So people will find a hack.
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:59 am
First of all, marketing flywheels, in my experience, almost always beat growth hacks. I know that growth hacks have been all the rage over the past few years, especially in the startup and tech worlds. There’s been a kind of search for the next big growth hack that will transform our businesses. But I have to be honest with you. Not just here at Moz, but at all the companies I’ve worked with as a marketer, this is what it looks like when it’s implemented.
They'll find some trick that works for a while, and it results in some kind of increase in their traffic, their conversions, their success metrics. So they've figured out a way to game Facebook or belarus number data found this new black hat trick or they've found this great conversion device. Whatever it is, it's short-term and short-lived. Why is that? It's because of something Andrew Chen calls - and I'll use his euphemism here - it's called " the law of shitty click-through rates ," which basically says that over time, as people experience a marketing phenomenon, they become immune to its effects.
Marketing Lessons Learned from 16 Years of Building Moz - Whiteboard Friday
You can see it in anything that tries to hack consciousness or exploit psychological biases. So you get this pattern of hack, hack, hack, hack, and then none of the hacks you're trying to do work. Even if you have tremendous success, even if it's six months long, it's the case that, over time, they diminish and decline.
In contrast, a marketing flywheel is something you build that generates inertia and energy, such that every bit of effort and energy you put into it helps it spin faster and faster, and it passes. Once you get it up and running, it takes less energy to spin it again and again in the future. That’s how a lot of great marketing works. You build a brand. You build your audience. They come to you. They help grow it. They bring more and more people back. In the world of web marketing, it works really well.
They'll find some trick that works for a while, and it results in some kind of increase in their traffic, their conversions, their success metrics. So they've figured out a way to game Facebook or belarus number data found this new black hat trick or they've found this great conversion device. Whatever it is, it's short-term and short-lived. Why is that? It's because of something Andrew Chen calls - and I'll use his euphemism here - it's called " the law of shitty click-through rates ," which basically says that over time, as people experience a marketing phenomenon, they become immune to its effects.
Marketing Lessons Learned from 16 Years of Building Moz - Whiteboard Friday
You can see it in anything that tries to hack consciousness or exploit psychological biases. So you get this pattern of hack, hack, hack, hack, and then none of the hacks you're trying to do work. Even if you have tremendous success, even if it's six months long, it's the case that, over time, they diminish and decline.
In contrast, a marketing flywheel is something you build that generates inertia and energy, such that every bit of effort and energy you put into it helps it spin faster and faster, and it passes. Once you get it up and running, it takes less energy to spin it again and again in the future. That’s how a lot of great marketing works. You build a brand. You build your audience. They come to you. They help grow it. They bring more and more people back. In the world of web marketing, it works really well.