I gave a short talk at the Growth Hacking Antwerp and Growth Hacking Ghent meetups on January 18th and 24th respectively. This here is the content of that talk in slightly extended form. It’s actually my preparation for the talk, so sorry that it’s all text and no pictures.
(If you are interested in what the whole ‘growth hacking’ thing is all about, highly recommended you join those meetup.com groups, or if you speak Dutch, read Omar Mohout’s great explanation of growth hacking)
There are many aspects to growth hacking, but I’m only addressing one very specific aspect of ‘using technology for growth’: different tools we used and still use, the role they played in growing as a B2B startup, and the ‘hacking’ aspect of using the APIs all of them offer (good times!) to boost their value.
One way to justify this topic is that almost all of these tools (especially from the first slide) match what is often mentioned in the context of growth hacking: high value for growth at a very low price, with programming playing a central part in boosting that value.
About Engagor
Engagor is an online platform to help agencies and (medium to large) companies and organisations of all kinds manage their social media efforts by combining analytics, monitoring and engagement tool in one neat package.
The platform is built by the company of the same name, which was founded in February 2011 by CEO Folke Lemaitre, and is headquartered in Ghent, Belgium.
The model is Software-As-A-Service (SaaS): customers buy a license allowing them access to a personal secure Engagor account for x number of users during y months (typically one or more years), with some other differences in pricing plan related to features and how much you can monitor. See the pricing page at engagor.com for specifics.
As of this moment, we have about 30 employees, and roughly about 300 customers around the world. In August 2013 Engagor also received 2.5M in funding, and opened a second office in San Francisco. Being just under 3 years old, this means that Engagor has managed to grow fast compared to many other SaaS companies.
Founder/CEO Folke fits very, very much the description of ‘growth hacker’, so quite naturally the use of technology and data to help create and understand growth is ingrained in our company culture.I myself only started recently as ‘growth hacker’ at Engagor, so the credit for originally finding, implementing and then hacking the various tools I mention here goes entirely to him.
About me
I studied math and physics as Ghent University, but after (and actually, during) university it was startups all the way: SEO-optimized web site that brought in private teaching gigs during the last years of uni, then risk analysis consultant at Vose Software, web developer at Massive Media (Netlog / Twoo), co-founder of MyShoppingTab, then Engagor. (my linkedIn profile, if you’re curious)
I started at Engagor in October 2011 doing Customer Support / Relations (a non-technical role, but it sure makes you know the product and its users), then October 2013 my role became officially ‘growth hacker’. Yes, that’s on my contract, how cool is that!
At the beginning: communicate with your audience
First and foremost a disclaimer: while these tools and the hacks we did on them absolutely made growing easier, they by themselves did not make Engagor succeed: ‘classic’ things like great product-market fit, early exposure, and a great network all played a much more vital part. But they are not the theme of the talk.
Most important thing for B2B app is communicating with users, visitors, potential users, EVERYBODY. So none of these tools got us millions of visitors.
What they did get us is people coming to us interested in our product, and turning them into paying, extremely happy (and thus recurring) customers at a nice pace. We aim to optimise for sustainable revenue as much as we optimise for web site traffic.
- Value: chat widget we integrated in on our site (and app!) to help, and learn from, visitors. Useful for feedback, generating leads, improving product!
- Hacks we did: include not just name and location, but also current account plan in nickname, to know whether it’s a trial or current user (different approach for each!). Integrate tightly with both our helpdesk and CRM.
- Value: helpdesk / ticketing system. Keep incoming inquiries organized!
- Hacks we did: link closely to the internal issue tracking system of GitHub (a platform we use to help organize our development process), easily create issues from a ticket + reopen ticket when GitHub issue has changed.
- Easy online presentation + screen sharing with a fully featured free version!
- Hacks we did: none, it’s just easy to start a session for both parties, and works perfectly fine in the free version.
- Analytics at the user level! Great for more detailed understanding than Google Analytics, seeing realtime which pages a person asking support had looked at…
- Hacks: integrated traffic numbers in own backend dashboard to combine visit numbers with others (trial signups, mails sent…)
Many more: Curdbee for easy sending of quote+invoice, MailChimp for newsletters, Google Apps for gmail/calendar/shared docs, DropBox…
And let’s not forget the obvious: we have access to one enterprise-level tool for social media entirely for free! The perks of using your own product.
Now : sustainable growth, traffic, metrics and team
As Engagor grew in team size an reach, two main points play a bigger role: a smooth running team (and the occasional human errors, workflow tools that come with them) and maintaining data quality, not always obvious if you move fast as a company (URLs change, new product features…)
Top of the funnel
Search, display and retargeting ads with AdWords, AdRoll and others:
- Predictable, steady targeted traffic to feed the ‘top of the funnel’.
- The price of a click can seem high, but it can make business sense if you know the returns on those clicks!
- Hacks: landing pages! Different wording in each of the ads, constant tweaking in targeting…
- Story: sales rep says ‘I love Swiss leads, they tend to have resources for a tool like ours, readily accept meetings’. Quick check in SalesForce if the data matches his intuition, then dial up our Swiss targeting! That kind of stuff you cannot do with a blog post.
Ad Backends:
- Almost all offer conversion tracking!
Google Analytics:
- Powerful for segmenting and answering questions, but anonimised.
- No more keyword reports since 2013, but connecting with AdWords does give you some insights on search behavior.
- Tends to under-report numbers, so don’t rely only on it.
- Hacks: custom variables for metrics by account plan, heavy use of filters for ‘canonical urls’ (removing the user-specific IDs when they are in the URL)…
Middle of the funnel: leverage content, guide leads through ‘buyer journey’
From here on, we’re starting to leave the realm of low-priced tools and enter tools with a bit of steeper pricing, so not really fit for a beginning startup budget. One great advantage more expensive tools (like ours :)) tend to have is brilliant support though, both on usage and strategy level.
- Value: like Clicky, but better for our needs: individual customers, powerful ‘identifying’ tools, great segment reports, easy to include revenue numbers in reports
- Hacks we did: we track on account- rather than user level, since the person initially ‘discovering’ our tool is not always the end user, decision maker…
- Value: inbound marketing! These guys don’t just sell a tool, they sell a philosophy – great tool to help make the most out of your contact, set up lead nurturing campaigns…
- Hacks we did: tight connection to our CRM which is a benefit for both directions
- Value: empowering your sales e-mails, which can easily become a mess, using templates across the company, connected to CRM
- Hacks we did: none so far. Close eye on ‘template performance’ though.
Bottom of the funnel: sales
- Value: super complex and steep pricing, but boy is it a complete package, and almost every tool I named includes an integration with them. Great reporting tools as well to get reports ‘closest to revenue’.
- Hacks we did: pushing as much as possible from the earlier funnel info in there to tie ‘early’ properties to actual revenue
Bonus tool: hipchat
HipChat is a chat client, like skype without the voice/video calling. If you don’t use an internal chat for your team, stop being silly and start a chat room. If you do but think WHAT??? ANOTHER CHAT TOOL, AND IT’S NOT EVEN FREE???? bear with me.
- Value: the power of HipChat lies in its integrations: you can super-easily push automatic notifications to chat rooms from your own code, and developer tools like Jenkins and GitHub have integrations with it, to notify everybody of deploys and new bug tickets etc… Also not bad that they mail you if you get @mentioned while absent, so you don’t miss anything important.
- Hacks we did: we use it to show a nice ‘vitory GIF’ whenever something great happens like a new customer won, or also to alert the Sales chat room that somebody asked for a demo on the chat, etc..
Conclusion
Almost none of the tools listed are free, but they can pay off hugely, saving you time and hassle so you can focus on what really matters: building a great product, having a great and smoothly functioning team, and most of all: delighting and understanding your users!