What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a technique that comes from the field of marketing. With the help of limited resources, the aim is to achieve rapid growth for the company.
By means of analytical thinking, methods of marketing are used that are cost-effective, resource-efficient and creative, thereby increasing customer acquisition and retention for long-term growth.
Growth Hacks such as the use of micro-influencers, customer-acquire-customer programs, or content creation for search engine optimization can help accelerate a company’s growth in the long term and at low cost.
What is a growth hack?
A growth hack is a marketing trick that uses a creative idea to drive users to achieve a specific marketing goal or boost sales.
What is the difference between growth hacking and growth marketing?
Although growth hacking is a sub-discipline of growth marketing, there are key differences between these two terms and techniques.
While growth hacking is designed to achieve rapid growth through various methods, growth marketing focuses more on building the brand and achieving long-term growth.
For this, unlike growth hacking, measures are used repeatedly, which work well and have proven themselves for continuous growth. Growth hacking, on the other hand, tends to use hacks and tactics that are based on creative ideas and usually work only once.
What are the benefits of growth hacking?
Since the Growth Hacking method originated in the field of startups and small businesses, the advantages of the marketing technique are also defined by the most common problems of these types of businesses: low funding and insufficient resources.
This is exactly where growth hacking comes in. Marketing teams are not needed to implement growth hacking. It is often enough for one person to take care of the development and implementation of the hack.
No or only a small financial outlay is required to use the hacking method.
It is about low-cost sustainable growth, for example through content marketing, as opposed to expensive short-term growth, for example through paid ads.
Another benefit of growth hacking is tracking the performance of a hack based on return on investment. With the metric, you can decide if a hack is working or if you need to discard it and replace it with a new one.
Even if you have to replace the hack, always remember that the financial investment was ultimately very small, unlike paying for expensive ads or promotional videos.
What is a growth hacker?
A Growth Hacker, according to Sean Ellis , is a marketing expert who is focused and vetted exclusively around the growth of the business.
Using creative ideas and tricks as well as analytical thinking, the Growth Hacker is supposed to find simple ways to achieve the marketing goals set by the company and boost sales.
In doing so, he or she must find ideas for growth, prioritize them, test them, and then evaluate them to retain growth drivers or eliminate them.
What should you focus on as a growth hacker?
When using growth hacking techniques, you should focus on the following 5 steps of customer acquisition and retention:
- Acquisition
How do potential customers find your business? Acquisition in growth marketing is all about how you manage to get potential customers to notice you and direct them to your website or store. - Activation
In activation, growth hackers must now try to encourage visitors to interact with the company or the products it offers.
This can be, for example, a registration, a purchase, consuming a video, sharing content or simply filling out a form. The targeted action always depends on the activation goal. - Retention
Once visitors have been encouraged to interact, the goal of retention is to not to lose them.
Produce good content, maintain your contacts and make sure that the visitor who may already be a buyer, remembers your name or your product.
Because customer retention is always cheaper in the end than acquiring new (cold) customers. - Monetization
This step is about generating revenue. So, how to motivate potential customers to buy, make additional sales by up-selling or retain customers for a longer period of time?
Here, the growth hacker must try to stay in touch with potential leads and active customers, for example, by sending a reminder email if something is still in the shopping cart, or by offering discount promotions in the form of coupons. - Referral
When it comes to referrals, the growth hacker needs to address the question of how to ensure that customers become active supporters.
Motivation and creating incentives are approaches that could help here. However, it could also be enough that the customer is so taken with your product or brand that he already recommends it without incentives.
Do I need a basis for applying growth hacking?
Growth hacking, like other marketing methods, requires a certain amount of preparation.
First, you need information about the target group to which you want to apply the growth hack.
This information can be obtained very well, for example, with an online survey. There you can ask valuable information about the demographics, buying and consumer behavior and the needs and desires of the target group and that in a short time.
In addition to a target group analysis, the data collected also helps you to create a representative fictitious person.
Now that you know who your target group is, the next prerequisite should be to check to what extent the product offered fits the target group.
Ultimately, every product must bring added value to the target group and this also applies to the growth hacking method that is to be used. Here, the hack must fit the product and the target group. Otherwise, failure is inevitable.
Another basis for the implementation of growth hacking is also the personnel. It does not matter whether it is the marketing expert or the young professional who develops and applies the growth hack. Creativity and drive are what is needed in growth hacking.
What are possible growth hacks?
There are different hacks you can do in growth marketing. However, the hack you apply always depends on your product and your goal. Below, we’ll give you a few ideas for possible hacks.
1. Produce content
Although content marketing is known for not being suitable for short-term growth efforts, it can still be used for growth hacking. You just have to know how.
Growth hackers need to think creatively for this as well as follow social trends. Write about topics that are currently interesting and try to connect them to your business, product or offer.
This will help you rank faster in search engines, increase your visibility and create awareness on social media.
Then content hacking can also become a short-term measure for growth.
2. Use forms to generate leads
No growth without new customers.
Because new customers generate additional sales and reach, which ultimately also promote company growth. Therefore, lead generation is an essential part of any business.
However, in order to generate new customers, you first need to get their contact information. There are many different approaches and practices that allow you to gather this information.
In addition to classic methods such as collecting business cards at trade shows and events, online marketing offers a variety of other ways to collect contact information from potential prospects.
The online form is one of the simplest and most flexible methods in digital marketing for gathering contact information from potential customers via various channels.
Used creatively, well-placed, and attractively designed, an online form can increase your conversion rate. For example, by using it to sign up for your newsletter, download content, or schedule a consultation.
But our tip for you: Always keep the web form short. The time of long forms is over.
Today, no one has the desire or time to fill out long forms about anything.
Or do you?
For each form, ask yourself what information is absolutely needed for the purpose of the form and don’t ask for unnecessary data.
After all, the longer the form is, the higher the bounce rate. Most importantly, the person filling out the form will bounce if they notice that information is being asked for that actually has nothing to do with the purpose of the form.
In the end, you’ll find that this has a positive effect on your conversion rate.
3. Introduce referral program
Want to grow fast without spending a lot of time and effort?
Recommendations from your customers are a great way to do that. There is nothing more trustworthy than when a customer tells a friend, colleague or other person about you and your product.
Unfortunately, many people no longer trust reviews written by people they don’t know. They prefer to trust people they know and who share their (honest) opinion and experience.
Therefore, try to get satisfied customers and users to recommend you. But don’t just wait for them, speed up the process.
It’s best to offer them incentives for successful referrals. However, these incentives do not necessarily have to be monetary in nature. They can also be through special benefits, such as unlocking additional features, or some other creative way.
Think of something that makes a referral irresistible.
4. Use exit pop-ups
If you want to prevent visitors from leaving your website, you can use exit pop-ups to stop them for a short moment. In the pop-up itself, you can display information to keep the user on your website, for example, a coupon code or further content such as an e-book or a reference to your podcast.
Exit pop-ups are a great hack to increase the time spent on your website or to increase the conversion rate.
5. Use local events
How many local events are you at?
At many, then good. At few to none, then bad.
Local events such as networking events, bar camps, exhibitions or small trade fairs offer you a great opportunity to present your company and your products to a broad public and to increase your awareness.
Get in touch with other companies in personal conversations, cultivate relationships with people you already know and demonstrate professional expertise. Depending on the event, the financial outlay is low, but the effect is great.
Are there examples of known growth hacks?
Yes, there are.
- Dropbox
Let’s take the example of Dropbox, a file hosting service from the USA.
They have achieved rapid growth by incentivizing users to refer them.
Their incentive was that any user who referred another user would receive additional storage (500 MB) for their cloud folder. The recruited person also received 500 MB of additional storage for his cloud folder.
It was a mega success for the then fledgling company. Today they have more than 500 million users worldwide. - Dollar Shave
Let’s look at another example: The company Dollar Shave.
Dollar Shave is an American company that delivers razors and other personal care products to customers by mail.
For their growth hack campaign, they used a video to promote a service that consisted of sending new razor blades every month for only $1.
The video went viral, quickly reaching 19 million views and making the company a household name.
Two years after launch, Dollar Shave had already made more than $20 million in sales, according to Business Insider . A year later, that number had tripled. - Outlook
Let’s look at another example of a successful growth hack: Hotmail, now Outlook, an email service.
They added a signature line for every outgoing email asking recipients to sign up for a free account.
This additional signature had the text, “PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.”
Within 18 months, hotmail had a growth of 12 million users.
You see, successful examples of growth hacking campaigns abound. The trick now is to develop your growth hacking campaign to match your offer and to steer it successfully.
To do this, you need to create the basis in the first step and develop and implement ideas with creativity in the second step. If it doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up, check off the attempt and try the whole thing with a new hack.
Good luck with your growth hack!
