1. What is growth hacking

A marketing technique born from the overwhelming number of technology startups that focuses on low-cost and innovative alternatives to traditional marketing to grow their business. In a way, growth hacking is about letting your users and followers do the leg work for you. It’s about leveraging other platforms to scale.

2. How growth hacking was born

The rise of tech startups, limited marketing budgets, digital platforms, and tech savvy marketers forged a new breed of marketing techniques called growth hacking.

3. Some of today’s megabrands

Here are some of today’s megabrands that generated millions of users without using traditional media. Instead, these companies engineered self-fed marketing machines that reached millions by itself.
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Uber
• AirBNB
• Dropbox
• Pinterest
• Instagram

4. Traditional marketers VS growth hackers

Growth hackers

• Goal is growth
• Make a product people want
• A hybrid of marketer and an engineer

Growth hackers are marketers who have restricted their vision to growth alone.

Growth hackers focus on product validation and retention and increasing activation, referral and acquisition. Every strategy and tactic is built with growth in mind and is tested infinitely. Sales channels are clearly defined and every stage is tested (visit  activate member  referral) for higher conversion. A/B tests, landing pages, email delivery, open rates, click thought rates (CTRs), cost per acquisition (CPA) cost per lead (CPL) and long term value (LTV) decide what sticks and what drops.

Traditional marketers
• Goal is to drive sales
• Make people want the product.

Traditional marketers focus on branding, awareness, top of mind, share of voice and use media coverage, marketing events, paid advertising and social media. Sales funnels are not defined, results are hardly measureable and look at vanity metrics as success indicators.

5. Five growth hacking examples

Facebook
Facebook used email notifications to notify people that a person they know had ‘tagged’ them in a photo. With click-through rates of ~75%, you can see how this genius leveraging of human curiosity and must-see-my-face mentality worked so well for the social media giant.

Twitter
Twitter worked out that users who followed more than 30 people were more likely to become an active user. They took advantage of this by tweaking the user experience to highlight suggested people to follow upon signing up.

Airbnb
Airbnb hit a rich vein of traffic when they took full advantage of the well-established Craigslist. By integrating their platform with Craigslist, its users could easily reach a ton of people very easily.

Dropbox
Dropbox generated viral growth through its ‘Refer a Friend’ scheme. By rewarding both parties with free storage space, it was a catapult to what is now a huge user base.

Spotify
Spotify allows its users to post the tracks that they’re listening to on Facebook, thus placing their platform in-front of a receptive audience. What’s that? Mainstream music for free?…

6. The Growth Hacking Process

Define your growth hacking goal
Yes, the overall goal is growth, but to get there you need to break it down into smaller achievable goals. For example, to grow your company, you can focus on your sales funnel (demo requests, signups, or checkout), customer retention, or referrals, just to mention some. Pick something and focus on that.

Track your goals
Let’s say you decide to increase demo requests by 3X. You need to have the right analytics in place to see if this goal is attained. Analytics will show you what is working and what is not and sometimes even discover something you did not know.

Leverage what you know
Ask your-self, what is the most efficient and promising way to increase demo requests? Start there. Let’s say you know your way around Google Adwords – advertising to consumers searching on google and other search engines for your product/service. Go with that for now.

Experiment
You have decided to increase demo requests. You have the right analytic tools in place. And you decided to run few google ads. Now it is time to run the experiment. Go.
Do not get discouraged by the initial results. Give it time and let data flow in. It the experiment is a complete flop, kill it and learn from this.

Take into consideration the cost per lead (CPL). If each lead is costing you more than what the customers pays for your product/service or its long term value (LTM), you probably want to find another way to increase demo request. You’d be losing money.

Optimize the Experiment
Familiar with A/B testing? Let’s say your experiment is working. It’s time to optimize this experiment and run and re-run a series of experiments.
Have a control group (group A) and a test group (group B). Group A is your original Ad and group B is a tweak version of the original ad. Track and see which one does better. As you make educated changes on your experiments, you will naturally see positive results.
Repeat this process over and over until group B proves to be weaker.

7. Conclusion

There are a variety of growth hacking techniques you can implement to grow your business. Here is a list in the order in which people go from being prospects to being customers.

• Focus on push tactics and give people a reason to come to you. (content marketing, blog)
• Focus on pull tactics such as display ads and social ads.
• Focus on optimizing your sales funnel and guide people towards a direct goal (signup, checkout, download).
• Focus on your product features
• Facilitate the onboarding process
• Focus on retaining customers
• Focus on referral techniques

Whatever you decided to go with, growth hacking is a process that allows you to grow your business using out of the box thinking, data and cost effective marketing techniques. Good luck out there.

Growth Hacking Sources

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/

http://www.direct-spark.com/traditional-marketing-vs-growth-hacking/

http://www.zestdigital.com/20-awesome-growth-hacking-examples/