What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking refers to the marketing channel set which will generate your business growth in a data-driven and cost-effective manner.
Successful growth hacking comprises the following:-
- Brainstorming and experimenting with multiple theories to come down to marketing strategy to take your business to the next level.
- Continuously optimizing your efforts, and user retention with the discovered hacks.
The term growth hacking was introduced in the year 2010, by Sean Ellis, CEO, and founder of GrowthHackers. This platform allows you to learn and share about ethical digital marketing techniques.
Growth hacking is marketing which utilizes creative campaigns, analytics, and social media to acquire exposure for your product/service.
This approach has gained popularity due to its less expenditure and innovative approach when compared to traditional marketing methods for start-ups or small businesses that are unable to finance huge budget marketing campaigns.
Growth hacking is the assembly of marketing and engineering where measuring actions are about tracking to rapid increase results in less cost.
Growth hacking relies on experiential, measurable methods and follows a full conversion sales funnel from awareness to referral.
Growth hacking is a practical mindset which relies on creativity and adventurous marketing techniques to grow your business quickly.
The result does matter and not the way you do it. Growth hacking is often associated with innovative processes.
The main difference in growth hacking and traditional marketing are that growth hackers don’t take the time to come up with a long-term marketing strategy.
Who is Growth Hacker –
A growth hacker is someone who focuses on achieving goals established rather than following a defined process. Growth hackers do believe in the experiment to find something that works fast.
Growth hackers focus only on growing the business quickly and inexpensively. Hacker characterizes to someone who forgets about the rules and solves problems in an unusual manner.
A growth hacker needs to know a complete sales funnel marketing to generate leads or sales to survive at the beginning of the business.
A growth hacker is an IT expert who exploits elements of market research and marketing in addition to technical and technology strategies to offer a solution.
Growth hacking is an online marketing strategy and skills of Coding, Design usability, SEO, Viral Share, and Sales Funnel marketing.
Most growth hackers are skilled in coding. This skill set allows growth hackers to use many unconventional marketing tactics.
# Qualities – A growth hacker need several skills and natural abilities to succeed.
First – you need a growth mindset. If you are fearful of growth or if you don’t know how to scale your business, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage.
Second – you need a strong work ethic. It takes time to quickly push out new products and roll out new marketing campaigns. You have to monitor those campaigns and products carefully and watching the data.
Growth hackers are always curious and creative. They know how to take tried and tested marketing tactics and turn them into something new and interesting.
You need to understand data to apply that data creatively. Innovation is built into a growth hacker’s mindset.
# Coding Skills – A growth hacker should understand basic coding skills as a web developer. It’ll help you to design the embed code, viral loop, API integration with other platforms for ongoing viral results.
- Embed Code – If your website has a good product, you can build an embed widget for other webmasters to use in their pages by reference as powered by to leverage other website’s traffic.
- API Plugin – You can build a WordPress API plugin for your products to drive traffic.
# Design Skills – A growth hacker understands how to design a website for better user experience such as page aped, mobile-friendly, navigation, quality content, etc.
# SEO Skills – A growth hacker can build better SEO semantics page. It requires initial keywords research, On-Page SEO tag, Off-Page backlink building strategy to drive more traffic.
# Viral Content Skills – A growth hacker understands how to find the best product-market fit, design the most viable product, getting user feedback. They design better-designed content for more viral shares from loyal users to grow organically.
# Analytical Skills – A growth hacker should need to know how to set up custom Google Analytics reports like event tracking, goals, segmentation reports with tweaking and optimization for better results.
Growth Hacking Sales Funnel –
Growth hacking is a term which includes marketing and promotional strategies focused only on growth. These strategies are designed to achieve quick results with less expenditure.
The reason behind hacking made into this terminology is because it’s all about finding clever shortcuts in order to bring in huge results.
The growth hacking funnel for a start-up or small business comprises of the AARRR model:-
# Acquisition – Acquisition is all about getting users to your website. The first aim of your growth hacking funnel is to get visitors. It’s the process of getting people to visit your website or the app for the first time.
For start-up or small business, this stage is where you gain the necessary awareness among your target audience to see results from your marketing efforts.
There are 3 well-known ways of getting potential customers to visit your website or app as:-
- Pull Tactics – It’s the first technique to achieving a satisfactorily high acquisition. You have to find ways to attract your potential customers, incentivize them, and come up with unique strategies. These techniques are generally based on the concept of offering to your clients some sort of value in a lucrative manner to make them visit your website or app. Some of the techniques under this strategy may be as: Blogging & Guest Blogging, Creating eBooks, Tutorials, Valuable Infographics, Webinars, Leveraging SEO, Announce contests & rewards, Deal websites, etc.
- Push Tactics – This technique is employed by creating an interruption in the ongoing consumption of the content. This can be accomplished in more than one ways with some of the popular ones here: Buy some ads, Cross promote or Promo swap, Affiliate marketing, direct sales, etc.
- Product Tactics – You should make sure that you create a product that people actually want. You should afford the ability to make use of the product itself in order to acquire a new visitor. The product tactics are a lot different from pull and push tactics and you can take a look here as – Network invitations, Sharing on social media, App integrations, Good number of backlinks, Word of mouth marketing. Etc.
# Activation – Here, your audience knows about your business and the services/products. It’s time to convert them into customers. You have got multiple ways to get people to your website or app.
It’s the process of getting visitors to take action in your product/service. This stage helps to take your audience closer to the customer stage.
This strategy is realized when visitors do something that you’ve established to get closer to your bigger goals.
Some of the activation goals can be started with as: Visitors email addresses, visitors create an account, to read something by visitors, to comments on something, to share something, to buy something, to fill out a form, to interact with someone, etc.
# Retention – In this stage, you have already convinced some visitors on your website or app and have activated them to take action.
It’s the technique of getting your members to start using the product/service on your website or app again and again.
This is the stage where you tap into your USP to convince your customers to keep using your product or service instead of multiple options available in the market.
Customer retention is a skill which can be learned with time. It’s the most important aspect of the entire growth of hacking funnel.
There are few tactics listed as: Staged traffic, leverage emails, send alerts or notifications, loyalty programs, build community, etc.
# Revenue – You need to figure out ahead of time how you are going to get the revenue. You have spent some valuable time providing your subscribers all the worth-full information about product/service.
Now you can go for a hard sell. It means that once you have managed to work on the retention tactics, it’s the time to shift your goal to revenue.
You need to know how your business will maintain healthy cash flow with the rising profit margin.
#Referral – This stage deals with getting more customers out of your existing set of customers. You can simply ask the one question to your existing customers that would you like to recommend our product/service to your friends and family.
You can present them with a service scale of 0-10 to understand the customers’ experience and satisfaction. The word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing.
Benefits of Growth Hacking –
There are multiple benefits of growth hacking as:-
# Provable ROI – You should continue with hacks that have been shown or promise to show performance and reject those that don’t show the potential. You can verify the hacks that are functioning at their best.
# Low Cost – It’s a game-changer due to the facts. The traditional methods costs like advertising or content marketing are not applicable to growth hacking.
# Low Resources – Growth hacks are often established and executed by a sole individual on the product. It doesn’t require an entire marketing team specifically to the execution of the same.
How I can Implement Growth Hacks –
There are different parameters to implement growth hacks in a small business or any start-up as:-
# Perfect Your Product – You should analyze the necessities and preference of your objective. You can utilize this information to upgrade your product/service. It’s important to ensure your offering is as solid as feasible before utilizing for development.
# Set Goals – Your development program success lies in describing precise and major objectives. It’ll control the compulsion to expand your concentration and can increase the time spending on testing and refining.
# Test Your Approach – Testing is basic for measuring what will and will not work for you. You should learn from tests and record the information to authenticate the best mixes to improve the development.
# Analyze Performance – Analytics are basic to remain on track with objectives. This information can be utilized to alter and adjust the actions from products to objectives.
# Optimize – There is a motivation in the learning by doing approach. It’ll include executing a new methodology or refine your existing plan of action.
Growth Hacking Strategies –
The growth hacking has featured the out-of-the-box technique which is somehow familiar to digital marketing techniques.
Growth hacking is the process of rapidly experimenting with different marketing and product development techniques.
It’s based on quick results and potentially lucrative opportunities. There are no rules when it comes to growth hacking, nor a specific set of tools or neither any guideline.
You can make the rules and figure out how to best serve your existing and potential customer base.
You can look at some ways to practice growth hacking:-
# Blog – A blog is a necessary tool in the toolbox of a growth hacker. It’s all about content marketing efforts. The fuel of growth hacking is content.
You can opt for blogging, infographics, SlideShare or Instagram, but the content is important.
Today’s customers want content. The more content you develop, promote and maintain an amount of content, you’ll be more skilled at growth hacking.
Some networks are more powerful than others. Connecting with the right network in the right way can decode a major growth hack. Bloggers and podcast hosts with wide followings are dubbed influencers.
If you can show the value and relevance of your product or service, these influencers may help to turn their audience into your audience.
# Email Marketing – The top lead generation technique is email. Email is associated with 3 times more active users when compared to social media.
Email continues to be a major avenue of communication between businesses and their customers.
Email is a staple of day-to-day life. It’s an important method to try out new growth hacking ideas. Growth hacking is all about generating the biggest response possible and quickly.
So focussing on efforts when and where your customers are most engaged is your benefit. You can consider executing your growth hack idea via welcome emails to get the biggest ROI.
You should expand the email list via your website with an email opt-in form. You can also utilize a pop-up for maximum email harvesting.
# Affiliate Marketing – This term refers to targeting an entity within your niche or industry. This entity has already proved itself as an authority and gained a huge audience.
Affiliate marketing is a great strategy to utilize to get ahead. It helps you to effectively give up all the slow-moving aspects of SEO and social media marketing.
Your objective is to get Influencers to promote your brand in interactions with their huge audience. You’ll get exposure to many hundreds or thousands of people with just one post.
You may possibly get yourself an immense number of fans and subscribers overnight. You don’t need to develop own audience. You will gain from direct access to the influencer’s audience.
# Lesser Landing Pages – The minimum landing pages is a fantastic solution for a single-action program like capturing email addresses. It’s highly useful for a quick redo process.
# Infographics – Social media is a natural platform for executing growth hacks. Every content marketer dreams of their content can go viral. Visual content has a strong likelihood of going viral than text-based content.
Conclusion – Growth hacking should be used as a compliment instead of a replacement for your long-term marketing strategy. There is no growth hacking checklist or perfect strategy. Every growth hacker has to come up with something fresh and new if they want to turn-away the competition and rapidly gather market share. Growth hacking won’t replace digital marketing. It’s a part of your digital marketing campaign.