What is Growth Hacking: A Definitive Guide
Growth hacking is a popular marketing strategy. However, there isn’t a lot of information available about it to guide marketers on how to go about it.
The main aim of growth hacking is to enable businesses to grow faster and be able to be the market leaders in the industry through the use of extraordinary marketing strategies.
For your growth hacking strategy to work, you need to have a good business model. Without a good model then it will be difficult to implement your strategy. This is where a lot of new marketers or entrepreneurs go wrong when they are working on growth hacking.
The process of getting customers can be viewed as a three-step process. This involves attracting clients, then activating the clients and then engaging them. You can then work on making your business better by taking into account the feedback given by your clients and based on your client’s behaviors as well.
What is Growth Hacking
If there is a term that has been misunderstood by most people, it is growth hacking. There are so many opposing views about what it is. Some are of the opinion that it is a form of camouflaged marketing, or it is a smart strategy for marketers to come up with a fancy title in the hopes of getting higher salaries. It has also been proposed to be the start of a new wave of online marketing. Here are the basic facts about this issue.
A Short History of Growth Hacking
Sean Ellis is the one who came up with the term “growth hacker” in 2010. When talking to Sean, I asked him how he came up with this term. He said that it was a term that was coined out of frustration as he was trying to find someone who could take up his former job.
A growth hacker is not another term for a marketer or someone who does a better job than a marketer. There is a difference between a growth hacker and a marketer. Sean’s definition of a growth hacker is “Someone whose true north is growth.”
A growth hacker makes decisions based on facts. Every decision or move that they take has the main objective of causing growth. The life of the growth hacker revolves around growing. Even though a marketer is also aiming at growth, he is not as obsessed with this single goal as the growth hacker is. The growth hacker will ignore other things and just focus on how to achieve growth.
Because of this singular focus on achieving growth, there are some methods, tools, and behaviors that have been developed to help achieve this purpose. These were things that were non-existent before in the marketing profession. And as time passes, the differences between marketing and growth hacking are widening.
Redefining Product
According to traditional marketers, a product is something physical that you can see and is tangible. This includes things like a car, soap or couch. However, with the coming of the Internet, this definition has been changed. Now, bits and bytes of software are defined as products. Products are no longer just things that you can see and touch. For instance, a platform like Twitter can be defined as a product. The accounting software that you use is seen as a product. This redefinition of products has seen the emergence of contemporary growth hackers. Since the Internet is a new product, it has redefined the way things around the world are done.
Due to these changes, it is possible for a product to use its platform to promote itself. This might sound like a contradiction, but it is not. For instance, Facebook is a product that makes it possible for you to share it with other people in a bid to improve your experience when using the platform. This is not possible with a product like soap. When using a product like DropBox, you can invite other people on the platform, and you will be rewarded with free cloud storage. It is not possible to do this with a couch. For you to understand what hacking is all about, you have to understand this new definition of what a product is.
Sean Ellis, the one who created the term “growth hacking” was in charge of the growth of DropBox. He has a good understanding of the new kinds of internet products.
Growth hackers are aware of the potential of Internet products to market themselves. The work of the hacker will be to ensure that this potential of the product marketing itself is achieved.
Redefining Distribution
No matter how good or important a product is, it would not be wise for you to limit yourself only to that product. The way the definition of a product has changed is the same way that the definition of distribution has also changed. The distribution of the product is not entirely in the product. If you have a good understanding of how people operate online, then you will be able to take advantage of that knowledge in your startup.
A good example of line growth hacking (if something like this exists) is what McDonald’s did. When new highways were being built in America in the 1950s, McDonald’s decided to take advantage of these new inner-city roads. That is why up to date most highway exits are manned by McDonald’s outlets.
You can do the same thing that McDonald’s did but now apply it to the Internet. You need to find out what direction people and data are taking so that you can also strategically set yourself where you know that your services will be needed most.
Here are some examples to inspire you:
· Highways play a huge role in driving people to where brick and mortar businesses are. In the Internet age, those who drive people to online businesses, SEO professionals, can make a huge digital difference.
· Roads normally lead to movie theaters. In the internet age, you can drive traffic to your YouTube videos. If you can be able to do this well, then you will be able to draw attention to your product.
· Now instead of most people visiting their neighbors, they prefer to connect on Facebook instead. You can take advantage of this to promote your agenda when using this platform.
There are so many more examples of how people or companies are using the Internet to create great opportunities for distributing their products. However, if you are quite good at observing trends online, then you can take advantage of this to create huge growth opportunities for you that you cannot even imagine. The examples mentioned above are some of the few that happen, but there are hundreds of other examples that it is not possible to mention them all. As a growth hacker, it is your responsibility to uncover all these opportunities.
Definition of “Hacker” in Growth Hacker
The term “hacker” has different meanings as used in the term growth hacker:
· Clever Hacker
Clever can be used to define someone who is smart or nifty. Such people find problems with solutions using methods that other people might have ignored. They will take advantage of whatever they can access to come up with the solutions. The right term to use would be a life hacker. Most growth hackers work using the same concept. They are forced to be creative to come up with solutions to their problems. Finding growth solutions might not be so straightforward, therefore the need for the growth hacker to find creative solutions.
· Software Hacker
It is not a must for a growth hacker to be a software engineer. However, most of the solutions that they come up with usually take advantage of technological advancements. Software hackers are usually technologically smart, and most of them have a background in IT or software engineering. This means that in case a growth hacker also happens to have a background in IT or software engineering, they can take advantage of this to come up with smart and efficient solutions. It is important that a growth hacker have a good technological understanding to increase their chances of being successful. Even though it is not compulsory for them to know the code, they might know as much about it to enable them to at least coordinate programmers that they are working together with.
· Illegal Hacker
This term can sometimes be used to refer to someone who gains unauthorized access to various systems and programs. For instance, most criminal hackers will use ‘zero-day exploits.’ These are gaps in systems that can be exploited to gain access to a system. Zero-days refers to the period between which the security vulnerability is uncovered, and the time the hacker takes to exploit this security hole. Similarly, a growth hacker will exploit such kinds of conditions. For instance, if a new online platform is launched and they release an API, the growth hacker will take advantage of this to get followers before the API is fixed. The growth hacker will try and find opportunities that they might exploit before they get fixed, and the hole is closed.
Growth Hacking in Practice
This article has given a lot of detail about growth hacking, and it is now time to see how this principle can be applied in real life.
A good example of growth hacking is Airbnb. This system works by allowing practically anyone who has extra room to rent in their house to host guests that are looking for a place to stay in different countries and cities all over the world. What made this idea grow in leaps and bounds is growth hacking.
One of the things Airbnb did was use Craigslist to gain leverage. This platform gives you the option of posting your listing on Craigslist when you are getting started. This gave lots of exposure to homeowners, given that there were a lot of people on Craigslist who were already looking for a place to stay. This led to Airbnb having lots of inbound links and the listing also got lots of inbound links.
When you look at this concept, it might look like a no-brainer at first. It lives you questioning why other companies did not use the power of Craigslist before to gain more exposure for their products. The main reason for this was that Craigslist did not have a public API, which means that it was not possible for other companies to cross-list their services there. To solve this problem, Airbnb reverse engineered the way Craigslist forms work to be able to connect to Craigslist even without having to use an API. It is easy to come up with an API, but it is not easy to reverse engineer.
What the Future Holds for Internet Businesses
Through growth hacking, it is possible to get an idea of how the future of online businesses can go. In most instances, the people who come up with the product are different from the ones who market the product, and there might be no direct connection between these two teams. However, it is now important for marketers to start learning about APIs and code builders and programmers must give more thought about the user experience. It means that these two worlds now need to be interconnected.
If you want your company to grow, then there has to be an interconnection between different departments in the organization. Designers, customer service agents, and marketers should all work with growth in mind.
A lot of growth hacking happens with startups. But pretty soon even more established companies like Fortune 500 companies will also start incorporating growth hacking into their organizations. A lot of new companies find themselves growth hacking since they have limited resources to work with. Therefore, they must make use of whatever resources they have access to. The same principles that are used to growth hack in small companies can also be used to hack in big companies.
