Come on a journey through 2+ years of knowledge I've collected on the topic of growth. This is the untold story of Backupify's growth, and I cover tangible tactics you can put in place immediately to gain lift in your digital marketing activities.

1. The Truth about
Growth Hacking in B2B
Vishal Sunak
Director of Operations, Backupify (acquired by Datto)
@TheSunak, vsunak@datto.com

2. What you can expect today
Today you will learn:
● The Growth “Funnel”
● How to get started
● Tools of the Trade
● Resources I love
● Questions

3. About Me
● Vishal Sunak
○ BS in Computer Engineering, Northeastern University
○ MS in Systems Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
○ SIB Graduate, WebDev, Fall 2012
● Current: Director of Operations, Backupify (acquired by Datto)
● Past: Senior Systems Engineer, BAE Systems
● Contact:
○ @TheSunak
○ vsunak@datto.com

4. What is Growth Hacking?
Term coined by Sean Ellis in 2010
● Its not a replacement for
marketing or better than a
marketing
● “A growth hacker is a person
whose true north is growth."
- Sean Ellis

5. What is Growth Hacking?

6. Its widely known in B2C Businesses

7. Today we show B2B some love
The Untold Growth Story

8. The Growth Funnel for B2B
Visitors
Conversions
Leads
Set out to move
the needle on one
of these three
things

9. The Growth Funnel for B2B
Visitors
Conversions
Leads
Increase visitors to
your homepage,
landing page, app
store listing, etc
Getting the person
visiting your page to
take the action you
want (schedule a
demo, take a trial,
contact us, download
content)
Become a qualified
prospect for your
Sales engine

10. Lift - The Metric of Growth
This is the metric that you are trying to improve… and shows the progress of your growth activities

11. Now what?
Well you get the basic concept of focusing your efforts to a
particular part of the funnel
Now you need to get organized and get a few people to
help you with some specific skills

12. Growth Team Composition
Growth Team
Inbound Marketing Web Developer Analytics
Knowledge of web page
design, SEO, content,
Social Media
Implement
HTML/CSS/Javascript,
deploy to your production
site
Understands data, where
its stored, how to get it out
and analyze it with tools
(like Excel)

13. Quick Aside about Channels / Lift
This is a the
desired lift
This is the channel (mechanism)
to achieve that lift

14. Quick Aside about Channels / Lift
Let’s do an example together...
Growth experiment:
“Get more visitors to
our webpage”
Channel:
Via tweeting out a link to our
followers on Twitter

15. Let’s get organized
Agile/Scrum methodology:
● Backlog - List of things to do
your “experiments”
● In Progress
● Done
Trello is my preferred tool.
Its free and easy to setup.
Or use a spreadsheet.

16. Tools of the Trade
We use many tools at Backupify on our Growth team:
● SEO
● A/B Testing Software
● Google Analytics
● Website Hacks
● Moz
● Google Spreadsheets
● Google Webmaster tools

17. Tools of the Trade - SEO
Goal:
Get more visitors to your web pages
via Google by ranking on Page 1
Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage:
Basic Principle:
Content
Landing Page
Blog

18. Tools of the Trade - SEO
I joined Backupify in February 2013… and then a few months later, something weird happened
with our blog visitors:
What happened, we wondered...

19. Tools of the Trade - SEO
Hey, maybe it will go away… let’s keep blogging weekly.
It didn’t go away, it got worse.

20. Tools of the Trade - SEO
As we continued to research it… we discovered via Moz that Google did a Panda algorithm
update in March 2013 and started to hand out penalties:
Google will penalize any pages that violate these principles:
● Pages with thin content
● Duplicate pages
● Multiple domains pointing to the same IP address

21. Tools of the Trade - SEO
Then we started looking around at the blog and the content and quickly discovered, we literally violated
all the rules and were getting penalized majorly
So, we hired an SEO consultant (like a real one, not someone who emails you with broken english)
This is what he found:
● Identified that we had been penalized
○ Thin content
○ Duplicate pages
○ Multiple test domains pointing to a single IP
● He told us to create a list of all blog pages and do an audit
● As a result we de-indexed many blog pages (noindex meta tags)
○ Verified in Google Webmaster Tools
● Updated robots.txt file to tell Google not to index those
Trust me, I
got this

22. Tools of the Trade - SEO
5x
We managed to fix our blog’s issues and let Google munch on some beautifully SEO’d
content that led to a 5x increase!

23. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks
Goal:
Implement HTML/Javascript that
gets people to convert on some
call to action
Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage:
Basic Principle:
Add some HTML/Javascript on your website that can increase conversions
Open Source, $0

24. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks
Scroll down the
page, this flies out
Goal: Get more blog subscribers

25. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks
7.5x Increase in our Blog Subscribers with the Fly out (#upAndToTheRight)
7.5x

26. Tools of the Trade - Website Hacks
A few more:
● Bounce monitoring Live Chat

27. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Homepage 1
Web
Traffic
Homepage 2
Split your website traffic to 2
versions and measure activity on
each split through a Javascript
snippet you install on each page
Goal:
Run experiments on our website
to see if we can generate more
conversions (clicks)
Tool of Choice:Funnel Stage:
Basic Principle:

28. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Anatomy of a Homepage
Headline
Subheadline
Primary Call to
Action
Hero Image
To generate a backlog of A/B Tests - use these four attributes

29. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
In addition to Trello, we keep a A/B Testing Program dashboard:
CMOs / VPs of Marketing love to see this view - make it part of your monthly metrics collection

30. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - Objective

31. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - Supporting Information

32. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - The Test in Graphics

33. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Each Test gets its own Spreadsheet in a template - The Results
Google Analytics helped us collect Bounce Rate (Integrated with Optimizely)

34. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
In the last 2 years we have ran tests related to:
● Headlines
● Subheadlines
● Button Call to Action text
● Button Color
● Button Style (ribbon vs. button, round button vs. square)
● Button Placement
● Button thickness
● Hero Images

35. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Example, main Button Call to Action text we tested:
● Start a Free Trial
● Schedule a Demo
● Try it Now
● Try it Free
● Sign Up
● Get Started
● Learn More → Most popular in B2B SaaS companies by research
After many tests, ”Learn More” was the worst and
“Try it Free” performed the best for a free Trial CTA (its the one we use today)

36. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
How long should your test run?
● Lots of opinions out there
● It should be based on your web traffic so scale accordingly
○ Hubspot’s homepage traffic is slightly different than yours :)
We test everything 30 days minimum based on our traffic

37. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Let’s talk about results…
Game of small numbers

38. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Multivariate tests:
● Testing two variables at once
● For example: Headline + Call to Action on a Button
○ Combinations:
■ Headline A + CTA A
■ Headline B + CTA A
■ Headline A + CTA B
■ Headline B + CTA B
● Your traffic needs to be split 4 ways
Multivariate is really interesting, but remember more splits… means less traffic
to each combination, which could mean longer tests and inconclusive data

39. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Example of Multivariate test results
Click tracking on the Homepage Trial Button
Testing 2 headlines and 2 button colors simultaneously

40. Tools of the Trade - A/B Testing
Let’s talk about results for A/B Tests:
● Not all tests give you super conclusive, actionable results
● More likely its the Game of Small numbers
○ 1-2% improvements
○ Can be more frustrating than helpful
○ Give you doubt about making a change
My advice:
● Stay true to your original baseline (use common sense)
● Little percentages can add up (better up than down)
● Multivariate testing is great, but keep in mind the split traffic scenario
● 30 days minimum (unless you have a compelling reason otherwise)
● Get in a rhythm and keep experimenting!

41. Today’s Session Summary
● You can do it - I promise you, you’re going to be great :)
● Think about the growth funnel when setting up experiments
● Channels / Tactics - create experiments with clear objectives on both
● A/B Testing is the lifeblood of growth - get one running!
● Fail often, try different things
● Shamelessly steal ideas from other companies :)

42. Growth Reading
● The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking, Quick Sprout
○ http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-
hacking-chapter-1/
○ @neilpatel
● Coelevate, Brian Balfour VP of Growth @ Hubspot
○ http://www.coelevate.com/
○ @bbalfour
● growthhackers.com
○ @growthhackers
○ @seanellis

43. Thanks! Questions?
@thesunak, vsunak@datto.com