Growth Hacker Tools

Putting that aside, however, the construct itself is useful in demonstrating the depth and breadth of knowledge needed to have the ability to continually grow value for your users and, as a result, for your product. Being T-shaped means having general knowledge of many skills and having deep knowledge or ability in one or a few areas.

The T-shaped marketer framework, by Brian Balfour.

The first popular version of this T-shaped marketer construct was the one created by Brian Balfour in 2013. The idea here was that you could develop a T-shaped approach to acquiring the skills necessary to do your job: In other words, you could develop broad knowledge of the basics, key processes, and activities of a growth program and then build deep expertise within specific channels.

The T would have three layers, starting from the top:

• Base Knowledge: Consists of those non-growth, more generalized topics that nevertheless have an impact across multiple aspects of the growth program
• Marketing Foundation: Much like the base knowledge layer, consists of marketing and growth fundamentals that inform all activities at one point or another
• Channel Expertise: Knowing how to work with the channels that are performing well today and finding those that could work well tomorrow

Since Balfour released this concept (which itself was inspired by an earlier, more SEO-specific version of the same idea, by Mike Tekula), others have expanded on what specific skills are part of the T as an understanding of growth and marketing has evolved and as new channels have emerged. Some of these updates have even repositioned whether certain skills might lie within the base layer or the Marketing Foundation layer.

To a certain extent, the debate might be academic. What is clear, though, is that as our understanding of growth hacking has evolved and as the inevitable expectations of growth professionals have increased, what may be considered a part of any specific layer has evolved as well.

Even though everything you’ve been reading here has been from the lens of the growth lead, it should be apparent that the T for a growth lead would look quite different from the T of, say a data analyst, community manager, or content marketer on the team, because they have different strengths that they need to go deep on.

This may mean that, for some people, the stem of the T — that part that represents specific channel expertise — may not necessarily show up in the middle. For others — those who go deeper in multiple channels, for example — their T may end up looking more like an M — 3 "legs" rather than 1. Take the T framework for what it is — a starting point to understand where you could make choices on where to go deep.

Writing about each of these growth skills in depth would merit separate books, but knowing in general terms the universe of skills waiting to be tapped is beneficial because it gives you a starting point for where to attack based on the knowledge you may already have or on personal preferences.

• Base Knowledge Layer
  • Behavioral psychology: This theme is so important is that growth is about growing value for your customers. That means having an understanding of why they do what they do (and don’t do). To understand their pain points and the goals they want to achieve, you simply have to have a knowledge of behavioral psychology. You could think of this area as an extension of the process of research for customer development as a way to understand your ideal customer better. It’s not much of a stretch to say that if you understand behavioral psychology, your ability to grow almost any product or service effectively increases dramatically.
  • Branding/positioning/storytelling: Part of understanding your customers is also identifying the particular value of your product or service and communicating it in a way that resonates with them. The cliché is true: “If you build it for everyone, you build it for no one.” Here's how you learn about how your offering is different from your competitors in order to craft narratives that stand out from the crowd. This is hard to do because this set of skills is all about creating excitement around your company — in other words, it goes beyond excitement about the product itself. It’s the sum of the experience people have while interacting with your company along its many touch points. And because it’s not just one thing, it’s a difficult skill to master.
  • Customer journey mapping: This area overlaps in many ways with building a growth model, but it's generally more detailed as you understand all the different ways people can experience your product and all the touch points involved, depending on where they came from and where they landed and all the combinations therein that ultimately lead them to value. Part of knowing how to do mapping correctly involves seeing how painful it can sometimes be for customers as they make their way along their journey; it's a great way to build empathy for your customers by designing better ways for them to reach their goals.
  • Design/user experience design: As you start to understand the customer journey, you need to start putting that understanding into practice in the form of wireframes for subjects like onboarding flows, checkout flows, or even detailing how new features work. You obviously won’t turn into a design specialist, but you need to understand how aspects of design impact product, marketing, and growth as a whole. As you do more of this, you’ll start to develop the “good taste” necessary for understanding what great design and a great user experience look and feel like.
  • Statistics fundamentals: Face it. You have to deal with numbers — a lot. When doing testing, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of concepts like statistical significance, confidence intervals, p-tests, and sample sizes. And whether you know it already or not, you’ll create lots of spreadsheets where you track all sorts of numbers and goals.
  • Basic HTML and CSS: You can find plenty of drag-and-drop templates to work with for all sorts of web design tools that you’re sure to use regularly. But soon you’ll realize that whenever you want to customize just a little, you’ll be pointed to the dreaded Advanced mode, which requires you to know at least some HTML or CSS. Having even basic familiarity here makes you more independent, whether it’s the layout of your email, landing pages, or even your blog.
• Marketing Foundation Layer
  • Data and Analytics: Growth is nothing if not informed by data. Every tool you use will generate data, and you’ll have the task of stitching together all these pieces of data into a unified picture. So, understanding data analytics and how to integrate them is vital.

Data is a true rabbit hole, so before you get sucked into all it can offer, you should know what data can and cannot show you and what good data analysis looks like. Only when you know what is happening and marry that with an understanding of why it’s happening can you optimize effectively. If you can learn to be consistent with what and how you measure data, the better positioned you’ll be in order to understand how to move key numbers in the right direction.

As you gain more experience here, you’ll find that you'll want to slice your data in ways that just aren’t possible by using standard analytics tools. Having some basic SQL querying knowledge can help you get the data in the right format from your database. And even after that, you’ll likely want to manipulate the data in a spreadsheet to extract even more insights, so knowing what’s possible within Excel or comparable programs is useful as well.

• • Conversion rate optimization (CRO): The CRO process and the tactics used will help you uncover the biggest obstacles in the way of your product’s growth and/or the largest opportunities to unlock that growth. Doing this results in more conversions or more people doing what you wanted them to do, be it signing up for your product or making more sales. This plays into every test you run across the customer journey, whether it’s within your product or with any acquisition channel.
  • Funnel marketing: This area takes your knowledge of the customer journey to the next step, where you can start to get a deeper understanding of how and why people move through each stage of the journey. Here you’ll try to dig deeper into what it is exactly that tips someone over to becoming a customer or what keeps them coming back; as always, your goal is to continually improve the customer experience and the value you provide.
  • Copywriting: Understanding your current customer’s psychology (as well as the psychology of potential customers) should inform everything you use to communicate about your product. This manifests itself in everything from ad copy to site copy and any content you generate within any channel.

    You don’t necessarily have to be an amazing copywriter if you have writers on your team, but you should be able to communicate messaging strategies to the writers if that’s the case.

  • Testing and experiment design: Testing is an aspect of CRO, but it involves more than just running tests. This also goes to developing a growth mindset that is all about gaining insights. And, when you run tests, you need to design them properly so that you can extract the greatest level of learning, and the right kind of learning, from them.
  • Pricing: It’s not uncommon to see pricing be a function of guesswork or simply following what someone else is doing. But, as with all other aspects of your business, this too requires a deliberate approach that’s a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Decisions you make here, unsurprisingly, have a direct impact on your ability to survive and grow.
  • Automation: As you start using more tools, you’ll quickly realize that managing them becomes a hassle. Coordinating data and interactions between them becomes critical, and doing it manually quickly stops being an option. Knowing how to automate these connections and interactions using purpose-built tools or application programming interfaces (APIs) will become a key advantage, because you’ll be able to make your entire system work more efficiently by automating repetitive, critical, and time-sensitive tasks like data transfers, data syncing, and reporting.
  • Collaboration: As you and your team start running more tests, you’ll inevitably need assistance and involvement from other groups. Learning how to influence and bridge competing needs is invaluable, in not only keeping your testing program going but also spreading adoption company wide.
• Channel Expertise Layer
  • Viral marketing: You grow by encouraging your users to refer other users.
  • Public relations (PR): Your name is mentioned in traditional media outlets, like newspapers, magazines, and TV.
  • Unconventional PR: Do something unexpected, like initiate publicity stunts or do business in a way that no one else does, in order to draw media attention.
  • Search engine marketing (SEM): Show targeted ads to consumers who are already searching online in order to solve a particular problem.
  • Social and display ads: Run ads on popular sites like YouTube or Facebook to reach new customers.
  • Offline ads: Run ads on TV, radio, or billboards; in newspapers or magazines; or create flyers and other local advertisements.
  • Search engine optimization: Ensure that your website shows up for key search results so that you can cheaply acquire lots of highly targeted traffic.
  • Content marketing: Generate high-quality content that attracts an outsized level of attention from people interested in a topic, which in turn drives traffic to the business.
  • Email marketing: After you have a prospect's attention, use email to convert, retain, and monetize them.
  • Engineering as marketing: Build tools, calculators, or widgets that people can use for free, and in turn they give you their contact information so that you can nurture them into customers.
  • Targeting blogs: Target niche blogs (or microinfluencers) to talk about your product to their highly engaged audiences.
  • Partnerships: Partner up and create strategic relationships that produce a mutual benefit.
  • Sales: Create sustainable and scalable processes to make it easier for customers to buy. This is mostly seen in the B2B world, where transactions can be complex.
  • Affiliate programs: Enhance your distribution by allowing other people or companies to sell your product for a commission.
  • Existing platforms: Piggyback on a huge platform like Facebook or an app store so that you leverage the attention of their large user base toward your product.
  • Trade shows: Showcase your product to a specific industry and, more importantly, to decision-makers who attend such events.
  • Offline events: Sponsor or host offline events — of any size — putting your product in front of a qualified audience in order to generate interest.
  • Speaking engagements: Speak at high-profile events, which results in your product being promoted to an interested audience as a natural consequence of promoting you.
  • Community building: Grow by forming passionate communities around your product.

Given the number of channels out there, a question you may have is, “Which one(s) should I specialize in?? One way to do this is to start with channels for which you have a natural interest or aptitude. It’s just easier to stay motivated that way. If you then layer on what the needs of your business might be, that gives you another lens to further narrow your focus to a channel that might be a win-win for everyone.

Here's another suggestion: if you have the flexibility to do so, focus on a new or emerging channel. In doing so, you become one of the first people to learn about the dynamics of that channel, which (if it becomes popular) you’ve become an “expert” in. And, because everyone else is rushing to catch up to where you are, there won’t be many people like you, further burnishing your brand as well as personal opportunities to leverage what you’ve learned.

If you don’t have the flexibility to pick emerging channels, consider whether you can specialize in a couple of channels that people generally don’t do together.

For example, people who are comfortable with paid marketing tend to focus only on the channels that allow them to do this well. But what if you were to excel at using AdWords and community building? This again positions you uniquely to be knowledgeable about how to leverage an unusual combination of channels towards specific growth goals.