What Is Growth Hacking and How to Start It in Your Company
Growth Hacking is a data and product oriented marketing. It is quite different from traditional marketing in a couple of ways and makes use of a different set of tools and skills to help a company grow. Growth marketeers are responsible for tracking the whole customer journey, from the very first point of contact up until the conversion. As well as finding and creating ways to deliver a meaningful positive customer experience.
The term was invented by Sean Ellis in 2010 and has since been widely used and helping companies - especially startups - to reach their goals with a more direct and focused approach. But what exactly is Growth Marketing and why should you want to start it on your own company? Read on as we go through its definition and what it takes to implement it.
Definition of Growth Hacking
As Wikipedia easily describes it: Growth Hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing funnel, product development, sales segments, and other areas of the business to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business. That is pretty much what Growth Hacking is all about, quickly going through different methods and trying different things that could potentially boost your business by using relevant and critical data.
Growth Hacking can be done by any person, as long as the focus is correctly set and it is important to mention that it doesn’t replace marketers, it enhances it. As put by Sean Ellis himself: A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Which means that every single strategy employed by growth marketers will carry the ultimate goal of improving a company at its core.
According to Neil Patel and Bronson Taylor’s Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking, it is about defining actionable goals, leveraging your existing strengths, implementing analytics to track your goals and finally executing the experiment. And of course, if your experiment fails, optimize it and repeat the process.
Why is it important?
If traditional marketing can help your company grow and bring positive results, why is growth hacking needed at all? Mainly because it makes use of different tools to achieve what traditional marketing can’t envision or execute. Growth hackers put technology in their favor in a complex way, literally coding and creating pieces of software that are able to enhance a customer’s experience. That is basically where the hacker part comes from Growth Hacking, it’s the ability to generate results from engineering.
The importance of Growth Hacking comes from the fact that your company will be using data collected from analytical sources. By making use of metrics and real numbers growth hackers can pinpoint what can or needs to be done to improve a company’s listing. Whether it’s a simple upgrade on the whole purchase process a visitor has to go through or creating software solutions from scratch to meet clients demands, growth hackers are on the lookout for ways to deliver better solutions.
The staff needed to execute Growth Hacking
According to Entrepreneur, there are 8 roles that need to be filled to grow your company with traditional methods:
- Project Manager
- Campaign Strategist
- Marketing Representative
- Social Media Manager
- Content Strategist
- Analyst
- Web Designer
- Copywriter
All of these are indispensable to reach the desired level of brand awareness, online impact, and success. Now, a Growth hacker can be any of these or someone that is able to gather the strengths of every department to create solutions and improve the customer experience. Basically, growth hackers are a combination of Marketing and Engineering, people able to visualize what are the best ways to reach potential customers and push conversions and execute the plans even if it takes technical skills such as coding.
Growth hackers base their decisions on data and work together with both the marketing team to acquire more customers as well as the development team to produce tools and employ better solutions for its target audience.
How to do it?
These are the three levels of the growth hacker funnel as defined by Neil Patel and Bronson Taylor
Getting Visitors is the very first step, which means growth hackers and marketers need to have people coming to their website or visiting their app for the very first time. But of course, that doesn’t mean a visitor will become a customer. Which leads us to the next step that is Activate Members. And last but not least, Retaining Users is where your company has and continues to deliver such a great experience that your customers will return or keep buying from you, hence why "users" is the term being employed.
There are hundreds of different ways to increase the flow of visitors on your website, such as paid Ads, SEO, content marketing (blog posts, guides, discussions), creating multimedia advertisements or leveraging social media. It is not as difficult to execute the first step in the funnel as it is for the others, as you go down, less and less people remain. Turning your visitors into customers, for example, takes more than just marketing, your offerings need to be good, that includes not only the products and services your company works with but also its platforms, such as the website or application. A great example of a solution that can be employed to activate members is an online chat on your website, allowing you to proactively reach your visitors and generate engagement.
Tools for Growth Hacking
There are a number of different tools that can be used to employ Growth Hacking on your company. We have selected 5 of the best to help you start right away, check the list below.
1. Qualaroo
Qualaroo was created by Sean Ellis, the very person who invented the term and started what growth hacking has come to be today. The tool aids your company in getting relevant information about its target audience, easily helping to identify their needs and deliver greater engagement to your visitors.
2. Colibri.io
Colibri.io enhances your SEO solutions by providing critical information on your targets searches. Also, it is able to show which relevant discussions are being held in your industry so that you main join in and participate.
3. Outbrain
Outbrain is a platform that helps people get trustworthy, relevant and interesting recommendations on their desired topics. According to their website every month over 275 billion Outbrain recommendations are published by organizations such as CNN, Ha’aretz and Le Parisien.
4. Infusion Soft
Infusion Soft is a company that delivers a solution for businesses to automate marketing. Providing tools such as email marketing and social media platforms. Also, you’ll be able to analyze its data through a comprehensive dashboard to improve your growth hacking efforts.
5. Marketo
Marketo is another marketing automation platform that can help you enhance your customer engagement efforts. They provide a wide variety of tools such as email marketing platforms, digital ads, mobile solutions and more.
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