A Beginner’s Guide to Growth Hacking
Your push marketing efforts will not do the trick anymore. To grow your audience and increase conversion rates, you need to master growth hacking.
If you’ve been on social media for the past five years, you’re probably familiar with the term hack. On one side of the spectrum, hacking is the illegal act of using one’s programming skills to access a computer program or network. And on the other side of the spectrum, people talk about life hacks, strategies or tricks one uses to be more productive and efficient.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about a different kind of hacking, one that’s gaining popularity, especially in business, one that all managers and business owners need to know about.
It’s called growth hacking.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Similar to life hacks, a growth hack is something that helps you improve and grow your business using the most efficient tactics. The goal of growth hacking is to be able to test many marketing platforms or channels in order to increase the number of conversions.
More and more organisations are experimenting on growth hacking because it’s inexpensive, as compared to traditional media (print, TV, and radio). While traditional media still plays a significant part of marketing efforts, growth hacking is gaining popularity because it’s attainable no matter what your marketing dollar looks like.
Growth Hacker vs Traditional Marketer
If you’re a bootstrap company looking to leverage what limited resources you have, then you’re not looking for traditional marketers to take you to where you want to go. While a traditional marketer’s set of skills are highly valuable and helpful in managing a marketing team or executing a marketing plan, you won’t need these skills yet. Your direction as a startup should be towards growth.
A growth hacker is a marketer whose decision making, initiatives, and tactics are guided by a sole purpose: growth. A growth hacker is single-mindedly focused on growing the conversion rates.
Not that traditional marketers don’t care about growth — they do. But not as obsessively as growth hackers.
The Growth Hacker’s Rule Book
- Have a Product that Users Love
“You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs.”
— Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing lecture
Growth hackers understand that it’s not just about attracting new users — it’s about creating or refining a product experience, which ultimately leads to gaining massive raving fans. “Working on scalable growth is an optimization problem”, Andrew Chen, growth hacker at Uber, said. It could be as simple as highlighting a compelling product benefit or fine-tuning the product’s messaging — or it could be as complex as changing your business model.
When it comes to growth hacking, one case study that comes to mind is Airbnb. This famous startup allows you to book space anywhere in the world; it’s now valued at $30 billion. But this wasn’t how it always was.
The founders began with the idea of turning their own living room into a bed-and-breakfast; they bought mattresses and offered homemade breakfast to their guests. Unsatisfied, they brainstormed and decided to appeal to a different market: guests who were turned down by fully booked hotels. The idea seemed to be successful because of the better market. But the founders went on to redefine their business further. They studied guests’ usage patterns and implemented feedback, and came up with what they have now — a service that allows guests to rent absolutely any types of accommodations.
Just as Airbnb’s founders were able to refine their target market, you also need to ask yourself, “Who are my ideal customers?”
2. Focus on Early Adopters — Easy Trial
The Diffusion of Innovation model would tell us that people can be categorised into five segments based on their propensity to adopt new ideas or innovation: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and the laggards.
Of the five segments, growth hackers focus on early adopters rather than the innovators.
Innovators enjoy, and even obsess about, getting the recent cutting-edge products. When it comes to growth, businesses don’t look to them as they will be gone the moment another business introduces another craze.
You need to focus your attention and your efforts on the early adopters. Wanting to be seen as trend setters, they are willing to pay premium if they are guaranteed that using the product will improve how they live and work, minimise cost, or advance their social status. They are those who are willing to spend an hour on the phone with you to review your product and point out its flaws.
Businesses welcome their feedback because the early adopters understand a brand’s purpose. Known to make sound and well-informed decisions, early adopters are socially respected. This is why businesses count on them so they can further refine the product and to cover the cost of the product’s R&D.
Now have a look at your business. Can you identify the early adopters in your category? How can your product be enticing right now? Is your product indispensable? If not, how can you make it so?
3. Add Viral Elements to Your Product — Easy Share
Customer gets customer — this is the concept of virality and the holy grail of growth hacking. In order for virality to be effective, it needs to be an essential part of your product.
Take, for example, Skype. Before you get to use the product, it asks you to invite people in your network so you can get in touch with them through the app. And when they join Skype, they, in turn, will invite their friends to use it. Other examples of products with a virality naturally built to them include Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter.
In your business, check if your product or service inspires, encourages, and facilitates sharing. If you think there’s a space for improvement, now is a good time to sit down with your team and find ways to integrate viral elements naturally to your product.
4. Refine and Reengage
Constantly testing, measuring, and refining is the key to an effective growth hacking effort. You need to map out your customer journey and ensure that every touchpoint flows smoothly — from data capturing to customer engagement.
The best way to measure growth is through customer feedback. Using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) will help you determine your growth potential. All you have to do is ask your clients how likely will they recommend your business to their friends. The best time to introduce them to NPS is right after they’ve used your product — not two Christmases after.
Those who give scores of 9 or 10 will promote your business — thank them for their feedback and ask for a video-recorded or written testimonial. Now those who give scores of 0 to 6 are unhappy clients — your support team should call them immediately and fix the issue that’s bothering them and improve your product. This way, you can turn a negative experience to a neutral one or even a positive one.
Conclusion
Growth hacking is flexible, scalable, and efficient. It’s powering not just the startups but the blue chips as well. So you see, the rules of the marketing game have changed.
Ryan Holiday, the strategist who wrote the book Growth Hacker Marketing, shared eight rules we need to consider before launching a product:
- Who are my ideal customers?
- Who are early adopters?
- How can my product be enticing right now?
- Why is my service indispensable?
- How can I make it indispensable?
- Does my service inspire, encourage, and facilitate sharing?
- How willing am I to improve based on feedback they provide?
- What’s my crazy/cool attention getter that’s ideally brand new?
Written by Ashton Bishop, CEO at Step Change
Ashton Bishop is Australia’s Predatory Thinker — an expert in pinpointing how businesses can grow by outsmarting their competitors. His niche is in strategy, where he has spent the last 14 years working internationally on some of the world’s biggest brands. He’s a business owner and serial entrepreneur; challenging, sometimes even controversial; but always focused on what gets results.
Additional Sources
The secret to Skype’s success: how growth hacking tactics contributed to product virality
The Framework of Growth Hacking
Originally published at blog.hellostepchange.com.
