What the heck is growth hacking ?
Growth hacking is more of a mindset, than a tool-kit — Aaron Ginn
The first step towards developing a product or a service is to build content that will immediately attract millions. However in the long run, the spark of most of these companies fades away. Take Orkut or MSN for example. Initially, a social network based on an invite-only service Orkut gathered a huge user base. They made sure that it was easy accessible for an emerging middle-class society especially when computers and internet became affordable.
Obviously the fervent desire to engage and communicate with each other is not what died down, it was the exclusivity, the inability of Orkut to stop improvising is what led to the eventual downfall of this social networking platform. Other networks were constantly innovating and introducing newer features to keep their user base active or rather constantly engaged, and Orkut was simply reacting to those changes rather than leading them. With this came the emergence of Facebook. And the rest is history.
Now what did a company like Orkut lack? It wasn’t the investment, or the user base. It was the inability to keep the existing users engaged. This is where Growth Marketing steps in. But Orkut was not the only company trapped in this dilemma, there were several technical companies at the centre of this radical change, but only a handful were able to maintain extraordinary growth rates.
For a company the first touchdown is customer acquisition. So where did they start? They coined a term — Growth hacking. Growth hacking is where marketing tactics meet product development. Its goal is to get the product to market itself. Your marketing tactic is not outside the product, but with the given context, you enable conversions.
Let me give you a small example. Do you remember every single one of your friends’ birthday? Obviously not. So what do you do? You either check out his/her Facebook profile or Facebook will simply send out a notification.
But why does Facebook do this? When you read this notification you immediately go back to Facebook and wish your Friend birthday. And what is Facebook getting out of all this? Engagement. It has made you stop whatever it is that you’re doing and come back to Facebook. Also they aren’t using anything outside their product to market the brand. They used their product itself. This is a growth hack. A growth hacker will continuously study how people use a product and optimise every digital touchpoint in order to make the user take action.
Let me share some of the most innovative and engaging growth hacks. I’m sure they’ll knock your socks off.
- Give customers a head start — Customers are most likely to use your product if they’re achieving a goal. And when the goal looks achievable, he is more likely to continue. A car wash company introduced the idea of stamp cards with 2 variants. With the first variant a customer needed to collect 8 stamps in order to get a free car wash. But with the second variant there were 10 blocks and the first 2 blocks were pre-stamped.
Both variants implied one idea — Upon collecting 8 Stamps you get a free car wash. But which one appeals to a customer more? The second variant obviously. The user feels closer to achieving the goal and you have satisfied the customer at the very first step. Obviously he wants to come back. But I’m not simply telling you a story, the second variant performed twice as well as the first one.
- Core Offer Profit Maximizer —
Profit maximiser is simply a strategy to increase the average transaction value of a customer, where the core offer is the product you’re trying to sell. A profit maximising strategy is product centric. As complicated as it sounds it’s pretty easy. Let’s take McDonalds for starters- Every time you ask for a burger with fries the employee is trained to ask you if you want to convert it into a meal for a slightly increased price. Who doesn’t like the thought of getting more, more than what they asked for. They immediately raise the transaction value and generate a profit per customer. Would you like some fries with that ?
- Solve the Zero-day problem — This a problem faced by any website on the zeroth day where they have no previous knowledge of the customer. Take twitter for instance, initially they did not realise the zeroth day problem. If I join twitter today, my newsfeed will look empty as I haven’t followed anybody yet. Twitter has nothing to engage me with. So they came up with a growth hack to solve this issue. By asking questions based on where I live/ where I studied they recommend a few friends. Statistics say, you need around 8 friends to establish a functional news feed. They persuaded new users to follow at least 10 people on Twitter and the odds of that user returning increased drastically.
- What kind of pasta are you? —
As much as you loathe taking quizzes in school, quizzes on social media is viral content. By connecting to the character of the user, usage of pop culture and bunch of share-worthy images you have created a viral loop. These loops encourage interactions after results and add an element of curiosity. Buzzed has used such quizzes to drive users to their main site.
- We always want what we can’t have — OnePlus came up with an ‘invite-only’ marketing strategy. The company will gradually fulfil the demand while they keep the customer in anticipation. But in a while they started allowing users to buy the smartphone invite-free. With soaring sales, OnePlus, being a fairly new company, managed to dominate the market in a very short amount of time.
- “Always deliver more than expected” — A customer likes a good product, but a customer loves when you overdeliver. But how can you overdeliver? It’s simple, you promise less. Box8, is an on demand food delivery startup based in Mumbai. So you place an order, and they will deliver. Nothing new. Box8 also takes surveys as to the kind of dishes one prefers. This one time I called for lunch via Box8 and they surprised me with a complimentary brownie. Getting the same brownie I like cannot be a coincidence right? They tracked down my orders and found the brownie I frequently ordered. They also added a “surprise gift” in my invoice. With this they have garnered two things 1. I am excited to check out what’s in store for me 2. I am delighted upon seeing the brownie I like. On the other hand if they offered me with a cash back or a discount I would not have felt as good as I do right now. They personalised the transaction and over delivered and it worked wonders.
- More is not always better- The process of decision making can be tedious and the more options you present, you have more analyses to keep up with. It’s like a human version of an information hamster wheel, you can run all along but it will lead you nowhere. The process can be endless until you stop it yourself. This phenomena is more commonly known as “Analysis Paralysis”. Now, if suppose you offer 50 flavours of jam. The probability of finding the one that tastes good is very likely, but on a subjective note finding the one which satisfies you the most is hard to choose when you have too much variety. Eventually the decision making process is so overwhelming that the user does not buy anything. Hence it is imperative to offer the right amount of choices, enough to show variety and help making decisions.
- Mutual Serendipity — Two birds one marketing tactic. Acquisition and Retention done right.
DropBox and Makemytrip use this technique to improve customer acquisition. Like Dropbox uses a ‘Refer a friend’ scheme by rewarding both parties with free additional storage space.
Similarly PayPal offered 10$ to both the existing as well as the new user. An effective customer acquisition technique giving rise to a huge user base. Furthermore, Makemytrip offers a ‘Refer and earn’ program where in an existing user gets wallet money if a friend downloads and books through Makemytrip and the new user will also get some wallet money upon joining.
- Leverage an existing community to build a bigger community — Airbnb, an online marketplace to rent short-term lodging for vacation rentals, apartment rentals etc, in their early days, integrated it’s platform with CraigsList, which was already well-established to build a more advanced network. Clever, and very effective indeed.
The key to an effective growth strategy is to “Think out of a box”. You need to come up with elegant “hacks” to circumvent the cost and time of traditional methods of growth. A lot of developed companies like Facebook have matured a solid growth hacking strategy and developing companies are catching up. The main idea is to develop repeated growth, after all we all want an eternal money making machine.
Growth hacking is the way of the future. Forget about traditional methods of customer acquisition. In today’s data driven world, there is no “wait and see.” There’s only “test, iterate and optimize.” After all, if you don’t build the best growth hacking team you can, your competitor definitely will. So brace yourselves it’s only the beginning.
Hack your way into the future.
Did I miss any growth hacks you think is worth being on this list?
Reach out at priyanshi@pixelgenie.co
