Boost Your Business Growth With Growth Hacking
Growth hacking is not a new kid on the block, it is been here for some years. Recently growth hacking is taking pace with its unique approach towards marketing.
For many companies growth hacking is taking the position of VP marketing. Growth hacking has changed the way companies used to practice their marketing.
Who are growth hackers?
Growth hacking is the brainchild of the Sean Ellis. What growth hackers do is, they catch the pulse of internet users. By gauging the potential of software, they devise ways to spread it among the masses.
They are different from the traditional marketers but their work proves more effective than traditional marketers. Their degrees fall flat in developing out of the box marketing ideas for big houses.
Growth hackers have changed the fortune of many ‘fortune 500’ companies around the world and helped them come up with IPOs.
For startups growth hackers can do wonders. From increasing viewership to increasing website activity, growth hacker will make that happen for you.
There is a misconception that a growth hacker has to be a coder or engineer. But that is not true. He does not always code, so a growth hacker doesn’t have to be a programmer always. You can call him an experimenter.
Growth hacking is basically work of passion. A growth hacker at every stage learns the system and works out different hacks.
A growth hacker usually works as a 3 pillar team. Other than him, his team is made of one front-end-developer and a back-end developer.
How a growth hacker works
The team growth hacker does not think much about the process of growth that deeply. For them its joy that binds them with the work.
Now, they start monitoring each aspect of a website, like referrals, interactions, sign up etc.
Improving content, website design falls in making the marketing funnel. With close monitoring conversion slowly grows up.
Being different in nature their marketing also takes an unusual path, developed from testing and learning.
How growth Hacking takes place
There is no rule or fixed path taken by the growth. Their specialty reside in their out of the box thinking. They are able to catch what can attract a mass.
Main target of a growth hacker is basically increasing the number of users of a company. You cannot put a growth hacker in place of engineering, marketing, finance or HR division.
His expertise runs through all the divisions and the approaches he takes may blur the segmentation between marketing and engineering.
Startups in the initial stage usually bootstrap. Owners of startups often go for crowd sourcing to introduce a new feature or upgrade.
A growth hacker can make crowd sourcing your company investor.
A) Set a goal and then narrow it down to make it pin-point
Setting goal is always important as it spearheads your entire endeavor. Now, broad goal is of course growth but it is made of different small goals in different segments of company.
Suppose increasing user activity is your target. By creating a marketing funnel it can be achieved step by step.
Retention is the sub-target. Retention can be achieved when users will start putting content on the website.
The process goes this way- Target is creating a measurable, repeatable and predictable model.
Brain Storming Ideas-The entire team starts generating different ideas on acquisition, activation, retention, referral and profit.
As said earlier, these brainstorming sessions are not confined in a single department. Ideas are interconnected.
The target of growth hacker is creating a measurable, repeatable and predictable business model.
Four major aspects stages of work are-
- Generation of lead
- Prioritization of ideas
- Testing under high pace
- Building a knowledge Base
These aspects are enriched by-
- Observing competitors and what industry counterparts are doing
- Questioning each other until the process becomes error free
- Associating unrelated things to create something new out of them
- Constantly creating network with other people in order to make
All these tasks lead ultimately to the most testing zone. The testing is that weapon which helps in finding out the best combinations of changes brought by the growth hacker and his team.
B) Track your goal using analytics
You must use analytics in order to track different aspects of your goal. Analytics provide the real picture where the website is actually standing.
- Track the metrics of content
- The referral URLs associated with the content.
- Signups, form submissions and clicks and bounce rates.
- Last but not the least current conversion rate and profit margin.
You cannot build any plan on simple concepts. It will surely come up with a superficial end result.
Metrics and analytics help in taking and formulating pertinent decisions and future plans. Historical data also make it easier to go from one goal to another swiftly after finishing the first.
C) Never underestimate your existing strength
Your existing strength is your weapon. Never underestimate your product’s potential rather try to make it even sharper.
Whether it is the copy, a strong email list or traffic, try to cash in from there.
D) Experimenting is the Only Way
To find that best fruit you have go through several experiments. The experiments should be conducted keeping the resources of the startup keeping in mind.
Suppose, you want to experiment with the strong email list you have. Before initiating make your team mates aware of that.
Startups usually go with strict budget and they can’t afford high capacity server. So it is not right sending emails on a specific weekday when server runs slow due to high traffic.
Do not hesitate about sending email twice in a week because you think that recipients may get angry.
Do not fear of thinking about failure. Remember, 99% of your experiments may fail. Failures enrich us with things that lead to wrong. With failures, we actually narrow down the path toward success.
With each experiment, we learn something new.
In the next step, your duty is optimizing those experiments by taking cues from their performances.
Sending emails may have not yielded any positive result. To know where your experiment is lacking impart a new test.
Divide your email list into two parts by labeling control group and test group. The control group will be the older version and test group will be the optimized version.
Splitting the experiment into two parts is called A/B testing. It has always been most trusted friend of hackers. It has the power of bringing out the truth that was hiding.
It’s experiment that keeps the ball rolling in growth hacking.
F) Repetition of Experiment
Don’t stop or look back when you failed last. Rather pick up the pieces you learned and start your journey toward starting new experiments.
Growth hacking is actually not free. It takes a lot of effort to create high quality blogs, build good public relations require considerable amount of time and research. Social media also eats up same amount of time and efforts.
Although it seems free but growth is not free actually.
Time is money
You cannot walk forward without spending a little money on traditional analytics. PPC and SEO are bit costly but if you look at it as provider is huge amount of data that determines marketing outlook.
SEO efforts most of the times result fruitless but PPC provides the list of keywords you need to focus. PPC gives information on your profitability.
Recently Google has removed keyword referral data from Google Analytics that is why PPC is much more useful now. Budget is determined by the nature of your industry.
Growth Hacking in Social media
Growth hacking in social Media like Twitter and Facebook is very much useful and highly effective.
In Twitter targeting audience is much simpler. Assume, your website is related to fashion accessories and you create an ad by spending $65.
Now, you start displaying them to people interested in fashionable accessories or prominent figures of fashion industry.
It will get you 35–70 clicks per day. But if you are growth hacking then you will follow some 50 or 60 prominent and influential fashion personalities and try to make them share your content.
Facebook:
Facebook has some really potent and effective targeting options like location, workplace, age, gender, custom audiences from Gmail list, app IDs, phone number lists, website visitors and lookalike audience.
Lookalike audience creates, Custom audience generated by past buyers are very much powerful tools.
Closing thoughts
Growth hacking has the seed of enormous opportunities within it which can bring change. As discussed in this article, growth hacks are actually fruit of imagination cleverly wrapped under technical knowledge. Make most out of it.
About Author: Dinesh is Co Founder of Ads Triangle and has over 6 years of experience in paid search. Dinesh is Google Partner and Bing Ads Certified Professional.
Dinesh has handled thousands of successful Paid campaigns in the past. His association with small, medium and large business owners all across the globe has enhanced his skills and helped him in understanding the various business requirements of owners.
