Last updated on February 13, 2022, 4:21 PM
Through my years in the Growth Hacking environment, I was able to observe how the first agencies emerged and tried to bring the methods and mindset into the companies. Most of the time it didn’t go quite so well and in my agency work as a growth hacking consultant it became clear to me where the biggest stumbling blocks lay. Here are my ideas and thoughts on how to properly bring growth hacking into a company and establish it sustainably.
Growth Hacking / Growth Marketing needs to be explained first
Of course, it is often the case that the term first has to be explained at length and in broad terms. Depending on the “level of further training” in digital marketing of the marketing bosses/directors/CMOs etc., there is a wide range of dangerous half-knowledge.
In most cases, however, it is anchored in people’s minds that the growth hacker will immediately have the super duper growth hack ready in a few hours / days, which will immediately boost the company by 500 - 10,000% :)
And of course that is not the case, or is only possible very, very rarely. For me it was almost always the case that there was no real, seamless analytics setup in the company. And how are you supposed to analyze properly as a data-driven growth marketer if nothing is/has been measured?
This was where the big surprise usually came when people explained that you first had to set up an analysis setup for a few weeks and then you could collect data and then you could start experimenting.
Some agencies skip the whole topic and simply suggest wild experiments because you have to be able to sell something and show it off. Building and implementing an analytics setup over a few weeks isn’t particularly sexy. And due to these somewhat wilder approaches from agencies, such as building a landing page for something and then selling it as a growth hack, the entire industry or the buzzword quickly falls into disrepute (or of course it has long since happened over the years).
Back to the topic: -> I think it should always be clearly explained what growth hacking is -> in my opinion: data-driven experimentation and quick, agile testing of creative digital marketing approaches. The thinking and system from software product development is practically adopted into digital marketing. However, this fact must also be clearly communicated (as an agency) to the customer. It must be stated clearly and clearly what prerequisites are needed so that these processes can be established = for example a usable analytics system.
The analytics system must be set up correctly
As mentioned above, a correct analytics system must be in place because growth hacking is a data-based approach. Without data and measuring KPIs, you can’t do much analysis. Companies often only measure what is absolutely necessary, and the knowledge of how to actually measure channels, analyze them across channels and even use conversion tracking correctly is often somewhat poor.
This means that a lot has to be explained here and the general level of knowledge in the company needs to be raised. Employees in (digital) marketing should receive ongoing training on analytics systems and dashboard systems. And a basic knowledge of conversion tracking would of course also be quite good.
This is the only way to (somewhat) understand what the wild digital marketing professionals can measure and, above all, why it takes so long for them to set up their measurement system correctly.
Once everything is in place, real growth marketing and a nice experimental setup can be set up.
Not an agency for growth hacking implementation but training and development of internal growth marketers
In my opinion there is no way around it. It makes almost zero sense to have an external agency do growth hacks / growth marketing for a company.
If you observe the scene, you can clearly see that, first internationally and now also in the DACH region, everyone has been switching to training instead of agency implementation for a long time.
And the big reason for this is that it is incredibly complex to set up a correct growth hacking setup in a company as an external agency where there may not even be a halfway usable measurement system in place.
Therefore, it quickly became clear to the (good) agencies that there wasn’t much to be gained here, because the customer would then be left dissatisfied with isolated solutions that were usually only successful as a coincidence.
I don’t know whether Sean Ellis had a brief implementation agency after his time at Dropbox (with the famous “Get free cloud storage when you invite a new user” hack) or whether he went straight into the training business with Growthhackers.com :). But in any case, at Hendrick Lennarz in Germany you could quickly see how the agency implementation business was quickly switched to training as a business model for Thea Growth Hacking :)
So that’s entirely my opinion, because it has always been confirmed in my growth hacking consultant assignments. It takes a while to build a good setup and that’s why I always tried to train as many people in the company as possible and get them on board as a consultant/implementer. The training approach and building up knowledge within the company on the topic is much better and makes more sense for companies in the long term. Either you bring a growth hacker into the company as a full-time position or send your employees to good training courses (such as: to Growth Tribe) to build up internal stakeholders on the topic.
The mindset must be established - growth cycle and agile working
The last piece of the puzzle, after explaining the terms and making it clear what is possible, and building up knowledge and analytics setup, is also about consolidating the mindset and establishing a fixed process.
Once the setup is in place, a growth cycle must also be established. This is easiest if agile working with sprints of a certain length has already been established. In many start-ups, this has long been the case in the marketing departments. Not so in older and larger companies. Since growth hacking generally “comes from” agile software product development, the establishment of this system is essential.
However, it is important to anchor this mindset. Growth hacking thrives on experiments (tests) that have a fixed process. This means you think about x experiments that you want to run in the period of, for example, the next 2 weeks. And this process is repeated again and again. A system needs to be established where:
- Experiments are planned and the KPIs to be measured are determined
- The experiments may also be evaluated in the team and priorities set
- the experiments are set up and then run for a set period of time (ideally the length of the sprint such as 2 weeks)
- and then at the end the KPIs are looked at, whether the experiment (the growth hack) brought an improvement (e.g.: conversion rate could be increased) or whether there was no improvement.
and after this “cycle” has been completed, you simply start over again with a new cycle after discussing the results.
And here too it is clear that it is a bit difficult with an external agency that is supposed to carry out these experiments :)
Summary:
In short: A lot of work is necessary to establish growth hacking / growth marketing in the company in a future-proof manner. In my opinion, the important building blocks are:
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Explain the term correctly and in detail (with all the advantages and disadvantages and budget you need for it)
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Establish a complete, seamless measurement system (and of course also think about the right KPIs that should be measured)
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Don’t let an external agency implement it, but rather train in-house and build up the know-how
- Establish the mindset and growth cycle
That’s the only way it can work :)
