that was participating in the chat.

Try it before you buy it

Don’t buy the promised success of a growth hacking strategy hook, line and sinker.  When you identify one that you think will work, try it out before fully committing to it.  Maybe try it with a segment of your audience, or for a short period of time.  This is important because you don’t want to fully implement something before you can be somewhat sure of its success.  Take for example implementing a bot on Instagram – a bot can get you more likes, but it can also end up following a lot of different profiles that completely water down your feed to the point where it’s meaningless and you’re left with a lot of cleaning up to do.  Or you can select hashtags and enter comments that don’t always match up.  For example some people might use a hashtag in a way that you haven’t thought of, and your comment ends up looking very out of place.