How does Growth Hacking help your business grow?

Wondering why so many people are asking Google about Growth Hacking? Unless your business is a money tree, or if you're Elon Musk building a business, it's very likely that your goal is to grow your business as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. And growth hacking may be the answer!

What is growth hacking then?

Growth hacking, also known as growth marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on data-driven growth. Let’s sort out what it really means and how it will help your company grow quickly.

Leading companies often use this strategy to grow fast with a smaller budget. Either you start from a general data-driven marketing strategy or you hire a growth hacker, whose job is to focus solely on the company's data-driven growth. Both one or the other aims to generate as many new leads, new users or new customers as cost-effectively as possible. You succeed by analyzing the data and seeing which marketing efforts actually work and which don’t. All decisions on what to continue with versus what to scrap immediately are again based on a data-driven result.

Growth hacking is a popular concept and was made up by a man named Sean Ellis not too long ago. He came up with this pretty new way of working because he saw a problem for Start-ups to grow cost-effective. For young or small businesses who want to grow quickly, but don't have that much money in their pocket yet it’s a challenge to grow at the pace they want since they can’t spend endless amounts of money on marketing. With that being said, marketing is a broad field of work and Sean Ellis found a new niche for marketers to grow thanks to data-driven strategies.

Example on how to use a growth hacking strategy

A common strategy for growth hacking is relying on the AAARRR funnel. This funnel helps you with which marketing efforts you should or shouldn’t go for.

A: Awareness

A: Acquisition

A: Activation

R: Retention

R: Referral

R: Revenue

First up is brand awareness, how do you get people to notice you? Use tools and analyze the data to see how many visitors you have on a daily basis. Analyze where they are on your website, digital channels and identify when you’re getting new users and find out where they came from. Always experiment how to get more visitors.

Next up is acquisition, how do you make them stick? Analyze which marketing efforts get interactions and track all numbers to see what gets the most. Scrap all efforts that give bad numbers, continue with what you now know people interact with (therefore likes).

Activation, now we’re getting somewhere. At this stage visitors have interacted in some way with you and are interested in what you do or what you offer. Make sure to give these visitors super easy ways to convert. Have a user-friendly, easy navigated website, pop-ups etc.

Moving onto the first R that stands for Retention. This is important! Through great content and following the previous steps, there’s no problem getting new customers, but none of that matters if you can’t keep them.

Referral, make your customers or users talk about you, also known as “Brand ambassadors”. LeadPilot for example made customer testimonials, a great way to spread a successful customer story. You could also do collaborations together with happy users or customers and give each other a discount or a free trial to give away to the other customers/users or family/friends.

Last one to complete the funnel is Revenue that shows the actual growth.

Growth hacking is not personal

A growth hacking strategy should never be telling a content creator their content is bad, growth hacking is solely cross information i.e. what marketing efforts that work and what doesn’t. It’s never supposed to be based on their own opinion, just data. Versus in other marketing strategies that kind of feedback or information is based on someone's opinion.

There’s no need to hire a growth hacker and a content creator (Of course it’s better to have two different people educated in these areas of expertise), but you will succeed with both if you have the right mindset. The key is to separate them: a growth hacking mindset sees failing (lots of it) as an opportunity to grow. Their work flow is based on taking risks and experimenting.

Conclusion

Your business will grow if you collect data, analyze and follow it.