What are the steps needed for growth hacking?

Step 1 — Figure out what problem you are solving

Before you can implement a growth hacking strategy, you need to figure out if you need to grow users, paid users, revenue or some other core business metric. Then, you need to determine if and how a growth hack applies to what you are trying to do. For example, I worked on a data-driven jobs marketplace platform, and my job was to grow the user base with basically no marketing budget. I needed to find a way to reach new potential users and convince them to use our product. It’s difficult to reach people, even with a marketing budget, and I needed to find a low cost, high return (growth hack) to drive new sign ups. It was a hard problem, but I knew exactly what I was tackling.

In contrast to this, I’ve also worked on an enterprise software company that was focused on higher education. In enterprise software, it’s easy to know who your customer is but it can be difficult to find growth hacks. The process for the higher education market is: build a great product, secure early pilot partners (usually from your network), deliver on your promises, and use early partners as references to get new customers. If there was any growth hacking to be done, it was on cutting down on the slow and laborious sales process. See this YC blog post.

Step 2 — Figure out who you want to target

To figure out who to target, dig into your product analytics and run a survey to determine who is most excited about your product. Then, figure out why those users are coming to your product. If you don’t have enough users to have any analytics, you probably want to be doing this. In the case of the jobs marketplace company I worked on, I found out that many of our early users were CS majors either in college or recently graduated who wanted to work in tech, especially at high-growth startups.

Additionally, I found out the main things our early users cared about were company/job opportunity discovery and the insights (like investment trends and alumni connections) we presented on these companies. Try to target a narrower group of people because if you have the right message, their engagement and conversion rate will be higher.

Step 3 — Make a plan

Now you need to decide what growth hack you are going to test out. As Aaron mentioned in his answer, do some digging on the internet and find inspiration from your favorite products. Sean Ellis, a famous growth hacker, showed the slide included below during one of his presentations to show how he takes growth strategies from the products he uses. You should know what makes your users tick and therefore have an intuition for what might work.

4 — Execute

Now it’s time to put your plan into motion. At the jobs marketplace company, I wrote blog posts that focused on the features, benefits and topics that our user base cared most about. I was able to find relevant channels for the blog posts (like tight-knit Facebook groups) and drive new users to our product. This was a relatively simple growth hack but it worked, which is all that matters. And to be clear, this started with a few blog posts before we developed a full-fledged content marketing strategy. More on starting small in the next step.

In this interview with Sean Ellis, he says that moving the email address collector to the top of a page increased new sign ups by 700%. According to him, moving the position of the email collection field took 5 minutes. Amazing growth hacks can be simple.

Furthermore, don’t get discouraged if your growth hack doesn’t work because it probably won’t. You are going to need to try a bunch of different things to figure out what works for your product and market.

5 — Measure the success of your growth hack

You need to be able to determine if what you did moved the needle. For my blogging, I could look at blog traffic and then app downloads to see if my content was drawing interest and driving conversions. Although there was some noise with this measurement, I could see spikes in app downloads after blog posts were published and then posted in new channels.

My blog posts turned out to work very well for introducing new users to our product and getting them to try it. Since blogging worked, it became a core part of our marketing strategy and I wrote about 1–2 blog posts per week for awhile. While this seems super straightforward, if we had blogged about the wrong things or did not distribute the content in the right channels this strategy would not have worked.

Also, it’s important to note that this strategy, as with many growth hacks, had diminishing returns for new user growth. Eventually, I had reached most of our potential users in the social media channels and message boards we were targeting. When this happens, it’s important to already have new strategies in the hopper. Good growth hacks are hard to come by and often fleeting but well worth it.

Originally published at www.quora.com.