How is growth hacking viewed in marketing circles?
Growth Hacking has taken the startup space by storm and has helped many amazing businesses rise out of the noise of. However, inside marketing organisations it’s been branded both as ‘nothing new’ and ‘the saviour of marketing’! We have seen new agencies pop up, new hackers rise to the top of the notoriety pie and businesses leveraging it for dramatic growth. It has also caused a deep misunderstanding with some founders as to what it can do and what its purposes are. This misunderstanding means many investors are losing money based on the promise of growth.
Growth hacking has enabled marketing teams to redefine their purpose, their goals and to acquire new skill sets. They have moved into a mindset that is not simply about communicating value and trying to position their product and brand at the right place in the customer journey. Instead they have now been able to leverage software, data and analytics, and make machines that grow themselves using clever viral loops. Ultimately it has been about asking the customer to grow the business for them.
Marketing teams have changed, and now include a plethora of people that would look out of place only 5 years ago in a marketing department. Product developers, social media gurus, data analysts (although we should now all be data analysts), content creators and full stack marketers have all found themselves sitting around the table with one another and sharing ideas…
It has been about defining and systemising an approach to product development that’s sole focus is growth of the user base, and conversion to the end of the funnel. It has been about trial and error of traffic acquisition hacks, to drive top level traffic and awareness.
Growth hacking is invaluable for businesses because it forces teams to justify decision making using data. It has forced marketing teams to stop building strategies based on ‘gut feeling’. That transition has been hard for many, and has left some by the wayside. But those businesses, teams and individuals that have crossed the chasm have reaped the rewards.

Growth hacking, if implemented with rigour, can allow a business to develop and deploy marketing assets quickly… call it agile marketing if you will. The process will offer the ability for businesses to expect iterative gains in performance all the way down the product pipeline.
Growth marketing is the new tip of the spear. Having worked as an executive in high growth tech startups and as an agency assisting founders grow their businesses, the one thing I know is that growth hackers don’t solve your business problems. Defining where the growth activities needs to occur is most of the battle. Why grow something that has little relationship to the bottom line?
I believe that growth marketing has a far longer planning horizon, and is perhaps the closest thing to marketing strategy these days. A marketing strategy is still required, and it should be based on assumptions and insights gleaned from data at hand. Where to position yourself as a business, what niche to target, what price point to go in at are all important decisions. These are all decisions that should be made with strategy in mind. However it is of course the role of marketing to rigorously test these assumptions and update the strategy.
Growth is a component of strategy. Strategy without well formed, longer term growth initiatives will deliver poor results. Therefore having someone that can guide a business through data and where to focus attention, for how long, and when to move focus is of course paramount to the success of a strategy. It should also blend product optimisation and top of funnel growth with a constant approach to reduction in cost of sale. In short it’s all about the attribution model. This is the ultimate growth mechanism. If you’re undertaking growth initiatives in the right areas, in the right order you are far more likely to win the battle.
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