First, let’s answer the question: who is a growth hacker?
A growth hacker is a creative marketer that thinks outside the box, an engineer with technological knowledge and an analyst that knows how to use the collected data to gather interesting customer insights.
The important difference lies also in the main goal. While a traditional marketer may concentrate on various fields such as increasing brand awareness or PR, the growth hacker focuses only on one thing from the very beginning – driving the rapid growth of the company.
4 steps to growth hacking
There is no one commonly known theory on how to implement growth hacking in your company. It always depends on the goals and product that you want to promote.
However, Ryan Holiday distinguishes four steps that are significant to the growth hacking process.
Step 1. Focus on achieving a product-market fit
According to common belief, you should first enter the product on the market and then consider where all the failures come from. However, in times of demanding consumers and high competition, this approach is no longer profitable.
The worst decision that you can make is to enter the market with a product that nobody needs or cares about. That’s why you should first create a product that is able to solve the problem of a precisely defined target group, then collect the feedback and modify the product accordingly, until it is met with a positive reaction.
Step 2. Finding your growth hack
To understand the real meaning of this step we have to first overthrow the myth that success in advertising means reaching as many people as possible. In the growth hacking understanding, this approach is a total waste of money, as probably most of these people will never become your real customers.
Instead, you should focus on attracting a group of innovators, who are ready to test your product and check if it solves their problem. This way you are reaching a much smaller group of people, but you are gaining a very important value – if they are satisfied, they will become loyal. And the group of loyal users is able to bring the company more success than even several times larger group of uninvolved, indifferent recipients.
Finding your growth hack in this context means finding a way to reach the right people in the right time and at the right place with little to no cost, turning them into loyal and regular customers.
Step 3. Going viral
Most social media users probably know what going viral means, or have at least participated in viral shares once or twice.
Let’s assume you watched a cute video of a cat and you thought you should share it with some of your friends. 10 of your friends thought the same and then – boom! – the video has spread rapidly like a virus on the web, reaching millions of others people who did exactly the same thing as you did: recommended the content to their relatives. Those relatives were interested in this content because it was shared by someone they know, so they didn’t treat it like an intrusive advertisement.
As you may assume, viral marketing is very effective and… cheap. That’s why every company wants a viral spread of its content, but rarely anyone actually works to earn it.
Virility, contrary to popular belief, is not an accidental
phenomenon. Information must be worth spreading and it must also evoke specific emotions in people – to move, inspire, and excite them.
Producing this type of content is not a piece of cake, but it’s definitely worth the effort. While planning your next campaigns, try to think about their viral potential. Perhaps there is something that you can add to your ad that will move the users and make them want to share your content further?
Step 4. Retention and optimization
There is no sense in putting too much effort into gaining new customers if you can’t retain the existing ones. That’s why every growth hacker should be responsible not only for arousing the interest of potential clients, but also keeping them firmly in the company.
You may have figured out already that growth hacking is not a piece of cake. It requires a mix of various skills and a huge portion of creativity. However, many examples of its success are real proof that this effort is worth trying.
Despite the fact that growth hacking was created based on the startup business model, Sean Ellis believes that it can be successfully incorporated also in large, stable companies.
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