Growth Marketers? Sure. Growth Hackers? Very rarely.<p>I love your posts John, but "Hacker" implies a level of coding in my opinion, and I think most here on HN would agree.<p>As someone who talks to a few dozen SEOs a week, 99% of them cannot code in a fashion needed to be a "Growth Hacker". It's not that they can't contribute to growth, it's just that the traditional methods SEOs use (content, technical fixes, social) would not be considered hacks, but just solid online marketing.
Strongly disagree --
<a href="http://www.johnfdoherty.com/seos-growth-hackers/#comment-11777" rel="nofollow">http://www.johnfdoherty.com/seos-growth-hackers/#comment-117...</a><p>[for your convenience]:
I definitely agree that growth hacking has a lot of overlap with SEO and Inbound Marketing, but I think there are a couple of critical distinctions:<p>For one thing, Growth Hackers have to be <i>the</i> expert across a huge number of platforms, because of the environment they work in. Growth Hackers are most prevalent in startups, where they wont have the convenience of a larger team of specialists. A 10-man startup (still relatively small) the Growth Hacker has to be able to do the SEO, the Analytics, the CRO, the Social, the PPC, the Retargeting, the Media, and be on the bleeding edge of new customer acquisition technologies as they arrive. New team members may take on some of this work as the startup grows, but for the most part, it’s all Growth Hacker.<p>The other distinction is implementation. A Growth Hacker needs to be able to code, or it’s a dilution of the term — a Growth Hacker who can’t code at least a little is a Growth Strategist, still a highly valuable team member, but a different animal.<p>The reason this is so important is that in a startup environment, the team is always going to be maxing out their bandwidth. A Growth Hacker can hatch a new plan, and then start building it, bringing in other team members as they’re available.<p>A Growth Strategist on the other hand is utterly at the mercy of the other members of their team — if everyone is super busy (and they will be) new growth hacks can take forever to be enacted, and that can spell death for a startup.<p>I totally agree that the SEO skillset overlaps with growth hacking, but I think it’s a mistake to equate them 1:1 — any SEO worth his salt stands partway down the yellow brick road that leads to Growth Hackerdom, but there are many leagues to go before we reach the emerald city.
Read in a french accent, it becomes, "SEOs are gross hackers", which is certainly what comes to mind when you have to muddle through a page of w3schools or some other SEO pumped spam-sites results on your way to some actual content.<p>Some have said that SEOs were not hackers because they could not code, I would argue they are not hackers because their work is all about decreasing the signal/noise ratio for the sake of profit. Hackers should know better.<p>For hackers the web is a way to free information, not a gimmick to make a quick buck by polluting other people's information streams.
I love the information in the post - some valuable marketing strategies are in there. But the main point the author is making? I don't get it.<p>As a marketer I love the idea of "growth hacking" - manipulating existing systems for the purpose of growth and customer acquisition. But I'm confused by the new mantra growth hackers are using to define themselves. "Growth hacking is, at its essence, data driven marketing..." Seriously? Who the hell has been marketing without data?<p>There are some really cool hacks that SEOs can use. .GOV and .EDU links are valued much more highly than normal sites - how can you get those links? I've seen some dirty yet beautiful tricks. Building out blog networks with DNS's linked to different IPs in order to manipulate Google - though rarely worth it (trying to out-engineer Google isn't my cup of tea), it's also impressive, and definitely hacking. Creative and unique ways to get press from out-of-your-league sources? Sure, that's a form of social hacking.<p>But A/B testing? Using proper markup? "Hooking your app into a network like Facebook?" Call it proficiency if you like, you can define it as expertise, I'll even give you savvy, but it's not hacking. Calling it hacking turns into a giant "we're hackers too!" circle-jerk.<p>Again, I reiterate that there is some solid stuff in the post. But using that information as evidence that SEO is growth hacking just doesn't make sense.
SEOs should be a laser focused thing, but it is more likely a catch all title for "internet marketers" and the industry seems to be fairly good at latching on to any buzzword in the online marketing world. SEOs last big bandwagon was social media gurus, especially on twitter. Now Growth Hackers? Um... yay... :(
I find the term growth hacker comical. And it brought to mind these gimmicky attraction seeking roadside characters. There is value in having a clever developer that can quickly build an interface and make a query to target a market, but it is still marketing.<p>WRT SEO's being "growth hackers" by definition, I think is incorrect. I struggle to call the function even marketing as it is more pure advertising. The only analogy of a "growth hacker" in the SEO space I can think of would be those search bar installers that millions of people downloaded from looking
for "smilies" and simultaneously installed a toolbar which re-wrote the organic search results a few years back.<p>For more perspective on how I feel about "growth hackers".
<a href="http://quad10.com/the-latest-sensation-a-growth-hacker/" rel="nofollow">http://quad10.com/the-latest-sensation-a-growth-hacker/</a>
I think the biggest difference is that Growth Hackers aim to hit much less saturated verticals that are completely disjoint from traditional search engine optimization and marketing.
A lot of overlap but not the same. CRO is not really considered SEO and is big part of growth hacking for example. But with the term Inbound Marketer I agree more.