Step Up Your Business Growth With This Ultimate Guide to Growth Hacking

If you are a startup owner you might have come across the word “Growth Hacking”. It is a popular term that has become a buzz among the new entrepreneurs. 

For business owners, growth hacking is an umbrella term for various strategies like lead generation, brand awareness, customer acquisition, etc. focused solely on growth.

Over time growth hacking has been proven as an effective marketing strategy for many entrepreneurs, yet many are still unaware or are baffled about the concept.

Don’t worry at the end of this article I’ll try to explain each and every concept around the term and make growth hacking lucid.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is relatively a new term in the field of marketing, used collectively for strategies or tactics used by companies to grow their business, within the shortest possible time using small budgets.

The goal of growth hacking is to acquire as many customers and leads possible in the shortest duration with the least expenditure.

It may require a team of marketers, social media managers, developers, and product managers to increase your brand awareness and boost your conversion rates.

What Is A Growth Hacker?

A growth hacker is a person responsible for low-cost yet creative strategies that are focused on customer acquisition and retention. For becoming a growth hacker an individual should be analytical, curious and obsessed with growth.

As per Sean Ellis, the original growth hacker defined a growth hacker as:

“A person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

Yes, you read it right “a person whose true north is growth” and nothing else. 

Unlike traditional marketers who consider budgets, expenses, conversion, ROI, etc., on the other hand for a growth hacker, the only make-or-break metric is growth. 

In short, the jobs of a growth hacker are:

• Create strategies responsible for instigating exponential growth in business.
• Analyze and test their strategies, and find out what is working and what is not.
• Factors like budget and expenses should not act as a barrier for them.

If we go by Sean’s own words a Growth Hacker is completely different from a traditional Marketer, as:

For a  growth hacker:

“Growth is primary, and the budget is secondary.”

But for a marketer:

“Growth completely depends on the budget.”

History Of Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking was born when Sean Ellis, founder, and CEO of Qualaroo and GrowthHackers, coined the term Growth Hacker in 2010.

The term got expanded to a much wider audience in the article “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing”, by Andre Chen.

In 2012, Aaron Ginn presented the importance of a Growth Hacker as someone who has a curious yet analytical mindset that is creative enough to develop strategies that are growth-driven, in his publication, TechCrunch. 

In the following year Sean Ellis, partnered with Dylan La Com, Everette Taylor, Morgan Brown, and several others to start a community, the GrowthHackers, that offered software as a service (SaaS) adding more to the growth process.

The Second Annual Growth Hackers Conference that was held later in 2013, at San Francisco, introduced individuals who used social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc, to implement growth hacking strategies. 

Sean’s success in setting up so many startups on the internet has resulted in developing growth hacking to an extent that it has become the mainstream methodology of marketing.

A successful growth hacking campaign totally depends on how growth hackers think and plan a strategy for the campaign.

Step By Step Implementation Of Growth Hacking Strategies

Growth Hacking consists of a vast variety of tactics that can lead to exponential growth for your business. While you might imply any one of these or all of these upon your business, depending upon your goals. The goals can be anything like:

• Increasing organic traffic
• Boost your conversion rates
• Increase your subscriptions or downloads
• Customer retention

and much more…

Startups have been using growth hacking without even realizing it. One such example is McDonald’s using their billboards across every interstate highway, which is nothing but a strategy used by them to increase their audience outreach.

Let’s get started with some growth hacking strategies:

1. Market Research: Understanding Your Target Customers

The internet has changed the game of marketing. In earlier times when it was very easy to make a product famous just by hefty advertising, it is not that simple now. For making your product famous among the correct people, it has to be backed by strong market research that understands your target customers.

Entrepreneurs often commit this mistake, of first developing a product then investing all their funding on creating expensive marketing campaigns. This opens up a Pandora’s Box that is only closed when all your funds are exhausted.

Then what is the right approach?

Instead of investing your wealth in creating a product, take time to do market research. Analyze the users’ behavior, go through other products that are already a big gig in your niche. Use deep insights into your competitors and define a problem area that they are lagging.

Once you know the Achilles Heel in your competitors’ product start thinking and strategizing how you are going to use that weakness.

Startups are all about creating a product that solves a problem area in return for money spent by the customers. And market research is all about defining that problem area, thus saving your money from creating a crappy product.

2. Define Target Audience And Redefine Your Product

Once you’ve done your market research, now it’s time to define your target audience and redefine your product accordingly. As a growth hacker, you should be wise enough to choose your suitable audience for promoting goods. 

Finding the right audience saves you a lot of time and effort. Once you’ve understood your target audience you’ll understand what they actually want from you in the form of a product.

Now’s the time you start working on your product. From here you can either create a new product or redefine your existing products or services. 

The Internet has completely changed the definition of products from physical tangible articles to visible yet intangible bits and bytes. Due to the radical redefinition of products, it is the job of Growth Hackers to understand who are the perfect buyers, what they want and is their product the best for satisfying their audience’s demand.

Sean Ellis, the original growth hacker, perfectly understood the new internet products and the internet buyers when he was working for Dropbox.

3. Plan Your Marketing Campaign

You’ve done thorough market research, defined your target audience and molded the perfect product, now what next?

Now it’s time to deploy whatever you’ve gathered until now. It is time to plan your marketing campaign.

A marketing campaign is a medium that acts as a channel to communicate your brand to your target customers.

It helps you reach the right people, at the right time and with the right efficiency. Marketing campaigns promote your companies goals and raise awareness among the potential customers how your products and services will provide value to them. 

For planning a successful marketing campaign you need first ask yourselves these questions:

• What is the goal of your marketing campaign?
• To whom your marketing campaign will target?
• How are you going to measure marketing efforts?
• What channel are you going to use in your marketing campaign?

As a growth hacker, you need to have strong answers to these questions.

The biggest blunder you can make is directly landing into the planning of your marketing campaign. Without knowing the answers to the aforementioned questions there are chances you can end up creating a campaign that has a zero return on investment.

As per a survey by KOMARKETING, 37% of the marketers wasted their marketing spend due to an unplanned marketing campaign. This made them suffer from the loss of customers due to wrong targetting or choosing the wrong marketing channel.

Now you can see why having a well-planned marketing campaign is important for your business, and if you’re a startup you need to be even more careful with your marketing campaigns.

Let’s have a look at a few forms of popular marketing campaigns that can help you reach your audience:

• Email Campaigns

Emails are probably the oldest form of marketing in the digital world. It is the act of sending a commercial message to a group of people (your target audience) with the intention of promoting your services or products.

Since the first eMail in 1971, eMail marketing has changed a lot. Being so old, still, they are prevalent in the present marketing setup. 

The reason behind this is:

1. Emails are an easy way to reach mobile users

Did you know 81% of people use smartphones for regularly checking there eMails?

2. Help in keeping the customers informed effectively

Emails are used by organizations for keeping with their customers updated with the latest information about their brand.

As per a survey by DISQUS 70% of people subscribe to newsletters for various reasons out of which 35% of them use it for keeping themselves updated with the latest content from a website.

3. Emails help in boosting sales

Emails are a perfect way by which you can incentivize your customers by giving them coupons or exclusive discounts. 

A personalized email gives your customers a feeling of being rewarded and thus builds loyalty towards your brand.

4. Emails are inexpensive and versatile

Emails are easy, effective, provide variety, and inexpensive. Depending on how you monitor your email campaign success you can craft an eMail that best suits your business.

You can send a personalized email to a customer that has his name and even more. Also, this ROI comes with an amount of approximately 38$ for every dollar spent.

Thus, building a successful email campaign can do wonders for your business. As a growth hacker, you need to create strategies that:

1. Have targetted eMails
2. Work with your goals
3. Resonate with your buyer persona

• Social Media Campaign

Here’s another low cost yet an impactful and effective way of reaching your audience, social media campaign. With billions of users, it is very obvious that your target audience is present there. 

The social media giant, Facebook alone has 2.4 billion active users, gives you a huge opportunity to make people aware of your brand.

Not only this you can tap quality leads using social media. Social media campaigns are an effective hacking technique because they let the growth hackers experiment with so many social media platforms and choose the best strategy that helps him or her in achieving a brand’s smart goals.

Here are a few tips for creating a perfect social media strategy:

a. Competitor Research

It’s very important before creating any plan you do a little bit of research upon what others are doing in your industry. Try and figure out what is that one thing which is doing wonder for their brands.

b. Find your audience

With so many social media platforms available in the market like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. It might be difficult for anyone person to manage all the platforms, but here’s what you’ve to find out the platform where your potential buyers are most active.

c. Craft your content

Next is craft your content strategy. This is the key part on which the success of your social media campaign is dependent. Crafting the perfect content strategy for your business is necessary for appealing your brand to the target audience. Content should be designed in a manner that resonates with what people are wanting to hear or read.

d. Regular Monitoring

Once you’ve deployed all your plans, it’s time to regularly monitor your implementations. Choose your KPIs and check how they are performing for your brand. Are they doing justice to your goals or are they going in vain?

As a growth hacker regularly monitoring your social media plans will let you know are your strategies growth focussed.

• Paid Advertising Campaign

October 27, 1994: the web gave birth to the first online banner ad. Since then the advertising world has evolved a lot. 

Due to the introduction of digital platforms like Facebook, Google AdWords, LinkedIn, etc., the ad industry had crossed $1.3 Trillion and if go by mobile v/s desktop revenue in the U.S., mobiles share 53% CAGR in internet ad revenue industry.

Now you know the real reason behind why the digital ad industry is so big? Don’t you?

1. First and foremost the digital path transformation of various organizations and businesses. People are propagating towards the digital age and so the ads.
   
   
2. The search ads are always shown always on top of the organic results in the SERPs.Thus, a successful search ad campaign can direct the influx of visitors to your site.
   
3. Digital Ads give you the power of targeting and retargeting your ads that match with your buyers’ demographics.
4. Since online advertisements are also driving traffic to your site, hence it plays an important role in growing your brand.

Thus, as a growth hacker, you know what duty is waiting for you?

To create a successful paid advertising campaign with a great ROI. Here are some tips for creating a campaign strategy whose true north is growth:

1. Work on the relevancy of your ad by regularly checking the quality score, offered in most platforms’ ecosystems. Like for Google Adwords: relevancy + User Experience = Quality Score, if you see a poor quality score then you’ve to keep an eye either one or both.
2. Choose the right bid strategy that goes well with your campaign goals. Campaign goal can vary from:
   
   1.  Increasing traffic to your site.
   2. Make people take action upon visiting your platform.
   3. Boost your brand awareness.
   4. Or all of the above.
   
   Thus depending on your goal or goals, you’ve to choose from:
   
   1. Conversion-Based Strategies
   2. Impression-Based Strategies
   3. Click-Based Strategies
   4. Interaction-based Strategies
3. Target your ads at the right locations and show your ads at the right time. As a growth hacker, you have to see where your target audience is residing. As per your products or services you have to decide what suits best for your business:
   
   1. Targeting multiple countries.
   2. Targeting certain areas within a country.
   3. Targeting a single city or region.
   4. Targeting a locality with a small radius.
   
   The same goes for the timing, pick up the right schedule when your audience is active on the web.
4. Once you’ve deployed your ad campaigns it’s time to analyze your campaigns’ performance and optimize your bids accordingly. Regular analysis of your ads’ performance and optimization can give you a great deal on every penny spent in your campaign.
   
   The optimization can be done in two ways:
   
   – Manual
   – Algorithmic
   

So, this is how you can market your products or services and perforate them in your target audience’s minds.

4. Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is defined as the set of techniques or strategies performed or planned for attracting new customers and managing prospects.

You’ve done your market research and defined your target audience, also you’ve panned your marketing campaign and managed prospects.

Growth hacking plays an important role in growing your business’ customer pool. Being a growth hacker you’ve to think about what innovative ideas can bring the organization a huge wave of buyers. 

This is just what Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith did with Hotmail. When Hotmail was born its growth was very unimpressive. But someone had an idea of putting a line at the bottom of each line, “PS: I LOVE YOU. GET YOUR FREE EMAIL AT”. 

Using more such creative ideas, Hotmail saw a growth of 1 million users within 6 months, and by the time they sold it to Microsoft they had hit the 8.5 million user mark.

This was just an example, as a growth hacker you’ve to decide what is that one innovation that can bring your company an influx of customers and later retain them. 

Here are some growth hacking tips for customer acquisition:

• Leverage Customer Feedbacks

Customer feedback as you know is the piece of information provided by your buyers after using your products or services. 

Customer feedbacks provide the answer to questions like:

• The services you’re providing are actually needed by the buyers.
• What are the key areas of improvement?

Listening to what people say helps you understand what product is needed to be developed, what are the actual demands of your target audience, and where your product is lagging.

• Work On Your Buyer Experience

The digital age is all about hassle-free buying. E-commerce has given the ability to shop 24×7, easy product comparisons, and many such reasons for shopping online.

Consumers love easy online shopping because of the fact it’s easy and saves a lot of their time. Thus, as a growth hacker, you need to make sure your checkout processes are easy and customers do not have to fill long forms.

• Incentivize Your Present Buyers

People love to receive rewards. The same phenomenon can be used for retaining your customer pool and also attracting new customers. Building a successful loyalty program is one of the prominent growth hacking strategies for customer acquisition.

Here are some basic tips for rewarding your buyers:

1. Giving points and rewards to your loyal customers. This is a very traditional method of implementing your loyalty program strategies where frequent customers earn points and later they can redeem it and convert it into some type of rewards.
2. Giving referral discounts to your present customers and new customers. Referral marketing is one such growth hacking technique for customer acquisition by which you do brand awareness with word-of-mouth. A well-planned referral program helps in retaining your present customers and also brings new buyers.
3. You can also take advantage of cashback programs for retaining your customers. Cashback is an incredible method in which you motivate your customers to earn more by spending more.
4. Ask for feedback and reviews from your trusted buyers to attract new customers. You can motivate buyers with a small reward who share their valuable reviews for your products and services. Let’s crunch some numbers for better understanding:
   
   – As per a 2016 study by FanFuel 94% need reviews for making a purchasing decision.
   
   – BrightLocal shows us that 97% of buyers reach a local business with the help of user reviews.
   

• Address Your Customers With A Compelling Message

Remember the success of  HotMail, it was that one line at the end of every mail that compelled the readers to become their customers. It only takes 50 milliseconds for a user to form an opi target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer”nion upon landing upon your site.

Let’s have a look at how Trello did a series of experiments for delivering the perfect message to their users.

Trello growth hacker and content marketer Jessica Web and Trello team wanted to find the best way to portray their product in the best manner on their landing page. Their experiment plan consisted of 11 different message headlines until they found their best fit, which is:

“Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done.”

Thus, a perfect message helps in resonating with your product with your potential buyers, just as Trello, the experiment resulted in an overall 2% increase in their signups.

5. Analyze And Optimize

Finally, once you’ve implemented your strategies its time you regularly analyze how they are performing. As discussed earlier the true north of a growth hacking is growth. As a growth hacker, you need to analyze the growth of your strategies.

Regular analysis will give you an idea of how your campaigns and strategies are performing. If they are doing good then, hola!! you were successful in achieving your goals, and if not try new experiments and optimize your strategies.

Conclusion

Finally, we’ve made it to the end. I hope that I was successful in clearly stating all the steps necessary to grow and hack your business. Let’s summarize all the steps:

• The first thing is you need to do market research, to understand what products are people actually looking for, and understand how your products or services become their savior.
• After doing the market research, define your target audience. The digital age has made it very easy for to easily find the buyers who actually need your products.
• Once you have done market research and found your target audience, now it’s time to plan your marketing campaign. You cannot market your product and services to everyone, thus a well-planned marketing campaign will help you in making your target audience aware of your brand.
• Acquire potential buyers to grow your customers and retain them in order to serve them for the long-term. Use customer acquisition techniques for attracting and compelling the buyers to become your potential customers.
• Finally, analyze your growth hacking efforts to see how they are performing and then optimize accordingly.

Until now you must have understood one thing that growth hacking is not a strategy but a skill and for being a growth hacker you need to master this skill.