Growth Hacking or Growth Marketing?
Every business looks forward to massive growth. Startups in a special way are meant to achieve high speed growth as famously stated by Paul Graham.
You have a brilliant idea and a viable product. All you need is to reach out to people and make known your business intent.
Growth Hacking
Growth hacking steps in to bridge the gap that exists between your product and the market.
It is a popular term in a startup environment. The term was first used by Sean Ellis referring to marketing talents that tap into experimenting to reach out-of-the-box solutions and achieve rapid growth.
Growth hackers represent a new breed of marketing teams that reach beyond the conventional marketing to achieve the ultimate business growth.
In his book Sean Ellis defines Growth hacking as “a rigorous approach to fueling rapid market growth through high-speed, cross-functional experimentation.”
Growth Marketing
Growth hackers use every technical skills available to attain product/market fit and get the startup on its feet.
Once everything is on course, the high-speed growth strategies, thanks to growth hacking, transition into long-term strategic plans designed to keep the company in business.
This is where growth marketing takes shape. Growth marketing gets you focusing on brand growth immediately product/market fit is achieved. It’s mainly about connecting your brand to the audience.
Growth marketers are revenue driven.
They want to develop a great understanding of revenue attribution relying particularly on lower-funnel metrics. They’re out to ensure that growth is headed towards optimal profitability while registering as minimal loss as possible.
How is Growth Marketing Related to Growth Hacking?
Here are the similarities
- Goal. Both strategies aim at revenue growth through customer acquisition, retention and monetization.
- Data. The quantitative and qualitative data we seek in growth hacking is also significant in growth marketing.
- Process. Both strategies draw from the agile sprint model. These one encourages experimenting, data-oriented decisions and pursuit of consistent improvement.
- Product. They both rely on a good product to work .
That is all there is on similarities. Let’s explore the differences.
How do we drive the two concepts apart.
I’ll give you four significant differences:
Growth marketing involves lots of branding, growth hacking stays completely away from brand.
Let’s keep it simple.
Growth hackers don’t go for branding while the success of growth marketers is dependent on the brand.
One thing we must keep in mind going forward is that growth hackers and their brand averseness isn’t bad at all. What they go for are tactics and channels which bring down excellent attribution.
Their reason is simple.
If they have to evaluate an experiment to determine its success or failure, knowing where a lead came from is necessary.
This, on the other end, tells us how poorly attributable brand marketing can get.
As brand marketers, nothing would be as important as building a constant positive experience for everyone getting exposed to their brand. Theirs is a single strategy with a hard-to-measure impact.
One thing that keeps them happily baking these strategies into their playbook regardless of how poorly attributable the dividends are is the fact that they get to enjoy eventually even when things aren’t directly measurable.
Two points to take home here:
- No iconic brand is entirely obtained from growth hacking alone.
- Brand marketing, may not be as attributable but it’s totally worth it
Growth Hacking for High-Speed Growth, Growth Marketing for Sustainable Growth
In a perfect world these two groups will be striving for rapid sustainable growth. However, perfect isn’t what we have.
It comes down to making a choice. Growth hackers have to move with speed. Theirs is a startup environment giving them zero past experience they can rely on. They are neither guaranteed of any returns.
This practically means both growth marketers and growth hackers have the same problem, but differ in angles of approach.
Let’s take an instance where both are required to grow conversions of a website.
Growth hackers will immediately do what is right under the circumstances.
They’ll go back to the historical data, and realizing how high the rate of conversion already is, the most actionable move to drive the number of conversions would be to increase traffic. Quite straight forward.
This, certainly, isn’t anything good for the future of the business. They wouldn’t go to lengths to design a strategic approach and create a regular flow of organic traffic to the web pages with the highest conversion rates. Instead, they’ll enlist the aid of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads for paid acquisition.
They have to get immediate results. That’s it.
We meet growth marketers on the other end. To them it’s totally fine to dedicate a few weeks to research and customer interviews and use whichever the inputs to craft an SEO strategy where high-intent keywords drive the company up the ranks organically.
Growth hackers, on the other hand, will be emptying their pockets for similar keywords growth.
Growth Hacking is a Simple Revolutionary Move, Growth Marketing Call for Consistent Hard Work
Ideally, growth hackers are always out to pull off simple, but revolutionary hacks at a single press of a button.
They want to have their businesses sky-rocketing the soonest possible.
Which is not the case with growth marketers. In growth marketing, the company’s goals and realities come first.
Growth marketers will take time to understand their audience. They’ll do everything that takes time and money knowing better that their trouble is eventually rewarded.
Growth marketers put in the work day in day out. They will develop original, quality, content that targets keywords volumes of their competitors. They are determined to optimize their URLs and cross-link each and every blog post on their website.
Simply put, growth hackers operate in a high-tempo and creative environment. On the other hand, growth marketers are determined to put the work and scrutinize every angle of achieving success.
Growth Hackers are Biased When it Comes to Technology; Growth Marketers are Biased When it Comes to People and Business
Growth hackers are described by Andrew Chen as “Rather than a VP of marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers”
Unlike growth hackers who count on technical skills, growth marketers maintain a customer-obsessed business front. Their technical side doesn’t stretch beyond basic CSS, HTML and JavaScript, but they remain the kind you can go to when seeking to solve trickiest business puzzles.
Want to establish your product category? Get to know your best customers? You have to ensure that your product stands out from the alternatives.
Growth Hacking or Growth Marketing?
First, I want to set the record straight by stating that one growth marketing strategy might work for one niche and not another. And neither does it guarantee ultimate success.
Actually, many cases will call for more of growth hacking than growth marketing.
So how do you know the perfect match for your company?
To get your answer, you need to ask yourself the following questions.
- Do You Have a Product/Market Fit?
According to Sean Ellis, startups are, “too desperate and disadvantaged to adapt to the old rules of marketing”
In most cases, if a startup up fails to figure a concrete strategy on time, they are doomed to collapse.
There goes one good reason to adopt growth hacking. Actually, growth hacking works great for startups.
Startups have limited choices. They have a limited widow to take off and also have extremely high expenses. Such situations leave room for all sorts of experimenting with product, audience, and pricing.
However, you should shift to a more strategic model immediately you start to notice happy customers streaming in. You should also consider this approach when the money obtained becomes sufficient to cover for the cost of acquisition, plus associated services.
What else would you want than building a scalable engine that acquires, retains and grows once you’ve obtained consistent flow of customers with a high lifetime value?
First Rule: In the case where you have not achieved product/market fit, you should opt for growth hacking. Growth marketing is only a brilliant option if there is enough evidence of demand and a clear market for your product.
- Can You Achieve Product Virality
Dropbox, Airbnb, Hotmail, Facebook and Paypal are some examples that won’t stop popping up in most growth hacking guides.
I am not here to undermine these hacks as they have for sure been successful in retaining the competitive advantage of these companies. However, I would like us to shift the talks from internet companies to things like cloud storage, specialized B2B software procurement, or accounts payable.
Am simply saying that growth hacking can work magic even for cheap consumer-facing companies that have everyone as their ideal customers. For example, social media platforms, mobile games, productivity apps, and so on.
Growth hacking is a viable approach when dealing with consumer products such as electronics that have a longer life span. And the same applies when it comes to consumer products with social features such as smartphones, or gaming consoles.
These products have the potential for high virality which means that it becomes easy to build a consistent referral loop.
In terms of growth marketing,
This works for expensive, “boring” and niche products. Such products tend to have a longer sales cycles, high customer lifetime value, and zero product-based virality potential.
Second Rule: Move with speed to hack at any product-based virality potential if you have the chance. Anything else, think growth marketing.
- 3.What Are the Saturation Levels of Your Market?
When, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook and the likes got into business, there were zero serious competitors and that’s when they gathered a strong momentum.
Drift is a case in the exact opposite direction.
When Drift began its operations back in 2014, the market was brimming with over 5000 competitor companies eyeing the same customer attention.
But Drift now stands among the fastest growing companies in the marketing software industry globally. Ask David Cancel, the CEO and founder of Drift and he’ll tell you that there wouldn’t be no point venturing a market so saturated without an outstanding brand.
Third Rule: You may skip the brand trouble for now if yours is a superior product free from tons of competition. However, it gets pretty tight when competitors start putting up their show all around you.
Without a strong brand you’re looking at a serious down-the-gutter push on your prices.
And remember strong brand is growth marketing.
Summing Up
Growth hacking and growth marketing are no longer one and the same.
And none of them comes with the popular one-size-fits-all shortcut.
Growth hacking is suitable in the case where you have a product with easy-to-crack virality, a little-to- serious competition, and/or market fit startup with a short runway.
And when you get to a point where you have a handful of happy clients, then it’s time to incorporate more strategy and fewer hacks. This is called growth marketing.
