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How and Why Growth Hacking Can Build an Audience w/Lauren Patrick
30 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks to Lauren Patrick who is the VP of Marketing at Curricula.
What growth hacking really is and where it came from.
The massive gains Curricula has seen to their owned media because of these hacks
The process others can use to find them
What growth hacking really is and where it came from.
The massive gains Curricula has seen to their owned media because of these hacks
The process others can use to find them
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Attention Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention Podcast, where you learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to build an audience.
Interview with Lauren Patrick on Growth Hacking
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Dan Sanchez with Sweetfish, and today I interviewed Lauren Patrick, who is the VP of marketing at Curricula, about how and why growth hacking can build an audience.
Origins and Benefits of Growth Hacking
00:00:19
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about what growth hacking really is and where it came from. The massive gains Curricula has seen to their own owned media because of these hacks and the process others can use to find them. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Lauren, welcome
Debunking Growth Hacking Myths
00:00:39
Speaker
to the show.
00:00:39
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Dan. Big fan of Sweetfish. Absolutely. You mentioned in the pre-interview that you passionately disagree with people who say that you can't hack your way to growth. You got to tell me about this because I've heard the same people saying you can't hack it. You got to put in the work. You got to put in the reps. It's a long haul game, but at the same time, I'm a marketer and I'm practical. I'm like, oh, if you found some hacks, I could certainly use some hacks this quarter.
00:01:09
Speaker
I think that's probably what keeps us all going on LinkedIn, looking for the next silver bullet. But at the same time, I wanted to hear your perspective on why so? How are you hacking your way to growth and why do you think it's worth looking for?
Scalable Tactics and Audience Relevance
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, and there are a couple of asterisks or footnotes that I want to put on the idea of hacking, right? You know, when we think of hacking in the pejorative term, like hackers are not a good thing in our society, right? Nobody wants to be hacked. However, when it comes to scaling your startup, your investors in particular are going to be looking for those tactics that are going to lead to revenue growth and a faster return on their investment, right? So I do want to preface this also by saying there is no silver bullet.
00:01:49
Speaker
There is no one thing that you have to do that is going to work every freaking time, right? Because every organization is different and every buyer is different. So when I think of hacks, I am thinking of those tactics that are the quickest wins to scale a company. And the very first part of that is having your audience. So for example, if you
Historical Examples of Growth Hacking
00:02:10
Speaker
are a brand new startup and you get to create your own category,
00:02:13
Speaker
There's a totally different set of hacks that is required versus somebody who is coming into the Salesforce ecosystem, for example. So that's just my personal philosophy around growth hacking, if you will. Absolutely. I guess it is good to kind of define growth hackings. I have seen a lot of definitions out there. To me, I'll throw out my definition. We'll see if you agree with it. I kind of find that growth hacking
00:02:36
Speaker
kind of came out of like just in the second wave of like the 2000s. I don't know what they call that decade, the early 2000s, right? When companies like Google and Facebook were trying to grow and they were promoting engineers into marketing, right? Engineers were taking over marketing and they're like, well, what should we do? And they were finding all these interesting ways to leverage data, ways to leverage automation.
00:03:01
Speaker
in order to hack growth, right? It almost has like engineering and marketing came together to find creative ways of growth, right? So you have things where like Airbnb injected all their listings into Craigslist and like multiplied their traffic, right?
Curricula's Growth Strategies
00:03:18
Speaker
And they had to do that programmatically. It took an engineer to figure out how to inject it and kind of like have like the bots go and put them all in there for them automatically and take them down.
00:03:28
Speaker
but that's an example of growth hacking is engineering mindset applied to marketing. Now, where do you sit as far as growth hacking goes? Yeah, you hit the nail on the head and I have a couple of anecdotal examples to share as well. Engineers understand the concept of scale better than almost anyone else in business because they actually know what that means when you apply scalability to these principles. There's a head of product here in Atlanta who is actually working on a consumer brand.
00:03:55
Speaker
And he told me about how he built audiences around like-minded interests and then would rename the group once it got to a certain level of members, a couple thousand. The biggest one he told me about was 190,000 and then really changed the name of the group.
00:04:09
Speaker
And we saw a lot of that also happen in election cycles regarding the way that people would pivot people towards different political philosophies, but I digress. Yes, engineers absolutely get growth hacking better than anyone else. It's also incredibly helpful when you are, product-led growth is a big part of this conversation, right?
00:04:28
Speaker
And so when we think about how you can hack your growth, we have an engineer who is willing to open up your tech and work with marketing on that buyer's journey through a PLG lifecycle instead of the traditional funnel.
Programmatic SEO and Scalable Strategies
00:04:40
Speaker
That's another great technique for growth hacking.
00:04:42
Speaker
So scalability kind of being the key term that makes growth hack and growth hack like make it possible. It's not just an advertising campaign where you're just paying for more media. It has a scalable component that like if it works good on the test, we can just write a little bit more code or tweak a few more things and then bam, we just went from like 10 to 100,000 people. Hence programmatic SEO would be growth hacky, right?
00:05:06
Speaker
You're not just creating 50 blog posts, you're creating 500,000 pages of unique content with a few clicks of a button, which is what a Zapier did with their content, why they were able to grow so much.
Curricula's Marketing Approach
00:05:20
Speaker
That's a growth hack approach. And you brought up two really good things there as well with the paid side. Like if you have 100 million in funding, you raised a big old series B, then you absolutely can hack more growth and outspend all of your competition.
00:05:32
Speaker
On the flip side with everyone talking about PLG now, we actually saw that growth hack work for us a curricula. So in the last 90 days, we launched our free version in November. So we literally saw our site traffic and conversion rate double overnight.
00:05:47
Speaker
Now we launched new campaigns, we put a bunch of budget behind that, but we went after a hyper-local audience that we know would contribute to our growth. So I showed our investors our site traffic has literally tripled year every year and our conversion rate has gone from a 2% to a 5% in 90 days.
00:06:03
Speaker
That's hard to do. It's hard to grow traffic and conversion rates, right? Now, of course, you've lowered the bar massively with you eliminating friction so they can sign up and get you into a freemium model, is what I'm hearing. Exactly. We literally re-architected the platform so that people don't just have a two-week trial. They have their own freemium account in perpetuity.
00:06:23
Speaker
So and that's been a tried and true method for a long time to be able to grow user base and then trying to get those people to upsell and to a paid account of some kind. What else are you guys doing or have found successful in your attempts to find the tweaks that can make a big difference?
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a great question, Dan. Our investor refers to it as tinking with the dials and pulling on different levers.
Quick Wins and Customer Discovery
00:06:47
Speaker
So a big one of that is testing our campaign spend. We spend quite a bit on both LinkedIn ads and Google ads, but we have gotten super focused on the audiences that we're going after. Same thing with Google ads. Like we have really finessed the long tail keywords that we're using around our SEM campaigns. And to your point on SEO, we are spending up organic content optimizing those keywords as well.
00:07:09
Speaker
This strategy has worked very well for us considering what a crowded category we are in for cybersecurity. It's just our way of saying this is exactly where we're going to focus and go after this set instead of trying to be everywhere. Is most of your paid media going strictly towards product signups? Or do you have other things you're pushing paid media towards?
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm very lucky that I walked into a marketers dream and I have engineers that care about marketing in good design. So we have architected almost micro sites to go around with our LinkedIn ad campaigns. So our content is so good. People are engaging on the artwork we use with these campaigns as if it was a native post and not an ad.
00:07:49
Speaker
So as a marketing executive, where do you look for these quick wins at? Do you survey the audience? Where are you looking for them? It's one thing to be like, oh, let's try out some different ad creative to send them to a landing page or a microsite. Where do you look for these quick wins?
00:08:05
Speaker
That's an excellent question. The first thing I do as a marketer whenever I come into any organization is do customer discovery. I'm always looking for those keywords from our customers about why they loved us. Because I want people to feel that love around every touch point in the buyer's journey. Whatever the first ad we hit you with was, that first cold email blast you got, the drip, etc. To your point, we have incredible creative. We're a security awareness training company. We produce all of our content in-house.
00:08:33
Speaker
All of our ads feature the characters from our Curriculaville universe. When you see that ad with this cartoon talking about cybersecurity, it immediately peaks the person who we're hitting with and like, well, I want to see what this is all about. We're looking at an 11 percent conversion rate on our page channels right now. How does that turn into a broader audience? As you're building these familiarity with the brand, you're building characters. How does the audience grow for the company then?
00:09:02
Speaker
That's an excellent question. So we are lucky on two different, or actually three different pieces there. The cybersecurity partner ecosystem is vast because there are so many people in the industry who are doing phishing training or compliance, et cetera. So we have the direct side with these folks who signed up for curricula, love us, have bought and implemented us in their companies. Then we have partners who saw what we were doing and said, I want to resell you.
00:09:27
Speaker
So we are expanding our ecosystem that way with reselling among channels and building API integrations with different providers so that their customers can opt into our content. And then there's the third piece of all these small managed service providers out there who are helping SMBs like your local dentist. Your dentist doesn't run their IT. They pay somebody else to do their IT. And so those folks are now saying, oh, curricula's cool. I want to help my local dentist prevent getting phished because he had a ransomware incident last year.
00:09:56
Speaker
Ma'am, so it sounds like you're focused mostly on building out an ecosystem for the company with lots of different vendors, partners, and avenues where the company can be exposed to the audience with. And that is definitely a growth hack, the community building exercises. Like if you have a community that you can correlate with your brand, that's also going to help drive demand. Absolutely. I'd like to say that community building and audience growth are different, though obviously go really well hand in hand.
00:10:25
Speaker
An audience is, you know, somebody a company or an individual is talking to, and they might talk back to the individual,
Community Building vs. Audience Growth
00:10:31
Speaker
but you have community when they start to talk to each other, right? And actually have to have a relationship outside of you sometimes. So what would be the next steps for growing your own audience with the company, with where you've been so far? Where you guys see this going in the future? That is an excellent question. So just looking at the work that we've done in the last two years since I joined the organization as marketing leader,
00:10:53
Speaker
we have really focused on the like-minded folks, people who want to do something different for cybersecurity, who just don't want to check the box for compliance. And I'm finding a lot of success on Twitter in particular. When I see the cybersecurity thought leaders who have a hundred thousand followers just sliding into their DM and being breezy about it and saying, Hey, I love that you said this, or I saw you quoted in this article,
00:11:18
Speaker
So for example, the cybersecurity adviser to the White House during the Obama administration, his name is Chris Painter.
00:11:25
Speaker
And Chris has become a friend of the company. So we had him on a webinar for Cyber Security Awareness Month. And that was a great way of expanding our audience saying like, Chris has fantastic reach. He's quoted in the Washington Post all the time. We used him in our press release announcing the event. And it was a great way to drive new people who knew Chris, knew his brand because he's been in the industry for 30 years and has literally prosecuted some of the worst cyber criminals out there to have him be associated with our brand was a big win.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's huge. So having him associated, how are you doing? Are you doing it formally or informally? And are you planning on scaling it to other influencers out there? Yeah, for sure. So definitely informal because, you know, he wants to remain unbiased. He's committed to the mission as are we. And so we've seen that as well from our partners. There's a giant cybersecurity insurance company in the Bay Area called Coalition. They were the number one fastest growing company in San Francisco last year.
00:12:17
Speaker
And their CEO, Joshua Motta, actually worked for the CIA as a nation state adversary. So when we get somebody like Joshua, who is an official partner, we have an API integration with them to talk about us in our blog content to sing curricula's praises, that's a win. But then on the flip side, we have other leaders in the space who say, yeah, curricula, I'm going to come and talk on your podcast, but I'm never going to buy from you because I'm committed to this vendor. And that's fine, right? At the end of the day, it's about the mission, help people stop from getting hacked,
00:12:46
Speaker
keep organizations safe from having to pay ransomware to nation state adversaries. Gosh, it's becoming a bigger and bigger thing, right? As a new homeowner, I've been pitched on home security and I'm like, I'm way less concerned about people breaking in my house as much as I am about getting hacked or having my identity stolen or different things like that. That's just becoming the new way everybody's, it seems like the criminals are operating.
00:13:07
Speaker
I know you're doing a great thing for a growing, growing need out in the world. As you have built a bit of some eyes and expertise in finding these mechanisms for growth, where can other people learn how to kind of create the same skillset? What can they do in their own businesses in order to find these areas for growth?
Insights from Industry Experts
00:13:32
Speaker
Listen to more Sweet Fish Media podcasts.
00:13:36
Speaker
You know, I have to give credit where credit's due here. Sangram Vajray, the CMO and co-founder of Terminus. In the early days, he really drilled it into all of our brains that brand drives demand. I saw what he did firsthand with Flip My Funnel with creating a category around ABM. And he started with just going after all the B2B marketers that he wanted to be advocates for Terminus. And he had a great strategy.
00:13:58
Speaker
he would interview said B2B marketer and record just like we are today and put that on the blog and then send them the tweets to share with their audience or put on LinkedIn. So suddenly he had people like Jill Rowley and Scott Branker advocating for terminus unofficially because Syngram interviewed them for the blog. And so that strategy worked really, really well to build that community of B2B marketing and sales leaders around ABM.
00:14:23
Speaker
I'm seeing something similar now over at Sonar, a company based here in Atlanta that I'm an advisor for. And Sonar has the Wizard of Ops community.
00:14:32
Speaker
Even though the company is only two years old, their community has like 4,000 members and they're seeing incredible growth from revenue operators who are looking to do something different with their tech stack to get better at RevOps. And so that's just another example of how that community of like-minded professionals has helped growing this startup as well. So it totally depends on your niche and your category. The best thing I can say is just start Googling people, see who comes up on Twitter. If you're brand new to this, find your first champion in the space who is willing to go and do press with you.
00:15:02
Speaker
Lauren, thank you so much for joining me on the Attention Podcast. This information's been fantastic. Where can people go to learn more about you and curricula online?
Further Information on Curricula
00:15:11
Speaker
Absolutely. Our website is curricula.com. On Twitter, it's at curricula. And on LinkedIn, I am the Lauren Patrick. Fantastic. Again, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Dan. Thank you, Sweetfish.
Ethical Growth Hacking and Reputation
00:15:24
Speaker
Let's talk about what caught my attention in this interview. While I'm a huge fan of just going the long and hard route, producing quality content at scale to just build loyalty over time, I'm also kind of a huge fan of being able to find those quick wins by building communities or leveraging technology in such a way that you can generate significant growth really fast.
00:15:49
Speaker
As long as it's ethical, as long as people don't frown too much upon it, generally, I think there are great opportunities to keep an eye out for. I'm always listening and surveying to see what's going on out there because if you can find it and it works, gosh, I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to try. Now, at the same time, I don't want to ruin my reputation in the process. My takeaway for this is that we should always be open.
00:16:16
Speaker
to these kinds of growth hacks, these little things, these little levers that can move great mountains of attention. They're out there. You just have to be looking for them.