The term “hacking” is often used to describe nefarious activity online. It brings to mind hooded figures hunched over computers in dimly-lit rooms. However, in the past decade, a new hacking form has emerged geared purely at growth. Growth-hacking is now as synonymous with start-ups as digital marketing. Any entrepreneur worth his salt will need to find out as much as possible about this discipline to ensure accelerated user growth on a constrained budget.
How do we bring a product/company to market most effectively?
In layman’s terms, growth-hacking is the answer. The people who facilitate this process are known as growth hackers. These are highly motivated, analytically-focused, and creative individuals whose sole purpose is to understand the product/company and find ingenious ways to fast track development from ideation to maturation. How is this accomplished?
Clearly define the goal
Offerings differ from one company to the other; therefore, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach in this discipline. The best starting point is to clearly define the goal and then establish your predictive metrics accurately. That is the processes or behaviours that measure progress to the destination. For each initiative, the project team will identify one element that has the most significant impact on progress toward the initiative.
Testing explained
It follows that once you know what you’d like to achieve and what you have to measure to track your progress, you have to create environments in which you can test your metrics and then compare the results to your hypothesis. Thus, the testing is an ongoing process reiterated time and again until there is enough learning to validate a specific strategy and exploit it.
Growth hackers are notorious for their testing practices. It becomes a necessity, especially in start-ups, to test often, and this further requires an ever-growing list of potential elements to try and ways to test them.
The testing phase can be simplified into two types:
- Testing to see what works
- Trying to see how to optimize what works
Growth hacking strategies tend to fall into three main areas:
- Content marketing
- Product Marketing
- Advertising
Typical content marketing activities include:
- Starting a blog and creating valuable, shareable content
- Guest blogging
- Creating social media content
- Writing ebooks and white papers
- Podcasting
- Running webinars
- Running contests and giveaways
- Getting bloggers to review your product
- Joining relevant forums, groups, and subreddits
- Influencer marketing
- Using email marketing to build a stronger connection with users
- Improving content visibility with SEO
- Getting listed in relevant marketplaces and sites, such as Product Hunt
Product marketing includes techniques for making your product more appealing and building the user base. They include:
- Leveraging the fear of missing out (FOMO) by using an invite-only signup system
- Gamifying the user onboarding process to make it more enjoyable and offering rewards
- Offering incentives for referrals that benefit both the referrer and the new user
- Affiliate marketing, which will also use content marketing growth tactics
Growth hackers also use social advertising and pay per click (PPC) advertising to promote their business.
Examples of Growth Hacks
Some well-known examples of successful growth hacking campaigns include:
- Uber/Taxify, which rewards existing users for inviting new ones with a promotional discount on the next ride
- Uber/Taxify, which promote downloading their restaurant delivery service with promotions for downloading the app/inviting new users (adoption and expansion)
- Airbnb, which used Craigslist to find and market to people looking for affordable accommodation
- Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn incorporates new ways to create content such as stories, reels, and live videos to enhance the user experience and encourage more content creation.
This is the growth-hacker function, an invaluable asset to achieving fast growth on limited means while simultaneously enhancing the product to improve the user experience and foster customer retention. In the rapidly developing world of e-commerce, where competition is rife and attention spans dwindle, it is crucial to incorporate this function into your business.
Do you have a business you would like to up-scale in the year to come? Perhaps an idea you want to implement or a strategy you’d like to refine? It would be in your best interest to consider how a growth-hacker can help bring substance to your projects in a way that results in traction. You can consult one on Conrati and get first-hand experience of the value these individuals can provide.
