Growth Hacking: A myth or a myth buster?
Growth Hacking seems to be the new buzz word in the market. What comes along with the package is the misconception of it being synonymous with marketing. Is it really a fancy word for marketing? Or is it just coined to attract more people into the corporate sector? The answer to these questions, I am afraid, is NO.
Growth Hacking is, no wonder, a word which seems to come out of the pop culture. It was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 when he needed a replacement for himself at the companies he helped grow.
“The definition of growth hacking was actually based more on the definition of what growth hacking is not,” — Sean Ellis.
How do you define Growth Hacking?
First, growth hacking is not synonymous to marketing. It is not something that can replace marketing and neither is it in any way better than marketing because there is no comparison. Growth hacking means taking charge of a company’s growth. Each step you take, every activity you do has to be growth centric. You experiment across channels, see what works best for you and it doesn’t have budget constraints. No growth hacker will be bounded by how much he can spend on publicising a product.
Traditional marketing on the other hand does get steamrolled by many guidelines that they must pay heed to while creating a marketing strategy for a company. A growth hacker ignores everything else and just focusses on growth. As Sean Ellis puts it- “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”
Every startup should get a person who can envision growth and work towards achieving it rather than building a great, highly qualified marketing team. What startups or most companies usually do is look out for skills and experiences which are irrelevant for them. Efficiency in planning a great marketing strategy or lead a marketing team is not what a startup requires in its initial stage. What you do require at that point of time is a sustainable way to grow your business which scales up your company when performed regularly. Well, this is what will get you a perfect graph and that’s what makes a difference.
What qualities must a Growth Hacker possess?
Since a growth hacker is one person whose vision and mission is growth, the qualities he possesses also point the compass towards the same direction.
- He should be able to take the responsibility of the growth of the company.
- Next thing he should look after is whether the product is market fit. The USP of your product should make it desirable among the users. If it is a startup, make sure that the product that you are launching solves the problems of your potential users and is unique. If you already have competitors the make your product stand out. Analyse what the requirement is and tweak your product accordingly. A growth hacker helps you meet all these goals in the initial stage.
- Growth can never be derived by practicing what we’ve been doing since ages. It demands experiment and risk taking. For a growth hacker to be a good one, he needs to take the risk of experimenting and testing what works in the niche market. He should be able to figure out the best and unique ways to reach the goals by using various techniques. This also makes him entrepreneurial.
- A growth hacker has a blend of marketing skills and coding. Like I mentioned above, experimentation is the key and for that you should put out stuff to your audience to see what works. So, whether it is A/B testing of your landing page or adding a new feature to the application you require both knowledge of how it will be in the best interest of the company and how it must be done. Not knowing coding can still be taken for granted but that would mean delegation of work to somebody who knows it which might or might not lead to the desired outcome.
“The better you understand your growth model, the easier it is
to come up with the right experiments to run to improve your key metrics.”
What growth hackers are capable to derive out of a business model is the product’s potential to market itself. They work around the potential and bring it to reality. The new age products which are different from what we’ve been seeing all this while, i.e. tangible products, demand a different kind of reach out to people. They also fulfil a totally different set of needs too. So Whatsapp lets you talk to your friends for free all over the globe. This makes Whatsapp a product which helps in its own adoption. Anyone who would want to talk to their friends for free would download the app. It creates a monopoly too because you can only talk with those who have Whatsapp installed in their phones. Dropbox gives you free storage space and rewards you with extra storage with every sign up that you generate out of your friend list. These softwares are not just unique in their approach but also have a turnaround which makes them one of a kind.
Now what I would like to throw light upon is another aspect of growth hacking. One which I discussed above is creating a product with a USP. The next point would be to figure out channels for its distribution. You must blow the trumpet once you have a product ready for customers to start pouring in. There are various channels like social media, search engines, youtube etc. online which let you distribute your product but you need to understand these channels completely to hack the ways to distribute your product efficiently.
The 5 essential ‘Hows’ that a growth hacker must ask himself
Because they are focused to make your product and business model better
- How do I get authentic users?
- How do I get my users to remain active?
- How do I increase the life-time value of my users?
- How do I make sure that my product and its features are effective and have a market value?
- How do I make my value propositions the best in the market?
“The biggest difference between companies that are growing or not is the ones that are running experiments tend to be growing.”
Since everything is going digital, for a business to grow, it needs to have a digital presence. There are new products that are being launched in the market and by products I not only mean tangible ones, I am also indicating at software. For such technological and new age products, we require a new age technique to help them grow. Hence the need for a growth hacker. It would be inappropriate to say that growth hacking is just for startups. It is here to stay and grow. These techniques which are used to tweak the growth of a new company show immense results when the startup hardly has any resources. You can only imagine the success stories once this is practiced in organizations with proper funds and resources. So, the next time you put out an ad to hire, don’t advertise for a VP Marketing, look for a growth hacker.
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