What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking (also known as ‘growth marketing’) uses resource-light and cost-effective digital marketing tactics to help build and maintain an active user base, sell items, and gain awareness. Instead of dreadful swaths of code that may destroy your computer and your life, think of ‘hacking’ as a series of little shortcuts that make your life easier.

Growth hacking is most often associated with startups and small businesses, i.e., businesses that don’t have a lot of cash but need to see results quickly. It is, however, a scalable strategy that can be adopted by any online company looking to grow and keep a loyal customer base.

Growth hacking vs conventional marketing: what’s the difference?

Many people erroneously assume that growth hacking and marketing are synonymous. There are, however, a few tiny yet essential differences.

The ultimate purpose of growth hacking, like marketing, is to increase the number of people who use a product or service. Given its origins in the startup world, it mainly focuses on techniques that do not need the enormous sums of money that more prominent firms possess.

Growth hacking is marketing, optimization, and development method that combines these skills to generate automated marketing on a shoestring budget.

What is the role of a Growth Hacker?

Skills of a Growth Hacker

You must work quickly as a growth hacker and so be as self-sufficient as possible. Consequently, the ability to program, manage data and design is crucial for a growth hacker. They don’t have to be an expert in everything, but they need to know the basics to do the bulk of the job independently.

You’ll require a wide range of abilities: data knowledge is crucial since it’s the only way to determine your primary problem and its fundamental cause. After that, a growth hacker must be inventive to come up with solutions to this problem, and last, a growth hacker must possess technical skills in order to put these ideas into action.

A growth hacker should do 80% of the assignment with 20% of the knowledge necessary. As a result, mastering the elemental and generalistic growth hacking talents and a large arsenal of growth hacking tools is significantly more efficient than learning Specialist Skills on the job.

Which technical skills should a growth hacker have?

• Make a landing page.
• Make a website.
• Colours, fonts, logos, and other design aspects are all understood.
• Use AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites to promote your business.
• The essentials of HTML and CSS.

Use tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Hotjar, among others, to monitor your progress.

Conversion rate optimization, marketing AI, web scraping, chatbots, APIs, and other concepts/techniques are just a few examples.

A Growth Hacking mindset

“What is Growth Hacking?” is a complex topic to answer since growth hacking is first and foremost a way of thinking and doing known as the “Growth Hacking Mindset.”

A growth hacker puts the end goal ahead of the means; his primary purpose is to improve his ‘North Star Metric,’ and the channel, approach, or tool he employs to do so is secondary. As a result, a growth hacker must possess a varied range of talents and abilities.

The following are characteristics of a growth hacking mindset:

Speed trumps perfection: It’s better to examine something right away, whether it has potential, than to build it from the ground up only to learn that you misread your customer. The experiments and the less-talking-more-doing approach reflect this.

Make data-driven decisions: Using data may help you be more productive. Where should you invest your time and money to have the most impact? Based on the findings of our research, what change would result in the most growth? What are the most valued users?

Strive to develop (both professionally and personally) regularly: In the development of your business, there is always a new challenge to conquer. On a personal level, you learn to have a high degree of “Learnability”: If you don’t understand anything, you can look it up on Google to learn more.

The advantages of growth hacking

Provable ROI: By employing data to drive every decision you make and appropriately measuring the effectiveness of a hack, you can easily verify which of your growth hacking strategies are performing as expected. Those with customer acquisition potential should be preserved, while those without should be eliminated.

Low-cost: Growth hacking is designed to make the most of whatever resources you have available. This comprises implementing tactics to guarantee that landing pages adhere to SEO best practices to get high rankings in search engines for important terms. It’s also a good idea to generate intriguing content, such as case studies, and then distribute it extensively on social media. Extensive and repetitive A/B testing may also help you collect user data quickly. Although the testing procedure may take a long time until you uncover that gold nugget, growth hacking does not charge the same rates as other content marketing or advertising methods.

Low Resources: Growth hacks are usually conceived and executed by a single person on the product or engineering team, and they don’t need the cooperation of a whole marketing team.

Criticisms of growth hacking

Some have recently criticized growth hacking for concentrating on quick solutions and shortcuts rather than developing a thorough marketing strategy. Others have said that growth hacking is little more than a fancy name for conventional marketing.

To escape the sinister connotations of the word “hacking,” some growth professionals have begun to refer to themselves as “growth marketers” due to these and other concerns.

Since growth teams and experts are increasingly concentrating on diving into the data of your website’s conversion funnel, discovering sources of friction, and optimizing each step to improve the overall conversion rate, the term “growth hacking” is inaccurate.

While several big bang hacks are often mentioned, many of which are featured here, growth is more often than not about getting to know your customers and iterating on how to give them the most frictionless experience possible across all touchpoints.

Finally, a successful growth strategy requires a product-market fit. Trying to grow and improve a product that isn’t ready for sale puts the cart before the horse.

Analytics for Growth Hacking

The most significant component of growth hacking, as well as its most valuable benefit, is analytics. Without analytics, growth hacking would be impossible. You’ll need analytics, data, and measurement to determine what worked and what didn’t. Otherwise, we’d keep guessing in the hopes of making the right decision.

When it comes to growth hacking analytics, there’s one thing you should keep in mind:

Whatever you measure, the tools you use, or the intricacy of the issue you’re trying to examine, having everything measurable to the point where you can comprehend whether or not your hack worked is crucial, and the data must be exact enough.

Examples include using product analytics, web analytics, or technology such as Google Analytics or Facebook pixel.

When analyzing performance, remember to double-check your data to verify that it is accurate and dependable.

If you’re tracking social media growth using YouTube Analytics or Facebook Analytics, for example, you’ll need to correlate these data points to your goals.

Finally, data serves as a source of explanation for how well an experiment works and a tool for future improvement.

Companies that have grown successfully as a result of growth hacking

Dropbox: Dropbox efficiently hacked growth and expanded dramatically by “gamifying” their onboarding process. Customers who connected their social network accounts and shared Dropbox material on their feeds received free storage increases from Dropbox. Depending on the message they got, users would earn varying amounts of free space upgrades, with responsibilities ranging from just connecting accounts to submitting photos to the Dropbox network. This method generated a lot of publicity, helped maintain current customers, and recruited new users at a low price.

 Airbnb: Airbnb is one of the most well-known and practical examples of growth hacking. To compete with Craigslist, the most popular source of alternative housing, the company understood it needed to build a user base, client base, and reputation on par with Craigslist. Airbnb found a solution by utilizing its competitor’s technology and allowing customers to switch their Airbnb listings to Craigslist with a single click, taking advantage of Craigslist’s massive audience and precision user targeting.

Gmail: Gmail featured a feature that enabled users to send a limited number of invitations to others when it first started. At the time, invitations were the only way to join Gmail. They added value to a product equivalent to many of its rivals by giving both the sender and the recipient a feeling of scarcity, exclusivity, and the dread of losing out. The popularity of Gmail skyrocketed, and some users even sold invitations on eBay. Limiting a product’s accessibility is always a risky decision, but it may pay off handsomely in the long run.

Conclusion

Growth hacking gone awry is essentially marketing, and there are many successful online marketing strategies for expanding a business. On the other hand, growth hacking is a must-have tool if you want and need to expand your firm.

Experiment to see what works, scale it up until it stops expanding, change your objectives, and start again.

On the other hand, growth hacking improves firms by combining the manufacture of better, scalable, and viral items that customers appreciate. Consequently, you may be able to grow faster even if your marketing budget is low.

We hope you now have a better idea of how to apply growth hacking to your situation, whether you’re starting a company, creating new products, or attempting to expand an existing one.

As previously said, it all boils down to trying out new and untested techniques that only your company or product can deliver.

As valuable as knowing about case studies and examples is, the most significant growth hacks are unique to each organization since our objectives and resources differ significantly.

So look inside, make a goal, break it down into stages, and achieve it, then evaluate, scale, and repeat.