Growth Hacking Secrets for 2017 Recap – Neil Patel

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Growth Hacking Secrets for 2017 was a virtual conference hosted by Neil Patel and partners.

30 top speakers in the digital marketing industry joined to give the audience more than just theories and concepts and provided actionable items for all types of businesses to implement to make a difference and grow their business.

We attended heaps of sessions and took some notes so that we can share the insights we gathered, with all of you.

Read below for a short recap and takeaways from each of the sessions.

Also, if you want to see what was said on social media – check out these hashtags: #neilpatel #growthhacking

See the full intro here:

Session: 7 New Growth Hacks by Neil Patel

Top takeaways:

1. Use content upsells. You can do this through interactive pop-ups, side bars and more. Once you have them reading and trusting you, use that trust to give them more content or offers. Neil Patel uses this tactic to collect emails and by adding a pop-up with an interactive background, he was able to increase email collections by 42%.

2. Use lead quizzes or other quiz platforms to entice your subscribers to give you their information. What’s even better than just giving someone an ebook? Having them interact with you beforehand. You can do this through quizzes, surveys, and other tactics. Neil Patel saw over 100% increase in people providing their email address for a content offer.

3. Put on webinars, but just hosting the webinar is not enough. You should spend more time giving your audience free tips and tools rather than selling, use the end of your webinar to sell after you’ve gained the trust of your audience. Don’t stop at just hosting a webinar, though. You may see up to half of your conversions come through your email follow-up, so make sure you think through your follow-up outreach. Continue selling and educating even after the webinar is over.

4. Make your website, emails, and landing pages super personal by using Geo IPs. Show your visitors a message that’s crafted specifically to their geo area and they’re far more likely to convert.

Session: How to Triple Your Conversion Rates With A/B Testing in 180 Days – Peep Laja

Top takeaways:
1. Don’t start with tactics. Many people try to implement what others call “best practices”, but those best practices are just a starting point, they’re not a tactic, you need your own data and research to figure out what might work for your business.

2. You can’t just start digging into data to get the answers. You first must ask the right questions and then use the responses to formulate smart and pointed tests.

Questions to ask when gathering data:

Session: Top 5 Growth Tactics for Content Marketing in 2017 – Hana Abaza

Top takeaways:

1. How do you figure out the right content? You talk to people and ask them what they want to read, have to understand not just their product pain points but their learning pain points as well. Talk to your customers and prospects to figure out what they need to learn about and what questions they have.

2. Find your content that works really well and parlay it into other mediums. Take advantage of your best-performing content by re-using it in other formats. Have a high-performing blog post? Turn it into a video, SlideShare, infographic, etc.

3. There are many ways to measure what content is doing well and serving a purpose but an important way to measure is by checking engagement. If people are engaging with your content – liking, sharing, commenting – then they find it interesting and are potentially passing it along to their peers.

4. Distribution: think about it before the content is published. Have a plan before publishing. Don’t just post every blog across every share network. Really think about where your audience is, and promote that piece of content the right way.

Session: How to Create Content that is Virtually Guaranteed to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Site – Aaron Agius

Top takeaways:

1. Make sure your content answers questions and solves problems.

2. Find the questions that people are asking across the web about your industry using these platforms:

3. Focus on your headlines. Think about how people are asking the question and let them know that you’re answering it right away. Spend 80% of your time developing your headline and also split test your headlines to make sure you’re driving the most engagement possible.

4. Do regular content audits. Include author, time to post, long vs short form, bounce rate, time on site etc. to continue to optimize your content process.

Session: How to Achieve 10x Growth By Acquiring Smaller Companies with Justin Mares

Top Takeaways:

1. If you’re looking to expand your product offering, don’t build up something that someone else already has trust around. If someone else is already doing it well, see if you can purchase and integrate.

2. Search for deals when looking to acquire other companies – free tools, blogs, small businesses that aren’t focused on growth or revenue, but that you can turn into a revenue generator.

Session: Teardown of 10 Successful Content Marketing Campaigns – Sujan Patel

Top Takeaways:

1. Add humor to the mix. Make people think that your content is not about you, but about putting joy into their lives. This might seem disjointed but it can build a strong brand for you.

2. Use your content to make you stand out from the crowd – choose a different angle. Don’t just create what your competitors are creating, try to find the angle that isn’t being talked about.

3. Make more comprehensive pieces of content. Rather than churning out content weekly or daily, make a few a year and make them the best. Choose focus around certain key terms that are super important to your market and focus all of your energy there.

4. Timely content. If there is a current event that relates to your brand and offering, always play into it.

Session: How to Turn Webinars Into Your Most Engaging And Highest Converting Growth Channel – Cy Hossain

Top takeaways:
1. Follow these 3 principles when creating any and all webinars:

• Be real – build a relationship
• Give away actionable and good content – don’t sell, teach.
• Engage and get people to interact with your events, don’t just speak at them.

Session: Minimum Viable Tests to 2X Your Growth Rate (Without Paid or Sales) – Conrad Wadowski

Top takeaways:

1. Test small changes deeper in your funnel which will likely have a larger impact than tests on the top of the funnel.

2. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket with tests. Run smaller growth experiments and then double down when you see signs of success.

3. Launch experiments before you launch full projects. For example: Rather than spending the time to build out a full 2-3 week or even 2-3 month follow-up series, test a 7-day email sequence to see if your audience is going to respond and if you’re using the right follow-up content.

Session: KEYNOTE: Start Making Unforgettable Content Now: How Naming the Unnamed Makes Your Content Unforgettable – Patrick Vlaskovits

Top takeaways:

There is a huge value of naming something that is unnamed. Patrick helped to coin the term of “growth hacking”.

1. Find a pain point that someone is having within your industry and coin it.

2. Put a name to the issue and then help them solve that issue.

Session: Growth Hacks For Getting Viewers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products – Nir Eyal

Top takeaways:

1. Make your product create a habit, a need to come back on their own. Add an element that makes them want to come back and engage in follow-up with your platform.
2. Connect with people’s emotions. Products and services can provide relief for negative emotions Ex: when bored we use YouTube.

Session: Push Notification Growth Tactics: How Pinterest Increased Active Users With One Simple Trick – John Egan

Top takeaways:

1. Use mobile notifications to get active users if your business has an app. But don’t just send any notifications, make them stick out with your audience.

2. Make your notifications personalized. You should use personalization in your push notifications to increase engagement. Using first name, details about their profile, etc. will increase engagement rates more than just generic notifications.

3. Like any other marketing channel, you should test notifications. Don’t just set it and forget it.

Session: The 15-Minute LinkedIn Hack That Drives Immediate Organic Traffic To Your Website – Dan McGaw

Top takeaways:

1. Find the right customer on LinkedIn by finding groups that are relevant and target users there. Then you can use advanced search to find the right title or function within that audience, area, etc.

2. Getting your content in front of the right people requires you to have a ton of connections. Don’t be hesitant to add people on LinkedIn so you grow your audience, especially if they are relevant to you and your business.

3. Syndicate your content on LinkedIn, but then bring them to your site by only giving them part of the article:

Session: 5 Uncommon Customer Acquisition Paths That Will Help You Grow – Eric Sui

Top takeaways:

1. Don’t just rely on the most common acquisition channels because they’ve worked for others. Often time these channels are saturated and expensive. Test other channels, newer channels.

2. Try YouTube ads. YouTube has cheap views because it takes time to make a great video and many brands aren’t even dabbling in video content. It’s great for branding and generating sales, just make sure you have the right content and CTAs. Here are the do’s of advertising on YouTube:

3. Test out Gmail ads. They have high CTRs and low CPCs. Make sure you are being very direct on this channel and are giving a clear value prop. Drive user to act now with a sense of urgency to get the best results.

Session: 5 Advanced Hacks To Double Your Customer Base In The Next 30 days – Vignesh Kumar

Top takeaways:

1. Hack #1 – Use logic plus emotion. You have to have a combo of minds working on something to make it the best it can be. EX: copywriter + designer to make something visually compelling and sell.

2. Hack #2 – focus each traffic source with one funnel. Try to make everything have a very specific purpose.

3. Hack #3 – Turn your marketing into a story. Use storytelling to sell your product. Many luxury brands do this to make people feel like they can be part of that story. People want to be the person in your story or help the person in your story. It makes them relate to the brand in a deeper way.

Session: Hacking Big Data: Using 3rd Party Data As Your Competitive Advantage – Zack Onisko

Top takeaways:

1. Enrich your contacts in your CRM with as much data as possible. You can use these tools to do so:

2. Once you have this rich data, segment based on the information and then launch into multi-channel targeting. Each of these platforms allows for you to upload segmented lists and target appropriately.

Session: Email Open Rate Enemies: 7+ Your “Normal” Email Marketing Are Hurting Your Opens (and What You Should Do Instead) with Susan Su

Top takeaways:

1. Make sure you have a strong sender score before sending. You can use Mail-tester.com to check for this. It will not only give you a score but will tell you how to fix your score if your sender score is bad.

2. Really think about your subject lines. Think through what your audience gets and what might get their attention outside of that. Interrupt patterns.

3. Sending the right content to the right people – always segment your list. By demo, geo, offer, device, time, etc.

Session: How to Growth Stack Your Product with Dan Martel

Top takeaways:

1. Create shareable moments. Let your own customers create a viral flow to get you more customers – for free. Dropbox does this, AngelList. Build shareability into your core product.

2. Use OPN (other people’s networks). Let your product integrate with other products. Get in front of people by letting people share your product on other people’s networks. Instagram example – anywhere you share from insta says “picture posted w/Instagram”, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Session: Samsung & Forbes.com Secret Lead Gen Growth Hacks Revealed

Top takeaways:

1. Get real insights from your audience. Don’t go after an audience blindly.

2. Make sure you’re defining your buyer persona. Know what they need from your product, what other products they buy, and what triggers their actions.

3. A/B test your landing pages all the time. Try different ways to reach your audience once you know who they are. Try a number of different unique value propositions.

4. Re-engage visitors with exit-intent. Use this as an opportunity to survey them, make them an offer or give them a different unique value prop.

Session: The Mobile Goldrush: Why mobile is now the biggest opportunity. – Dr. Karl Blanks

Top takeaways:

1. Mobile has 5x faster growth than desktop. It’s the least saturated way to reach your audience. A lot of younger eras are “mobile people”.

2. To succeed on mobile you need to still test but really think about the mobile experience over the desktop experience. Survey users to see exactly what they need on a mobile device, what they want to interact with.

3. Use on-page analytics and heatmaps, you’ll see that people interact with mobile much different than desktop and you’ll need to present you information in a different format.

4. Need to make sure your mobile advertising and mobile experience are aligned. That they are both short and sweet, say the same thing, etc.

Session: How to Create Viral Videos that Drive Millions in Sales – Karen X

Top takeaways:

Tips for how to make videos go viral

1. Don’t be too good for marketing. A viral video can start the engine, but it won’t keep the engine running. You need to use viral videos in tandem with your other marketing efforts.

2. Think like a reporter. Write the news headline before even shooting the video. Think about how you’re going to share it and how others are going to share it. Be familiar with the story you’re developing.

3. Release on a Monday or a Tuesday. Typically videos have a short shelf life. Weekends act as speed bumps, people typically interact with videos most during the week and reporters also only write about news mon-thurs. Take advantage of the new cycle.

4. Make it short. People have limited time to watch and interact with videos. Make the video as short as possible while still telling the right story.

5. Understand which emotions spread. You need to get interaction with your video right away. Trick the algorithm on social by getting as many people to like and engage right away.

6. Do something controversial. You have to take risks and push the boundaries to get people to watch. People are going to want to have an opinion about your video.

Wrap up

All in all, there were a ton of knowledgeable speakers with insightful takeaways. We hope you found 1 or 10 that you can implement today to start growing your audience and customer base.

To see all of the sessions and videos, visit this link.