This kind of hack helps businesses grow

The marketing job to shoot for isn't chief marketing officer after all. It's growth hacker.

Growth hacking is finding ways to grow sales without running any magazine advertising, hiring a public relations firm to drum up media coverage, printing a direct mail pitch or renting a trade show booth.

All that's needed is a clear understanding of what to say or show on a website to get visitors to see that what's for sale is something they should want. And when the formula is really working, those visitors help bring in a lot more visitors.

This is the big lesson from a conference this week called Converted 2015. While the thinking comes out of the world of selling technology products, like the storage company Dropbox does, it seems to be a useful way to think about marketing for the managers of any kind of business.

Executives skilled in the use of traditional tools need not be put off by the techie sound of growth hacking, a term that's a few years old. Media attention still helps in growth hacking. Running an ad still may be a good idea, and skipping a trade show may still be unwise. The point is that business owners need to think of them as part of a broader approach to generating growth in the customer base.

Part of the appeal of growth hacking is its do-it-yourself component. It's what works for start-ups with little money.

The company that put on the conference was LeadPages, a Minneapolis software company that is itself something of a case study in this low-cost approach to growing its customer base.

There's an analytical side to all of this, including how to know you've made effective landing pages, but one thing that is clear is that before business owners even tackle that assignment, they need to first figure out how to say something memorable about themselves and their business.

Videos, photographs, blog posts, white papers, it doesn't matter; it's all content and a lot of it is needed.

As for what's most interesting to say, there's unfortunately no simple script. One idea, driven home by the California entrepreneur and blogger Pat Flynn, is that business is "person-to-person." A business may sell to other businesses, but remember there's a person there doing the buying. It helps if they really know who's behind the product.

Flynn also suggested using "the power of the small quick win." Perhaps it's just giving visitors to the website a chance to give the right answer to a question. It's what the makers of popular video games do, as new users to a game like "Angry Birds" easily knock out the pigs in the first scenes and move on, only to find hours later that they've become hooked.

The Canadian technology entrepreneur Dan Martell gets his ideas for content by asking his own customers what they most want to know. He gives the answer to them, and everybody else who finds it online, in a short video.

He posts videos on the YouTube service of Google, the professional networking site LinkedIn, the social network Facebook and the blogging site Medium. The audio ends up on SoundCloud. Then he promotes his latest video, using tools ranging from his e-mail subscriber list to paying Facebook to "boost" his post.

It sounds like a lot of work, Martell said, but it's manageable even for entrepreneurs who already have more than enough to do.

There are plenty of inexpensive tools available to automate some of the work, too. Certainly Martell's e-mail is automated, because he sent me a friendly e-mail from his Gmail account when he appeared to be chatting in the back of the room in Minneapolis. It was an effective bit of person-to-person communication that didn't even come from a person he employs, but a machine he employs.

Yet nothing beats authenticity, the main point delivered this week by a photographer turned YouTube celebrity named Jared Polin.

It's taken him a few years, but he's now published about 2,000 videos about photography that have been viewed online more than 60 million times. The first video that popped up on a search took place in a Philadelphia pizza shop earlier this year, and it's already been viewed on YouTube about 285,000 times.

Polin just posted it to make the point that it would be hard to do any worse, so folks should try making one of their own. He got better at it, of course, and that person on his first video bore no resemblance to the presenter in Minneapolis who paced the stage, answering questions in a rapid fire manner.

In a conversation afterward, Polin had calmed down from his presentation but was still the talkative Fro Knows Photo from his YouTube videos. One of the recent projects he described is a TV show but without concrete plans to be shown on a conventional TV channel.

"Who wants to be on TV when you can reach the whole world yourself?" he added.

Entrepreneurs hearing this kind of advice to use YouTube and Facebook posts to reach the whole world of potential customers would probably jump at the chance to appear on a broadcast TV show. Doing it Polin's way is the hard way, but he's at least shown that it's possible.