A beginners guide to Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is one of the buzzwords that defines the Age of Innovation. ‘Growth Hacking’ is an umbrella term that encompasses the various strategies that a business can employ in order to grow. That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? The field is more complicated than that, otherwise there wouldn’t be experts. Still unclear to you? Read on to find out more.

Growth Hacking unpacked

Growing your business through Growth Hacking is an adaptive process. Growing a business with low-cost methods is the goal of Growth Hacking. The primary purpose of a Growth Hacker is to grow a company’s customer base while operating on a limited budget.

The Growth Hacker’s Mindset

It is important to know the characteristics that will make you successful as a Growth Hacker if that is your dream job. Due to the fact that this is a non-traditional concept, it is only natural that you should be someone who possesses these characteristics. Creative-thinkers, people who can adapt to change, and budget planners – a multi-talented person would be required.

You should also have a background in marketing, as a key part of Growth Hacking is lead generation and client acquisition, which is an integral part of marketing. Besides being creative, we also need to be analytical and critical – whatever strategies we devise must be evaluated and adapted as needed.

How It Works

It might be familiar to you that Sales Funnel describes the customer journey between awareness and purchase. Increasing your customer base is the core objective of Growth Hacking, so it’s vital to grow your customer base as a part of this strategy.

As part of Growth Hacking, the Sales Funnel begins with Awareness, which generates more traffic to the site. The goal is to turn these site visitors into customers or users. The final step in the process is to retain those customers for future business.

Strategies of growth hacking

Strategies for growth hacking are part of advertising, content marketing, and product marketing. Marketing through content is a popular and effective method, similar to that of Inbound Marketing. Growth Hacking differs from Inbound Marketing in that it takes a highly deliberate approach, where Inbound Marketing uses more established tools.

Growth Hacking Examples

Airbnb

Airbnb is now a global company. It’s incredible to think they started out as a group of broke guys in San Francisco who let strangers stay in their place when the local hotels were sold out. As a result of a crazy idea, we now have one of the most disruptive business models we have ever seen.

Traditional marketing tactics were used, such as attending trade shows and targeting early adopters. Their business grew and improved thanks to the simplest hack of all – photography.

They were able to grow their business by improving the quality of the photos on their website. The difference between hosts who have professional pictures and those who don’t is 40%.

Youtube

One of the biggest Internet inventions is Youtube, which has evolved so much over time. Up until now, uploading video content to the internet was a hassle – you had to convert file formats so they would be compatible with the web.

YouTube created a platform that allows users to upload and embed content, simplifying the process, making it easier to upload and watch content.  Through simplifying a process, this was itself a Growth Hack; it allowed a market to grow such as the scooter underwater market.

Dropbox

Dropbox used to use referral campaigns to generate new business at one point in time. Do you remember that? Growth hacking at its best. Refer a friend and receive 250mb of free storage. The campaign was simple and cost-effective. The number of users grew from 100K in 2008 to 4 million at the beginning of 2010.

Surf Gear Lab

The founder of ecommerce store, Surf Gear Lab, used a very clever little growth hack to drive awareness about one of their core products, a surfboard bike rack. He targeted local bike rental shops in California which happened to be located near surfing beaches such as Laguna and Huntington.

He offered to install his surfing racks on these bikes for free. Before long, visitors who were hiring bikes, decided to aslo hire surfboards.  This resulted in two things. Firstly they rented the bikes for longer so the owners of the bike rental stores were happy, and secondly they provided free advertising for the product.

Summary

Disruption. Yet another buzzword that flies around these days. It’s also a perfect way to describe what Growth Hacking is. In a world where the financial resources available to a company can determine their success, Growth Hacking provides a silver lining to an ominous looking cloud. Growing a business, whether a start-up or a large corporation is possible without seven figure budgets.

Growth can be achieved if marketing, product, and engineering teams work together creatively and critically. Growth Hacking is a broad topic, determined by a business, their problems, and their goals, whether it’s a disruptive campaign idea or a simple change like improving the quality of how you present your business.