What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is a relatively new term in the world of startups and seeks to distinguish between traditional marketing and one that has one aim before all others: growth. But as a growth agency, growth hacking is what we do.

Often when you hear or read the word “hack”, a negative feeling emerges. Many of us will think about a person in a hoodie, behind a computer, trying to hack into computers or networks to steal information. However, hacking can also mean to cope, tolerate, or manage successfully. Growth hacking is nothing illegal or causing harm. It is simply a method to manage growth successfully with little resources.

Growth hacking is an overarching term for strategies focused solely on growth. It is usually used in relation to startups and businesses that require massive growth in a short time on a small budget.  Growth hacking's goal is to obtain as many customers as possible while spending as little as possible. 

In 2010, Sean Ellis, an entrepreneur, angel investor, start-up advisor, and CEO of GrowthHackers, coined the term “growth hacker” in a blog. He defined growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”  The idea of growth hacking originated with start-ups needing to grow quickly on limited budgets. The focus is on innovation, scalability, and connectivity to drive one metric: growth.

Personally, I think growth hacking is an updated phrase from using “shoe-string budget”. Before the days of growth hacking, marketing directors were often tasked with the mission of growing a business on a “shoe-string budget”, which means the budget that is meager. I prefer the phrase growth hacking because it puts the priority of growth front and center, while at the same time saying resources are limited and finite. The goal is quite simple: to acquire as many customers as possible while spending as little as possible.

Often, growth hacker and growth marketer are terms used interchangeably. However, growth hacking is not reserved solely for marketers. A growth hacker can be a product manager, engineer, operations manager, etc. Those who practice growth hacking are obsessed with growing the business and are very unhappy with the status quo. These are MPWRSource’s people. They constantly test and analyze to see what is working. They are not afraid to change and pivot when they see that the desired results are not being achieved.

To successfully practice growth hacking, the business must figure out their “why” to grow, and then they constantly look for ways to make that happen on purpose. Growth hacking is based on action and activity that is based on data and analytics. Growth hackers do not believe in “bonne chance”.

Growth hackers follow the below methodology:

1. Set goals and growth priorities
2. Identify channels to acquire customers
3. Measure success
4. Scale growth and pivot when necessary

A growth marketer will focus on a website as a necessary means to drive growth because, let’s face it, websites are an effective, low-cost channel and tool to grow a business.

The point of growth hacking is to:

• Drive traffic and visitors to a website
• Turn visitors of a website into customers
• Retain customers as happy customers

What are some typical tactics used by growth hackers?

• Create a product or service and then test it to make sure people want it and are willing to pay for it.
• Develop buyer peronas and growth marketing tactics.
• Update products and services at regular intervals, gathering customer feedback to determine if the business is on the right track.
• Market product to foster continued growth and track the success of those results.
• Practice A/B testing and conversion optimization techniques. (A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a process of showing two variants of the same web page to different segments of website visitors at the same time and comparing which variant drives more conversions.)

There are three main areas of growth hacking strategies:

1. Content Marketing
2. Product Marketing
3. Advertising

HubSpot states that content marketing is “the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. It can boost factors like brand awareness, sales, reach, interactions, and loyalty.” Content marketing helps to:

• Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
• Boost conversions
• Build relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty
• Show your audience how your products and services solve or relieve their pain points
• Create a sense of community around your brand

Content marketing activities may include:

• Blogging
• Guest blogging
• Creating social media content
• Writing eBooks and white papers
• Podcasting
• Running webinars
• Getting bloggers to review your product
• Joining relevant forums, groups, and subreddits
• Influencer marketing
• Email marketing
• SEO management
• Getting listed and mentioned in relevant websites and marketplaces

Product marketing includes ways of making your product more appealing. Product marketing, in essence, is a process of promoting and selling a product or service.

Growth hackers may use the following methods to market a product:

• Leveraging FOMO (the fear of missing out) by using an invite-only signup system. (Clubhouse has done this successfully.)
• Gamifying the user onboarding process to make it more enjoyable and offering rewards. (This helps builds an overall customer experience, not just a building a shopping cart.)
• Offering incentives for referrals that benefit the referrer and the new customer.
• Affiliate marketing, which uses a lot of content marketing growth tactics. (Affiliate marketing is simply the process of earning a commission by promoting other business’s products or services.)

Advertising is another way to growth hack. However, as we now know, advertising funds are slim for growth hackers. The advertising channels used in growth hacking include social advertising, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., and pay per click (PPC) advertising.

HubSpot takes advantage of a growth hack. HubSpot offers a free CRM, and it has worked extremely well for them. Freebies are always attractive to potential customers and are a very effective way to expand market share exponentially. People like free. By leveraging something free that appeals to a target market, growth ensues quickly.

According to HubSpot, there are 24 Growth Hacking Strategies:

1. Repurpose blog content.
2. Build social sharing links directly into content.
3. Test your conversion points.
4. Embed live videos.
5. Connect with industry experts.
6. Take advantage of your highest-converting offer.
7. “Crowdsource” from your team.
8. Find your most talkative customers.
9. Embed social media posts.
10. Cross-pollinate.
11. Create a custom audience on Facebook.
12. Use Twitter retargeting.
13. Make multiple versions of one ad.
14. Tag your YouTube videos.
15. Do your ranking search.
16. Recycle old blog posts.
17. Experiment with email.
18. Make it easy to share.
19. Get feedback from real people.
20. Look for external collaboration opportunities.
21. Illustrate progress.
22. Create free tools – not just free content.
23. Customize landing pages for different channels.
24. Clip it and share it.

As you can see, growth hacking should not invoke the same negative emotions as computer hackers. Growth hacking should inspire a business to grow to the level the business seeks, whether it be town, country, or world domination, or maybe just a sliver of the pie. Growth hacking requires scrappiness, experimentation, and a growth mindset. These terms are often used to identify entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs and those with an entrepreneurial spirit, already have qualities to pursue growth hacking. Now, they just need to create and set forth a plan or find the right people to lead their charge towards growth.