What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking (also known as “growth marketing”) is the use of low-cost digital marketing methods to help expand and keep an active user base, sell products, and get awareness. Consider ‘hacking’ in terms of life hacks – those small shortcuts that make your life simpler – rather than malicious programs that might destroy your computer and your life.
Growth hacking is most usually linked with start-ups and small firms, i.e., organizations that don’t have a lot of money to spare yet need results fast. It is, however, a scalable approach that can be used to any online business that wants to sustain the growth and retention of an engaged user base. Growth hacking is an umbrella phrase for growth-focused techniques. It is typically applied to early-stage enterprises that require rapid expansion on a limited budget.
Growth hacking tactics aim to recruit as many users or customers as feasible while spending as little money as possible. Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of GrowthHackers, created the phrase “growth hacking” in 2010.
The difference between growth hacking & traditional marketing:
Many individuals mistake growth hacking and marketing for the same thing. There are, nevertheless, slight yet significant distinctions.
Growth hacking is similar to marketing wherein the end goal is customer acquisition or encouraging more people to use a specific product or service. However, because to its beginnings in the start-up world, it depends primarily on strategies that do not include spending vast resources that larger organizations have access to.
Growth hacking often combines marketing, optimization, and development know-how to execute automated marketing on a shoestring budget. For instance, automatic notification emails, easy sign-up forms or sign-up-driven homepages, or expediting new client onboarding.
What is a growth hacker?
A ‘growth hacker’ is someone who works in the field of growth hacking. This word was invented by Sean Ellis, the creator and current CEO of GrowthHackers.com, who formerly served as the head of growth at Dropbox.com, among other jobs. A growth hacker is someone who employs innovative, low-cost tactics to assist organizations in acquiring and retaining clients. Growth hackers are sometimes referred to as growth marketers, although they are not merely marketers. A growth hacker can be anybody involved in the development of a product or service, including product managers and engineers.
Benefits of growth hacking
Provable ROI — By using data to influence every choice you make and properly measuring the success of a hack, you can quickly discover which of your growth hacking techniques are working and which aren’t. Those that show potential for client acquisition should be kept, while those that don’t should be discarded.
Low-cost — By definition, growth hacking is intended to leverage whatever resources you have in the most cost-effective way feasible. This entails employing strategies such as ensuring landing pages are utilizing SEO best practices in order to rank highly in search engines for essential keywords. It’s also a good idea to create compelling material, such as case studies, and then share it widely on major social media networks. Extensive and iterative A/B testing can also be effective in gathering user data fast. Although the testing process may be extensive before discovering that golden nugget, growth hacking does not have the typical expenditures that other approaches, such as content marketing or advertising, entail.
Low-resources – Growth hacks are frequently designed and executed by a single individual on the product or engineering team, and do not need the execution of a full marketing staff.
Start growth hacking
Develop your product and evaluate it to ensure that people desire it and will pay for it. This will aid in data collection, allowing you to better understand your core consumer profiles and focus growth marketing methods accordingly.
Regularly update your product and get user feedback so you always know if you’re on the correct road. Simultaneously, advertise your product to encourage further growth, and track the success of those efforts. For efficient growth hacking, A/B testing and other content marketing approaches are essential.
How does growth hacking work?
Whereas most marketers focus on Awareness and Acquisition, a growth hacker looks at the complete funnel, including Retention and Referral. A growth hacker conducts little trials to see which approaches perform best/have the most potential, whereas a marketer often focuses on larger, long-term projects.
Examples of growth hacking:
Hotmail — ‘Get your free email at Hotmail,’ with a link to the sign-up page appended to users’ signatures automatically.
LinkedIn — Endorsements for existing contacts with a single click.
YouTube – Providing embed codes to make it as simple as possible for individuals to post YouTube videos on their own websites.
Twitter – Automated email notifications.
DropBox — Incentivized’refer-a-friend’ strategy for gaining new users.
Airbnb — Offers free cross-posting of all new listings on Craigslist.
The essence of these effective growth hacks – and so many more – is testing what works and rejecting what doesn’t. The hacks that fuel a business’s development can only be discovered through a persistent process of hypothesizing, testing, and refining.
Do you want to growth hack your website, product or services? Hire us! Send us an inquiry through contact@greendragoninteractive.net or through our contact page.