Growth Hacking Monthly - Issue #1

This is the first edition of my Growth Hacking Monthly. In this newsletter I’ll share my views on marketing and growth hacking, tools I discovered and other stuff I’m interested in. 

As this is also sort of an experiment, you’ll probably see changes in design, content and distribution every issue so don’t be alarmed if the next newsletter looks a bit different. That’s just me trying to find the best ’tone of voice’ and branding ;)

If you liked this issue please give it a ‘thumbs up’ at the bottom and share on your social networks. And if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to share them with me.

My name is Roeland van der Vliet and I work for Kantar, an international market-research firm in Amsterdam as a marketing advisor. My interest in Growth Hacking started after following a course at Growth Tribe and reading the book ’Hacking Growth’ by Sean Ellis. And I’m also interested in LEAN-startup, UX and Design Sprints. For fun I like to (kite)surf, snowboard, travel, play boardgames and do some occasional running.

Video’s are a great way to engage your costumers. They can be used for anything from promoting your business or service, explaining how your product works or sharing your views on a particular subject. But making a great looking video can take a lot of time. You need to shoot it, edit it and do some post-production (like adding effects). 

Luckily there are quite some tools which can help you make professional looking video’s - complete with effects and music - in less than an hour. Here are some of my favorites:

Wrote a great piece or blog? Use Lumen5 to turn your blog in a short and snappy video. Just paste in a link from your blog (or the copy) and you can select the key-points from your article. Lumen5 automatically searches for a fitting image/video (works best with English language) and your scene is ready. Keep adding scenes until you feel you’ve highlighted all the main points from your article and edit the scenes where needed (like adding your own images, choosing background music and adding a call to action). When your happy with how it looks you can let Lumen5 generate the video and download it as a video file or publish directly to social. 

They have a ‘free forever’ plan, so I recommend you check it out. 

Although I only played around with Biteable and haven’t used it yet for a campaign or project I love it’s potential. With Biteable create really cool looking video’s for quite a number of uses (explainer video’s, corporate videos, advertising, video’s for social etc.). 

You can choose from huge number of templates which you can modify by editing text, changing colors, adding your own images and logo’s and much more. Templates have different styles and feels. So whatever sector your in you can probably find a template which works best for your product or brand. 

Biteable offers a free plan (but watermarks your video’s). The paid plan is with around 275 dollars a year, quite a good deal if you’re planning to go heavy on your video-marketing efforts. 

I recently read the book ’The Startup Way’ by Eric Ries. This is follow-up to his book ’The LEAN startup’. In ’The Startup Way’ Eric talks about ways on how to implement LEAN-startup thinking into corporate environments. And this goes beyond just setting up an incubator or accelerator within the business. In his book Eric delivers a framework for transforming a company into a fast-learning and fast-acting ‘startup’. He describes how every corporate function (Marketing, HR, Finance etc.) needs to change and what they need to do to enable this type of culture.

What I like about the book is that it gives those working for 'corporates’ a path they can follow when they want to make their organization able to learn and adapt more quickly. This is essential for companies who want to stay ahead in the future. 

But this is not a book with quick fixes and requires real change-management and buy-in at the most senior level (preferably CEO level). And even then changing to this new way of working will be hard. 

But it’s an interesting and thought provoking read so I definitely recommend it.