Growth hacking is two terms in vogue and has become the popular marketing boy. Any businessperson or entrepreneur wanting to grow their business while keeping production, supply chain, and marketing costs as low as possible should use this methodology immediately.
Growth and the need for profitability, and spending fewer resources are the goal and obsession of all companies and their reason for being. But this is much more important, especially for those who have just started.
But how is it possible to accelerate this business growth and profitability? That is the essence of growth hacking.
Growth hacking has proven to be a powerful solution for companies that want to grow and conquer new horizons with less implicit costs.
This is an innovative way of conceiving and thinking about digital marketing. It allows companies to achieve the proposed goals more expeditiously and use fewer economic resources in the shortest possible time.
What exactly is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is a new approach to applying multiple strategies that allow significant and accelerated business growth. But to achieve this, the critical points must be established first.
Data collection and analysis, as well as the formulation of theories and experimentation, are part of these strategies. Teams create hypotheses, test them, and discover opportunities to help the company grow more innovative and faster.
Sean Ellis was the first professional to coin the term and used it to propel startups into giants. Here concepts like Dropbox and Eventbrite enter. The creator of GrowthHackers.com defines this form of marketing as one based on experiments.
The key performance indicators or KPIs that measure the success of a company, as well as web traffic, leads, and sales volume, serve to identify the pain points that guide each growth hack.
Suppose web traffic means the critical point, for example, with something tangible. In that case, growth hacking transforms this KPI into experiments that attract more visitors to the site faster and more efficiently.
The definition of which KPI will be used for this improvement is determined by how success is defined within each company.
The main KPI for an e-commerce site or online store (another example) is undoubtedly its sales number. This, in turn, can be broken down into other KPIs, such as the number of daily sales, seasonal sales, or one or more items produced or sold by the same company.
What matters most for an ad-supported website is undoubtedly web traffic. Consequently, it is necessary to plan its definition and implementation.
However, after reading this, it is worth wondering how growth hacking differs from other marketing techniques if they all pursue the same objective or growth.
To begin with, it must be remembered that not all marketing techniques are oriented toward KPIs. Many companies need more time and considerable money on strategies or tactics that do not contribute to achieving their objectives.
Growth hacking emphasizes, at all times, the end goal. So: the big difference is that it focuses all its efforts on adding the actions as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Likewise, it does so using the experiment method that validates each hypothesis. Growth hacking aims, therefore, to find new ways to grow and achieve profitability at a lower cost and much faster.
Consequently, believing that growth hackers (what growth hackers do) are magicians makes no sense. Investing in technology and data analysis tools that allow marketing teams to carry out experiments and automation to find the best and most timely solutions is necessary.
What it takes to become a growth hacker
Now that the concept is known, it is necessary to understand what is needed to operationalize growth hacking in a company.
In short, the parts or elementary points of this methodology can be summarized in this way:
- The objective: this must be clearly defined because the entire growth hacking strategy will be built from it.
- The hypothesis: a hypothesis must be developed based on the knowledge, intuition, and experience of marketing professionals, but also on the metrics offered by specific tools. That is to say, although it has an experimental essence, it is not built on the clouds but with knowledge.
- The experiments: it is the practical part and consists of carrying out tests aimed at verifying the efficiency and relevance of the hypothesis.
- The tools: for this phase, it is necessary to use various technological tools that allow testing, data analysis, and advanced automation processes.
Also Read: How To Improve Your Business With Technology
What does a growth hacker do, and how is it different from a hacker?
The word “hack” inserted into “growth hacking” can be misleading. Many people associate this word with the work of hackers or computer hackers who maliciously seek to scan systems to find security flaws and benefit from them.
As a result, when reading this new digital marketing strategy, many people believe it is unethical and illegal. This happens, although not all hackers or hackers perform unethical and illegal actions.
In any case, in the case of “growth hacking,” there is none of that. Just as a hacker is known for discovering and exploiting security flaws, a growth hacker is a professional discovering “open passageways” to increase a company’s profits rapidly.
That’s the only thing hackers and growth hackers have in common. Then, its objective is to find gaps or mistakes made that provide the company with intelligent, logically conceived, and accelerated growth without this implying going beyond the limits of law and ethics.
Growth hacking has as its only relationship with hackers pure and crude technology, programming, and using mathematics, figures, and indicators to raise quality.
Although this practice often covers these areas because they provide faster and more efficient solutions, the concept is much broader and includes business strategies.
As a result, the growth hacker does not need to be a computer or programming professional, although this knowledge helps align with the developers on the team.
However, a growth hacker is generally an advertising or marketing professional with a vision and notion for business expansion, profitability, and growth.
It must be made clear, however, that anyone who enters this field must take into account not only the sale or obtaining benefits but also the objective and efficiency of the company, seeking a faster and cheaper evolution to achieve it.
The growth hacker must therefore have a creative and exploratory profile. This will allow you to find growth opportunities and propose new hypotheses. But it must also be agile, timely to detect failures, and highly analytical.
These latter attributes will make it easier for them to test and prove their effectiveness through data quickly.
Growth hacker qualities
For a professional to be able to dedicate himself to growth hacking, he must have theoretical and technical knowledge of marketing, marketing, or advertising, but he must also have notions of:
- Business processes
- Experimental research methodology
- Technology, innovation, and development of production and business processes
- Analysis of statistics and classification of data
- Behavior of consumers
It is, therefore, a multifaceted professional who must have experience in advertising and business.
You have to know how people or consumers think throughout the shopping days or seasons. Likewise, you must be able to predict how they react and what motivates them to establish their consumption habits.
Having understood this, the growth hacker is a professional who uses his knowledge of marketing and consumer practice to find possible elements that trigger business growth and, with methods, does experiments to test his hypothesis.
If he manages to prove them, these hypotheses become processes. These are repeatable in patterns and have scalability.
At this point, the company or organization only spends a little time and money on these tasks.
Now, growth hackers are not born on trees. For this reason, to achieve these objectives, many companies look for professionals to hire in their campaigns and train their staff members to become growth hackers and form groups of growth hackers, known as growth teams.
How are growth teams made up?
These teams can present these structures or have the following charges or positions:
- The growth master: who is the leader or manager of the team? After the work of analysis and formulation of hypotheses, he makes the final decisions.
- The growth marketers: they are usually a specialist in SEO, email marketing, social networks, and digital marketing methodologies for digital platforms. He is in charge of proposing and implementing experiments using a KPI.
- The growth analyst: is the professional who feeds or provides the analysis of data and statistics to the team. This accumulation of information has the data corresponding to the performance of the experiments made and strategies that have been implemented.
- Designers, engineers, and developers (programmers): they are the ones who develop products and program technological tools and software based on the experiments that have been carried out and that have been measured.
With this balance of professionals that combines knowledge, all the aspects involved in the growth hacking process can be covered.
Advantages of growth hacking
Before, traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and television offered space and advertising costs for companies’ marketing campaigns.
For these, the audience was taken into account, values were negotiated and the service was contracted. But, no one could guarantee that the advertisement or propaganda would reach all the people in a market, and no guarantee was given for the investment.
Only advertising was bought without further guarantee. On the other hand, since there are few channels concentrated in consortiums and corporations, contracting spaces could be very expensive.
With the advent of the internet and thousands of platforms, all of this became more flexible and layered. Now there is a small audience, but many audiences.
Growth hacking seeks to reach these audiences through technological tools that allow studying their purchasing patterns and the various consumers in a given market while proposing new strategies for all types of businesses.
In this sense, it is much cheaper than traditional advertising and allows entrepreneurs or startups to make themselves known and grow more quickly.
Growth hacking stages
Align the good and the market.
This is the first step critical to any successful advertising promotion strategy. It is about providing consumers and users with what they need.
For this reason, companies must have a good product or service to offer the market in which they compete.
The balance between functionality and publicity
It refers to the use of the product, good, or service and how it aligns with the marketing and promotion strategy applied to it.
It has to be helpful to an audience to be interested in an advertisement.
Escalation and virtualization
This is the high point in the growth hacking process. It focuses on looking for the qualities so that the good or service goes non-stop by word of mouth; for them, everything is valid within ethical limits. Attract friends, promotions, games, challenges, and the like.
Loyalty customers and optimize the offer
After increasing the number of followers, users, and potential consumers, you have to focus on creating strategies for their long-term loyalty. Never leave aside the work of improving and innovating with the service or product.
Back to the beginning
As in any digital marketing strategy, you must start over after each cycle.
It is about constantly reassessing advertising policies and plans and responding promptly to markets and consumers, always eager for news and satisfying their needs.