What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a term generally used for marketing strategies focused on rapid growth. It aims to do more business in a short time with limited budgets
Growth hacking is a term generally used for marketing strategies focused on rapid growth. It is associated with early-stage start-ups that need large business volumes in a short time with relatively limited budgets, but it has also been favoured by many large companies, in the past and today.
The aim of growth hacking strategies is to win as many users or customers as possible while spending as little as possible. The term “growth hacking” was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, who led Dropbox and many other companies to success this way.
What Does a Growth Hacker (Digital Growth Specialist) Do?
The word “growth hacker” has no clear equivalent in Turkish; the one I find most suitable is “dijital büyüme uzmanı”, a digital growth specialist. A growth hacker is someone who uses creative, low-cost strategies to help businesses win and keep new customers. Growth hackers are sometimes called growth marketers, but growth hackers are not only marketers. A digital growth specialist should understand both marketing and technical matters such as site infrastructure and conversion rates. This requires digital growth specialists to be multidisciplinary.
Effective growth hackers are usually data-driven, curious and analytical people. They focus on strategies related to the business’s growth; they create and prioritise innovative growth strategies. They analyse and test what works.
The ideal growth hacker should know how to set growth priorities. They should be able to identify channels for customer acquisition, measure success and scale growth. You can follow my LinkedIn account, where I share growth-focused tips and short insights, here.
How Does Growth Hacking Work?
So how does growth hacking work? It is about finding effective growth strategies for each company and defining the ways to apply them.
What Is the Pirate Funnel?
Many start-ups and growth hackers use Dave McClure’s “Pirate Funnel” for growth. The main elements of the Pirate Funnel are Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue, whose initials give AARRR. According to this marketing funnel, the aim is to attract traffic and visitors, turn visitors into users and keep those users in a happy customer base. Sales funnels are not systems that are built once and left to their fate. This is exactly where the growth hacking mindset begins: the funnel should be brought, through constant improvement, to the point that best meets customer expectations. The headline, the visual, the call to action: each is optimised with fine adjustments for significant growth.
How Do You Do Growth Hacking?
If you are a newly founded company, or you are going to launch a new product or service, you first need to listen to the demand and expectations in the market. You should make sure your product is in demand and that people are willing to pay its price. This test will let you collect data that helps you understand your main buyer audience. Then you can target your growth marketing accordingly.
Update your product at regular intervals and always get feedback to find out whether you are on the right track. At the same time, market your product and monitor the success of the results. Run A/B tests, keep up your search engine optimisation (SEO) and publish content that creates value for your users, which will increase loyalty; these are critical examples of growth techniques. You should collect data on whether each step of the customer journey is effective. To reach more customers, you can follow my Medium account, where I share content that adds value to your marketing strategies, here.
What Are Growth Hacking Strategies?
We can look at growth hacking strategies under three main headings:
- Content marketing
- Product marketing
- Advertising
Depending on the tactics used, content marketing can offer a low-cost way to announce your product. It can help you reach your target audience and turn active users into customers. Below are some of the growth hacking methods in content marketing that you can apply too:
- Creating useful content through blogs and social media
- Building collaborations with professionals in the relevant field
- Creating e-books and useful documents
- Using broadcast channels such as podcasts and YouTube effectively
- Running webinars and, especially if you use the SaaS business model, running contests and giveaways
- Joining relevant forums, groups and threads
- Doing impressive marketing research for a good reputation
- Tracking the conversion rate
- Designing effective engagement pages
- Building a mailing list users can subscribe to so you can connect with them more strongly, and sending them information that is genuinely useful
- Increasing the visibility of content with SEO
- Getting listed on relevant marketplaces and sites such as Product Hunt
A product marketing strategy aims to make your product more attractive and build its user base. You can look at the examples below for product marketing strategies you can use:
- Getting users to act by using restrictive campaign techniques such as time-limited and limited-quantity offers
- Increasing user loyalty by using systems such as points and rewards
- Encouraging referral programmes and rewarding the user
- Using affiliate marketing
Digital growth specialists can also use cost-per-click or cost-per-impression ad types to promote their business. You can look at the following advertising strategies:
- Meta Ads
- Google Ads
- Paid backlink work
Growth Hacking Examples
Some well-known examples of successful growth hacking campaigns are:
- Dropbox used its own users as brand ambassadors and gave them extra storage for every customer they brought in.
- Hotmail, today’s Outlook, added a line to every email sent encouraging people to sign up for a new account: “P.S. I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail”.
- Airbnb used Craigslist to find people looking for affordable accommodation.
What Are the Advantages of Growth Hacking?
Today, marketing has long since ended the age of one-way information and moved to a multi-directional structure; choices are no longer as few as they used to be, and consumers are no longer as passive as they used to be whether or not they are happy with the product or service they buy. On top of that, with technological developments, site metrics and ad conversion rates can be analysed far more easily.
At this point you need to do more than traditional marketing. Of course, many of the points that should be in a traditional marketing plan are also applied in growth hacking methods, but with technological developments, measurability is now at a very different level than in the past. For example, imagine two companies advertising on a cost-per-click basis: one has its infrastructure prepared for this, the other has made no preparation; one runs the ad with a single creative, the other keeps improving its ads with a wide variety of creatives. In a very short time, serious differences will appear in these two companies’ customer acquisition costs.
Is Growth Hacking Only About Marketing?
As many marketers around the world keep insisting, there is no longer a way to keep a product that does not work in the market for long with high profits. That is why we can clearly say that growth hacking, or growth marketing, focuses on intervening in the product, especially in systems that can be productised such as software, on where they should improve, and on making the product fit the market better. As a result of competition increasing incredibly today, preparing and developing the product for the market is now very important, and digital growth expertise, which can bring together this technical infrastructure and marketing knowledge, now has a more important role.