The OILS Framework for Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is a now a commonly used term which basically involves generating growth in the most efficient and cost effective way. The idea is to come up with hacks which are focused and targeted to end users so as to get the best ROI on any resources spent.

The OILS Framework is a good way to come up with hacks which may aid growth of the business.

O – OLVP Definition: This involves defining the One Line Value Proposition of the company.

I – Identify Target Customer: Here based on the OLVP defined, the target customer is identified precisely.

L – Locate Customer: The above identified customer is analyzed and frequented locations and behavior is located.

S – Select Channels to Target: Based on the above locations identified, some channels are selected and targeted to reach out to these customers.

Hacks generated from the framework have to be tested and analyzed over time to judge the effectiveness and outcome of the same.

Growth Hack – Comprehensive Customer Research

As mentioned earlier as well, building a good product for a focused group of customers is a great way to get traction. A good tool to build such a product is customer research. Identify people in your target market, try to get as much information from them and incorporate the results in your product.

Tempo, an AI enhanced calendar app, was able to do this very well. It was launching at a time when the competition was extremely high. They did interviews, surveys and a whole lot of product testing before the launch. When they did launch, they were flooded by a large number of new users.

Growth Hack – Right Message at the Right Time

Sending a relevant message at the right time leads to great results. This is particularly important in push marketing techniques like email marketing, sms marketing etc. So what do I mean by the right message and the right time? The right time is about finding a reason/occasion to send a message and a right message is one which is structured around it.

OkCupid is a dating app which has used this hack time and again as part of it’s email campaign. For example, when it rains, they send the following message to their email list in that particular area – “We noticed it’s raining tonight in San Jose. Our statistics show that more people sign in when there is bad weather. It’s the perfect time to message that special someone!” (source: freshsupercool.com)

Growth Hack – Integrate

A good way a startup can get growth is by integrating the same with other businesses. The integration should result in some value addition for the users. The startup can benefit from the existing trust and visibility that these other businesses have created within their user base.

Slack has been able to integrate with major services like Dropbox, Asana and so on. This enabled it to get good user traction, especially in it’s early days. 

Growth Hack – Communicate Well

The sales process has changed and evolved significantly in the last couple of decades or so. A sale today is not just about a customer liking a product and buying it. A business tries to communicate exactly what it wants to a potential customer, builds a relationship and this eventually leads to a sale. Startups need to identify who their target market comprises of, what they want, why they want it and then try to build and present a solution to it.

A good example of this hack would be using the local language when setting up in a country. This helps putting the message across in a more personalized way.

Growth Hack – Invent the Wheel

Inventing the wheel means creating something useful well. Try to create something which is copyable and which other startups/businesses would need and may not want to invest in. Since you already have that with you, you can share it with others and get a mention/branding in return.

Startups do not want to spend money on creating a new privacy policy if they can copy it from some website for free. Iubenda was able to create a comprehensive privacy policy with their branding embedded in it and shared it with other startups. This helped them in their SEO and in getting referral traffic from these other startups.

Growth Hack – Social Sharing by Users

Social sharing by users has a great growth effect attached to it. If you can get a user to share actions on his/her social networks and blogs, it serves as a strong referral tool and good traction can be generated by it. Users tend to share because of 2 primary reasons – self-fulfillment and to establish new relationships and a personal brand.

A famous example of a startup using this hack is Quora. A user asking or answering a question on Quora can share the same on social media, which brings traffic to the website.

Growth Hack – Incentivizing Referrals

Getting referrals for your startup is a great way to attract new users. Referrals result in a higher conversion rate, because of the connection between the referrer and the referred. Using incentives, usually monetary, to encourage referrals can produce good results.

Paypal used this in it’s early days. They gave $10 cash as a signing up bonus to new users and also gave $10 to users who referred them. This hack was used by Paypal for a very long time.

Growth Hack – Right Place at the Right Time

I have read several times that successful people are at the right place at the right time and have often wondered why I have never managed to do this. The answer is that this does not happen by chance and requires a mix of intuition, effort and luck. We need to constantly look out for new and emerging waves of growth and need to position ourselves at the right place to grow along.

Evernote followed this strategy and was able get really good early traction based on it. Around 2008-9, mobile apps, as we know them today, were beginning to really take off. App stores were emerging as new and potentially strong distribution channels. App stores will still in their early days and competition within them was quite limited.  Evernote took note of this and spent a lot of time, money and effort in ensuring that they were listed on all app store platforms and tried to get featured listings in as many as possible. This gave them good user traction and growth.

Growth Hack Story – Buzzfeed

Buzzfeed is a social news and media company and aims to provide users with the original and entertaining breaking news about anything and everything. Buzzfeed was founded in 2006 and has grown into a leader in this space.

The problem Buzzfeed faced was that most of the content it was generating was in English and they had already captured a good share of this market. They were wanting to expand into different countries and knew that mass translation of content into local languages would be required to do so. Hiring a professional translator would be expensive and time consuming.

What Buzzfeed did was sheer ingenuity. They approached Duolingo, a language learning app, and got it’s users to translate for them. Translating Buzzfeed articles became part of the coursework for Duolingo users. This got Buzzfeed translated content in various languages at a tremendous pace and at a fraction of the cost.

The Buzzfeed team had a task in hand. Instead of going the regular way, they identified an alternate route and found a way which was cheaper and faster!

Growth Hack – Piggybacking on a Big Player

If your startup can forge an alliance, tie up or any other kind of relationship with a big business, it can really accelerate the startup’s growth. Getting visibility amongst the business’s customer base and capitalizing on the brand of the business are two big benefits which the startup can derive from the association.

Spotify pulled a landmark deal by partnering with Facebook to become the latter’s default music service in 2011. Today, the app has more than 50 million users and is valued at more than $10 billion.

Growth Hack – Target the Right People

If you can identify and target the right user base, quick growth will follow. So what is the right user base? That is something you need to identify. Find those users who you think may be willing to join in, will be active and will attract other users to join.

Tinder this is perfectly in it’s early days. Dating apps did well if there were enough girls on it. Tinder realized this and decided to target sorority girls as it’s early adopters. As more girls joined, more guys were willing to download the app and find girls nearby for dates. Also since these girls were young and tech savvy, word of mouth began spreading for the app at a rapid pace.

Growth Hack – Build a Strong Community

Some brands are able to build strong communities of passionate and obsessive customers. These people become so devoted to the brand that they stick to it and also promote it as much as they can. The brand becomes part of their lifestyle.

HarleyDavidson is the leading example for building a community. The Harley community has a clear story to tell and has very clear qualities and messages it is able to convey. Read more about the Harley Owners Group. 

The Best Growth Hack – Offer a Kick Ass Benefit to Users

If your product has some feature/usage outcome which proves extremely useful for your customers, it has a good chance of going viral. If users find something which totally amaze and delight them, they start spreading the word on their social media, blogs, websites and so on. This can start off a chain, resulting in growth at a low cost.

Linkedin was able to do this when it started allowing  it’s users to create public profiles. Search engines crawl through public profiles and index them, thereby ensuring that they show up in organic results. So now users could search their name and have their Linkedin profile showing in the top 5 results on search engines, which was not possible before this unless you were a big shot.

Growth Hack – Use Customer Usage to Get New Customers

If you can highlight your product in your existing customer’s usage of your product, it works like a referral and can give you good traction. You need to identify how to be part of the usage without hampering the customer experience.

Hotmail was able to do this wonderfully. They added a link at the end of every mail sent out by users which read PS – I love you. The link was directed to the homepage of Hotmail. A good percentage of people clicked on this link and Hotmail was able to generate good growth through this hack. 

Growth Hack – Showing Related Content

This is something which everyone’s doing now and is a great hack to increase user engagement. Showing content based on the user’s activity and interests (if any have been identified) is a great way to keep the user engaged with your startup. This can be done not only during the user’s visit, but should also form the basis of any other interaction you start with the user such as through e-mailers etc. This strategy is one which is used across startups, including e-commerce, networking, content websites and so on.

Youtube is the prime example of the success of this strategy. Time spent by users on the website has gone up significantly because of the videos, related to the one which the user is watching, are shown next to it.

Growth Hack – Keep Investing in the Product

Investment of time and money into the product should be continuous. Entrepreneurs tend to make a product ad focus their entire effort on marketing it. Continuous innovation and changes in the product are important in driving growth.

Twitter launched in 2006 and got a very good response at the outset itself. It got a lot of early traction and coverage early on. However, going forward, it was noticed that a lot of users were creating accounts and not logging in again thereafter. Instead of going the regular route of sending promotional mails and incentivising users to return, Twitter decided to analyse what may be going wrong. They realized that if a user were to follow atleast 5-10 users initially itself, the chances of the user returning were much higher. Twitter decided to invest in it’s user experience and made tweaks in order to show it’s users the true value of it, which stems from user interaction, and favorable results followed.

Growth Hack - Use the Existing to Promote the New

When thinking of a hack to grow your startup, first look at this one. Identify what your customers are doing presently (the existing). Use that to educate your customers about your product (the new) and get conversions.

Airbnb did this just right. Craiglist (online classifieds) was the platform which customers used at the time to find places for rent. Airbnb used this to platform and advertised on it to get customers onto it’s website.

Since the existing will realize the risk of losing it’s customers, the new has to think of innovative ways of capturing the existing’s customers.