The #1 Growth Hack for 2022 & Beyond with Larry Kim of MobileMonkey The #1 Growth Hack for 2022 & Beyond with Larry Kim of MobileMonkey

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Welcome back to 3-Minute Marketing, the world’s highest value-per-minute growth marketing podcast where we interview the world’s top growth marketing unicorns.

Today, I’m excited to be interviewing the renowned unicorn himself, Larry Kim. For those unfamiliar with Larry, he founded the online advertising SaaS WordStream in 2007 which he bootstrapped & successfully exited for $150M in 2018. Currently, Larry is Founder & VP Marketing at MobileMonkey, an industry-leading chatbot software for Facebook / Instagram, SMS & web chat.

Larry & I decided to “flip the script” & have a longer-form conversation around a topic I’d been dying to ask him about (but his answer might surprise you):

“What are your top growth hacks for 2022 & beyond?”

Show Notes:

Digital marketing & growth has come full circle — back in the early days, it was all about chasing channels & tactics like AdWords, Facebook Ads, SEO & jumping from one hoop to another. So any company could build a brand online without previously having had a brand.
But that’s changed — growth hacks are nowhere near as leveraged as they used to be & are short-lived. Plus, ad costs have gone up by 3-4 orders of magnitude. And you can’t just hack the organic search (SEO) algorithms like you used to.
So the #1 growth hack for 2022 & beyond? It’s back to building your brand.
The #1 reason someone will click & buy from you is whether they’ve heard of you before — brand-aware cohorts are 3-5X more likely to engage with your ads, organic listings & emails.
The algorithms have evolved to quantify traditional brand signals as measured by peoples’ propensity to trust, open, click & buy, then reward those signals.
To build your brand, leverage creativity to come up with memorable ideas that stick.
Example: WordStream’s AdWords Grader was a “one-in-a-million” hit that helped build the business to a $150M exit. It worked because it tapped into the psychology of the market (FOMO about how your ads are performing vs. peers & competitors.)
Not all ideas are created equal: test a lot of different “wacky” ideas to find the unicorn outlier. You might need to try 40-60 ideas to find that unicorn.
To test your ideas, start with an “external” view of your campaign performance. Don’t fall in love with your ideas, let the market decide.
Focus on creating a remarkable offer… “free trial” is not a remarkable offer. This can take your conversion rate from 2-3% to 5-7% or even 10%+ if it’s a real standout.
You can still “hack” the algorithms today by focusing on increasing brand signals.
Brand hacking tip #1: Get people to search for your brand terms more.
Brand hacking tip #2: Remarketing is another a highly-leveraged way to drive brand recall.
Brand hacking tip #3: Those “annoying” popups are actually highly effective at keeping people from bouncing, which drives time-on-site & engagement signals