Science and technology enterprises pay more and more attention to substituting hacking marketing

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Beijing Time September 4 News, the famous U.S. financial website MarketWatch published an article said, Facebook, Twitter and other technology Nova in a few years, at a very low cost to obtain hundreds of millions of users, the most important reason is the adoption of "substituting Hacking" Marketing model.

The "substituting Hacking" model is a broader and more effective definition of marketing and marketing spending: As long as it is a way to attract new users to use the company's services, such as product development, product optimization, and management of distribution partners, can be viewed as part of "marketing".

The "substituting Hacking" model has become the future of marketing, both Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Groupon, and Zynga, all of which are beneficiaries of this model.

Here are the details of the article:

New mode of marketing

In 2012, Microsoft's advertising spending amounted to $1.6 billion trillion, while Facebook spent only $67 million in the same period. I'm not sure what Facebook spends on advertising this year, but it's certainly less than Microsoft's. There may be some doubt that Facebook's revenues are far below Microsoft's, so its advertising spending is not as good as the latter.

Here, I would like to say that things have little to do with Microsoft, but want to focus on a business like Facebook, such as marketing models. Since its inception, Microsoft has always adopted a traditional sales and growth model, but Facebook has taken a completely different path.

Over the past three years, Facebook has been selling and advertising only 100 million dollars, but its users have grown from 600 million to 1 billion during this period, and most users are loyal users. Facebook's performance in gaining access to users has to be stunning. In addition to Facebook, similar low input, high growth trajectory in the technology industry there are many, such as social game developers Zynga, group purchase giant Groupon, professional social networking site LinkedIn, light blog site Tumblr, Picture sharing platform Instagram and social giant Twitter.

Compared with traditional technology giants, these start-ups are getting hundreds of millions of users at very low cost, and these users are likely to be their current or future customers. How do these companies do this? The answer is "substituting Hacking."

Substituting Hacking

Andrew Chen, a technology company consultant, said: "' substituting Hacking ' is actually a combination of marketers and programmers who think ' how to get my product to the customer ' and then pass a A/b test, landing page, viral factors, e-mail transmission capability and instant information sharing platform Opengraph to solve this problem. ”

He added: "They will also set the level of direct marketing discipline, focus on quantitative standards, and then through the spreadsheet to assume the situation, and a large number of database query work." ”

In the Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley ecosystem, "substituting Hacking" has opened up a new road, fundamentally changed the company's marketing model, this special work has become one of the most popular jobs in the technology industry.

The "substituting Hacking" model has a broader and more effective definition of marketing and marketing spending, in which marketing means other than press releases and billboards, everything else, such as product development, product optimization, and management of distribution partners, is seen as part of "marketing", As long as these things can attract new users to use the company's services.

This is good news for both investors and business executives. Because the introduction of "substituting Hacking" mode, will eliminate the existence of wasteful behavior. According to the traditional marketing viewpoint, it is the most correct way to make discipline and to change direction by result. But for emerging technology industries such as Facebook and Twitter, "creative" sustainable spending is the best way to sell.

Practical application of substituting hacking

So which companies are using the "substituting Hacker" model now?

Facebook is one of them. After the company was founded, Facebook never formed a formal marketing team, but instead invested resources in a "growth-ready" team. The team's primary responsibility is to help Facebook develop, not to "raise awareness" or "build brand attention".

Cloud storage Service provider Dropbox is also a supporter of the "substituting Hacker" model. 40% of the company's customers are from industry-leading referral programs, rather than traditional advertising businesses. Dropbox's current valuation topped 4 billion dollars and became an acquisition target for Apple and other companies. The author believes that the "substituting Hacking" mode of the introduction of the work must not.

Groupon is one of the fastest-growing companies in history, and the company is handy with the "substituting Hacker" model. Groupon has launched a plan to invite friends to sign up for Groupon emails and get a 10 dollar reward for a shopping interaction. The success of the program not only helped Groupon attract a large number of users, but also saved tens of millions of of dollars in advertising costs.

Just from Google to get 250 million of dollars of investment in the taxi application Uber, but also the "substituting Hacker" mode of a unique situation. Since the company's inception, Uber has been growing through a series of elaborate "show" activities, such as providing free ice cream and giving roses to passengers. In addition, Uber has been able to get thousands of new customers in Austin every spring by offering a free hitchhiking service. Judging from Uber's application of the "substituting Hacker" model, it is not surprising that the company, which started with only 200,000 dollars, can grow into a high-profile technology star.

The future of marketing

"Substituting Hacking" has become the future of marketing. For most startups, for example, they can't afford a five-digit monthly marketing expense, or a PR company, or even a full-time marketer. The marketing of these startups can only be done by engineers, founders or customers.

Luckily, these people use their skills thoroughly to form the marketing "game rules". They have created a data-driven, shortcut-focused, platform-centric new marketing model, which is more adapted to today's environment than the marketing strategy in Mad Men.

The "substituting Hacking" model has swept the tech industry, benefiting from Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn. For investors, what is needed now is to change ideas, try to understand this new paradigm and find ways to play its potential.