Growth hackers are marketing professionals devoted to finding creative and exploratory opportunities to expand their company quickly, efficiently, and with minimal costs. Their experiments validate tactics which are scalable, repeatable, and sustainable for their company’s long-term growth.
Hacking may conjure images of computer hackers who exploit security vulnerabilities; but a growth hacker’s goal is to identify gateways that will accelerate results at their company quickly.
What is growth hacking?
Eric Ries made growth hacking famous when he popularized it, and its practice involves applying low-cost and efficient marketing tactics to startup businesses to accelerate them and meet KPIs through exploiting gaps that would otherwise go undetected by traditional means of promotion.
In other words, A/B testing is an experimental marketing strategy that leverages marketing, optimization and development expertise to bring in more customers. Companies implementing such plans need to conduct extensive tests and evaluations so that their investment produces tangible returns on its own investment.
Growth hackers typically focus on key metrics essential to their business’s survival, such as website traffic. Once they assess it, they apply strategies proven to work successfully before coming up with innovative and new ways of expanding the business and improving user experiences.
Why do startups adopt this strategy?
Growth hacking aims to find cost-effective, speedy ways of increasing sales for your business by employing engineering, design, data analytics, coding and marketing techniques instead of more conventional approaches.
Dropbox was one of the first successful growth hacking efforts, successfully using “limited availability” as an incentive for people to share their email addresses in order to access its cloud storage service. Quora used this strategy successfully as well, encouraging its users to promote its platform by providing high-quality answers that promoted itself on Quora and elsewhere.
Growth hacking requires testing various strategies until you find those that work. Although some experiments may fail, you must learn from their failure and quickly move onto the next test. Adopting a growth hacking mindset is especially beneficial as it helps keep the focus on what really matters in your company.
What tools do you need for growth hacking?
Growth hackers use various tools to achieve their goals. Some of the most useful are SEO, content and referral tools which make it easier for businesses to generate organic search traffic and word-of-mouth referrals while increasing conversions by making customers happier and leveraging positive experiences to expand their customer base.
Discourse, another helpful tool, allows users to build an online community for your brand by organizing conversations, pin relevant topics and conduct surveys. Open source and simple in operation, this open-source solution comes with its own learning curve.
Zapier is another helpful tool, helping automate workflows by triggering actions in one app when an event happens in another. This is an efficient way to reduce repetitive tasks and save time. In addition, Adobe Analytics offers real-time analytics with detailed segmentation capabilities.
How do you know if you’re doing it right?
Once your growth hacking strategy has been executed, it is critical that its effectiveness be assessed. You’ll want to know whether its intended objectives have been achieved as well as any unexpected side-effects caused by your experiment.
Compare results with previous marketing tactics used. This will give a clear view of what your company is getting out of each strategy.
Traditional marketing may be difficult for startups and SMEs, so growth hacking offers them a way to stand out. By capitalizing on existing social media platforms, working with influencers, and building hype around products or services, growth hacking allows brands to increase traffic and customer loyalty while testing out different marketing strategies without incurring expensive ad spend costs – an invaluable opportunity for any startup business! Thus making growth hacking an essential tool.
