Growth Marketing Hacker — Why, What and How

Why the new CMO of your company is now a Growth Hacker, what he should be doing and how to get there.

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

7 min readAug 25, 2017

Andrew Chen coined the term in 2012, and since then everyone has been using it. But it’s important to remember that even though the term is still fairly new, the tactics and strategies that growth hacking encompasses have been around for awhile now.

Successful marketing is no longer only about good campaigns, huge advertisement budgets or defining brand positioning — it’s about all of that and more, it's about Growth, pure and simple and measurable.

And growth is more important than ever: if your business loses 2–3% of customers each month, that means you probably have to grow, at least 27%-43% annually to maintain the same revenue.

What is, after all, Growth Marketing?

“Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers.” (Mike Volpe — Angel Investor & Former CMO, HubSpot)

What is removing boundaries of marketing? And How to simple attract more engaged customers?

The discipline of marketing relied MOSTLY on communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people — newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people — advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, the traditional communication channels are fragmented and vast. For the first time ever, it’s possible for new products to go from zero to 10s of millions users in just a few years. Great examples include Pinterest, Zynga, Groupon, Instagram, Dropbox.

If your traditional marketing focused on the top of the funnel, the growth marketing requires focusing on the entire funnel. And that's why growth marketing is a new era.

“Growth starts with a deep understanding of product value and is about moving new users to THE moment as quickly as possible, measurable in seconds.” (Chamath Palihapitiya-CEO, Social Capital)

Rather than a CMO with a bunch of marketers reporting to them, growth marketers are people who aim to integrate and optimize your product to a big and wider platform that will requirer a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself. Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions — instead they are offensive weapons to win the market.

Growth marketing is all about scale. Growth marketers are known for finding new, out-of-the-box strategies for acquiring new users — and fast.

The How's — The famous case of Airbnb on Craigslist

In 2007, designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment. To make ends meet, they decided to turn their loft into a lodging space, but, as Gebbia explains, “We didn’t want to post on Craigslist because we felt it was too impersonal. Our entrepreneur instinct said ‘build your own site.’ So we did.”

This site got them their first three renters, each one paying $80, and after that first weekend they began receiving emails from people around the world asking when the site would be available for destinations like Buenos Aires, London, and Japan.

But how did a few air mattresses on the floor of a San Francisco loft become the most widely-used anecdote for startup growth hacking?

Craigslist Platform Integration

It’s unclear exactly when Airbnb implemented what’s become their most famous growth hack, but there is evidence of the Craigslist platform hack as early as 2010.

Though the startup worked hard to distinguish themselves from the more impersonal, scam-filled super platform, Craigslist had one thing that Airbnb did not — a massive user base. Airbnb knew through both market research and their own experience that Craigslist was the place where people who wanted something other than the standard hotel experience looked for listings — in other words, Airbnb’s target market. In order to tap into this market, Airbnb offered users who listed properties on Airbnb the opportunity to post them to Craigslist as well — despite the fact that there was no sanctioned way from Craigslist to do so.

The benefits of the Airbnb/Craigslist integration were numerous. Not only was it the sheer volume of potential users accessible via Craigslist, but the fact that Airbnb listings were far superior to the other properties available — more personal, with better descriptions and nicer photos — made them more appealing to Craigslist users looking for vacation properties. Once those Craigslist users made the switch, they were more likely to ignore Craigslist and book through Airbnb in the future. Not only that, but those with properties listed on Airbnb ended up making more money on their listings, which kept them using the service as well.

Though fairly straightforward in hindsight, the execution was anything but simple, as explained by writer and entrepreneur Andrew Chen. The impressive part is that this is done with no public Craigslist API. It turns out, you have to look closely and carefully at Craigslist in order to accomplish an integration like this.

Forget about your traditional Marketing skills

As we analise carefully the strategy behind Airbnb and Craigslist, we can see that a traditional marketer wouldn't be capable of doing it. It requires, too many technical details, of coding, engineering and marketing as well.

Meaning, if you want to discover the many tools available on growth marketing you will have to go beyond. Learn, Learn, Learn!!!

2. The shifting of people-centric to API-centric

“Application Program Interface” (API) has been in existence since the early 90’s, it was majorly built by premium third parties vendor/device houses, for developers to use when they build classic desktop application that will work with their devices or software, it was also called Plug-in’s. Nowadays API is synonymous to web services. In order to master growth hacking, your product, service or company will have to have a shift on how they think. Hacking the channels available for you to communicate to your audience are essential to create a good strategy.

3. Think about the Entire Funnel

The division between marketing and sales funnel are dead. Think about it as a unique concept on how to get engaged customers. I like this image below that represents in a simple way the main steps to visualize your funnel. Feel free to ad some steps if your customer journey have others.

4. Think like a start-up

The concept of growth marketing became more and more evident when the start-ups began to discover new ways to get their business up and running in a fast way.

Intrapreneurs rethink and promote innovation in processes, product development, marketing, collaboration and anywhere and everywhere it’s needed or possible. The difference here is that growth hackers take it upon themselves to do more with less as they hack the way things are done to find a potent way of obtaining goals.

On the topic of Growth Marketing/Hacking and what it is and isn’t, the top ranked answer comes from Andy Johns, “It’s the idea that an entrepreneur can take a clever or non-traditional approach to increasing the growth rate/adoption of his or her product by ‘hacking’ something together specifically for growth purposes. What people call ‘hacking’ today will become common sense to most in the tech world in the future because people are waking up to the fact that growth doesn’t simply come from having a good product.”

5. Testing, Testing and Testing

In this mindset of growth marketing, there aren't formulas to success. You will have to test, test and do some more testing. Test to understand the customer phycology, to understand your KPI's, the rates that work for each channel with each audience.

If the the mindset is based on data, you will have to learn how to exploit it and test it.

To Sum-up

“Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of ‘How do I get customers for my product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets and a lot of database queries.” (Andrew Chen)

Forget about the traditional marketing, engage in learning about coding, technology. Test your data in ways that you can create strategies that will give you engaged customers with small budgets. If start-ups did, so Can you.