By its mere name, growth hacking sounds like a dubious method used by con artists. In reality, growth hacking refers to a series of techniques and tricks used by digital marketers to increase a firm’s visibility in the market at the least possible CAC (customer acquisition cost).
Traditional marketing techniques, even some digital marketing tactics involve the investment of a large sum of money. In growth hacking, the question of big investment is removed as digital marketers make bold innovative plans to reach a large portion of the target audience quickly.
More and more startups and firms are employing growth hackers to rapidly grow their business. As a concept, growth hacking has become a necessary marketing tactic for small and large businesses. The challenge of lowering CAC and improving sales is a constant challenge for marketers, and growth hacking seeks to overcome this challenge.
Why is Growth Hacking Important?
The importance of anything is best told by its impact in the real world. In the case of growth hacking, let’s consider a real-life example.
On July 4, 1996, two tech developers launched a free email service called Hotmail. In a matter of twenty days, Hotmail managed to grow to over 20,000 customers.
The numbers were decent, but the two tech developers running the show were not satisfied. They wanted to market their email service to a large audience without an expensive marketing effort. After some brainstorming, they came up with an idea.
At the end of each email sent by a Hotmail ID, there was a line saying ‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’.
Any Hotmail user sending an email to a friend or colleague using a different email service read this very line at the end of the email along with a link to Hotmail’s registration page. To put this in context, a free email service was very rare at the time. Most email services charged a fee from its customers.
Suddenly, the name Hotmail began becoming synonymous amongst email users around the world. In the next six months, Hotmail reached a million customers and crossed two million only a few weeks later.
A year later, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400M. Hotmail had twelve million users at the time of the acquisition.
This was the first example of a growth hack in history. By adding a simple line at an end of an email, Hotmail managed to reach a great part of its target audience in a matter of days with negligible investment.
The importance of growth hacking is easily apparent from this example. When done well, growth hacking can be immensely profitable.
What is Growth Hacking?
In the example above, the founders of Hotmail deployed a stunning growth hacking tactic to grow their business exponentially in a small period of time.
At its heart, this tactic involved using existing technology within the company to reach out to a large portion of the target customers. This forms the crux of growth hacking. Viewing technology and marketing as an integrated machine to be used for rapid growth is called growth hacking.
Traditional marketing, even many facets of digital marketing, are usually segregated from the tech resources of the company. Growth hackers use tech resources to overhaul a company’s marketing strategy.
Many growth hackers would insist that growth hacking is more of a mindset than a technique. Growth hackers differ from digital marketers in approach and outlook.
Growth hackers are more concerned about immediate and rapid growth by leveraging a company’s tech capabilities. Digital marketers have a much wider set of responsibilities.
In many cases, growth hacking is part of a digital marketer’s job profile. In the current marketing landscape, most growth hacking techniques are deployed online and thus fall under the domain of digital marketing.
How to implement Growth Hacking?
As a company, you can implement growth hacking by first testing your product with a real audience. It is critical to first know whether there is even a need for a given product in the market. This process will help your firm’s marketing teams get actual data about who prospective customers could be. Based on the data, the teams would be able to create accurate buyer personas.
Once the product is in the market, keep upgrading the product by using customer feedback. This is a critical process as many successful startups stop looking at their product after some initial success. Think about it. If the founder of Hotmail didn’t think of reaching more people, would they have seen the success they eventually did?
Growth Hacking Tactics
In most cases, growth hacking boils down to three domains
• Content
Content here refers to using blog and newsletters to reach out to existing and prospective customers. The best way to get customers is by giving them an incentive to buy in the first place. In the current marketing landscape, there is nothing better to offer than useful content.
This tactic also involves basic tenets of digital marketing such as SEO and other actions like guest blogging, hosting webinars, inviting industry-specific reviewers and interacting on forums.
• Advertising
Smart SEM and PPC tactics can help a firm realize its advertising goals. Growth hackers tend to experiment a lot on out-of-the-box keywords with low-cost and high-reward prospects.
• Product Marketing
Growth hackers do not use traditional techniques for product marketing. For instance, a relatively familiar trick used is creating an invite-only system. Only a certain group of random people are allowed access to a product. This tends to create a sense of fear amongst the customers missing out and builds hype around a product. Google used the same tactic when it launched Gmail.
Other techniques used by growth hackers involve incentivizing the referral process. Users generally do not refer a product to their friends or family spontaneously. To crack this problem, growth hackers create incentives for users to share the product amongst their peers. This tactic was used by Dropbox, which offered its customers the incentive of additional space upon referral. This helped the company build a huge base of users in a short span of time.
Other techniques like affiliate marketing are also employed for growth hacking purposes.
The Typical Growth Hacker
Growth hackers are not an entirely separate segment of professionals. They can be product managers, engineers, and digital marketers, essentially anyone involved with the product or service in question.
A typical growth hacker’s primary quality has to be to look beyond traditional tactics of marketing. Their marketing strategy must be rooted in analytics and designed for the single purpose of rapid growth. Some key functions of a growth hacker include:
• Developing strategies for business growth. This can mean a growth hacker is a floating player working with engineers and marketers to come up with a set of actions to help the company. In a world where most department functions are separate, growth hackers cut through these setups and come up with disruptive strategies for unprecedented growth.
• A growth hacker should be able to conceptualize a given set of data and make the right conclusions from it. Data analysis is a crucial part of any business today. Incorrect analysis of data can be dangerous for the future of the company. Growth hacker must be adept at analyzing data and drawing the right conclusions from them.
• Discovering new channels for growth is another part of growth hacking. Channels are not simply limited to the main social media channels. Growth hackers have to find unique channels to promote a business, places which digital marketers generally don’t know about. For instance, Facebook limited access to its website to top universities around the world at first, as they believed college students to be their first and primary users. This helped create exclusivity around their brand and acted as a great channel for marketing.
In Conclusion
Growth hacking is one of the most sought after technique in today’s marketing landscape. Many startups and big companies are reforming their digital marketing strategies to suit growth hacking methods.
Some confuse growth hacking as a shortcut to growth. In reality, growth hacking provides a firm a platform to drive visibility and leads. It’s not a shortcut, but more of an initial push which can bring life to a new company.
Growth hacking cannot be learned. A professional who wishes to be a growth hacker has to first change his/her own mindset towards marketing. A growth hacker cannot think in terms of separate departments and strategies. Having an integrated outlook towards engineering and marketing is the first step towards being a growth hacker.
In order to imbibe growth hacking principles, companies allow growth hackers from different teams. This allows them to get a clear idea about the holistic picture of the firm, from engineering and tech to marketing and business development.
About Author
Gaurav Heera is a Digital Marketing Coach and Affiliate Marketing Specialist. Founder of Delhi Courses, a Digital Marketing Institute In Delhi & an Internet-Based Company on the premise of helping people change their lives.
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