PILLARS OF GROWTH HACKING.

This isn’t new, but growth hacking has been gaining ground as a marketing strategy of choice for brands in the USA. So, what is growth hacking? According to wikipedia Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.

Let’s break down the three pillars that make growth hacking such a powerful marketing strategy.

First creativity — creativity can’t be taught, but it can sure be built from what other are doing around you. When creating “growth hacking” strategies, being aware of what other companies are doing, learning what is the latest campaign out there can only help you develop your own strategies, and help you serve your brand or client better.

A great example where creativity was used as part of a successful of growth hacking initiative was for the now defunct app called Mailbox. Mailbox created (in my opinion), one of the most amazing pre-launch sign up initiatives to date. Mailbox got users to download their app to basically grab a number, stay inline and wait for the app to be active on their phone… about 300 thousand users were acquired during pre-launch. They did this by leveraging social influencers positive recommendations first and started pushing for the app sign ups as a waitlisted method. Genius!

For more cases on how people are implementing incredibly creative strategies, please visit:https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies

Now to analytical thinking — today, as marketers, we have so many tools at our disposal to help us measure our efforts that it is actually overwhelming. If you are running a campaign, a promotion, pushing a product or just tweeting something, you must measure it. The skill is not to recognize the need to measure or that you can measure it. The skill is knowing “the how” can you measure it so that you can have actionable data that can help you do better.

Maintaining an analytical frame of mind, will allow you to always measure any initiative you try to run. This type of thinking will keep you honest and it will give you the data you need to make adjustments on your performance.

To help you be always analytical, here are some links I believe can help you stay informed, learn and implement whatever you see here that other people are using:

• growthhackers.com — the community for the growth obsessed to connect and get inspired. Our goal is to provide you with the best growth-related experience on the web, and we’ve put together a short list of guidelines that will help keep the quality of content high.

• growthtools.io — The best damn way to search and discover growth hacking tools on the planet.

The latter will educate you in the tools needed to think like a growth hacker and the former will share the latest success stories and strategies used by people in the growth hacking community.

Last but not least, Social Metrics — today we are all interconnected with each other via social networks. We can talk to our family and friends that live around the globe via Facebook, we can connect directly to CEOs via LinkedIn, we can speak out our minds via Twitter and we can now live stream our lives to the world via Periscope. People are engaging online. Buying, selling, browsing and sharing, we are socializing over the web.

So, you as a growth hacker, must make sure to listen, to observe and to engage with your customers. But most importantly, you must clearly understand what types of metrics are relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.

Many people will tell you that you should measure likes, sentiment, klout score and so on. The key to running a successful campaign will be to recognize which metric from what networks will be yield the most relevant information for a successful campaign.

Here is a link that provides pretty good directory of social media metric tools for 2016:

• Careful, you can loose track of time in here: http://social-media-monitoring-review.toptenreviews.com/

At the end, you will ultimately decide what metrics will dictate your campaign successful. Once this is decided, it is up to you to use the social media metric tools that will help you track your campaign. We hope that the link above provides a guideline to get your started.

Overall, being a growth hacker will require you to always, and I repeat, always be on your toes creatively, analytically and as a social networker.

We hope this article can help you grow and improve as a professional or at the very least can inspire you to continue to dig up more information about growth hacking so that you can be better at helping your clients or company or product.

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Hasta pronto!

Eduardo H.