Growth Hacking – Growth Marketing

What is Growth Hacking & Growth Marketing?

Some people are still asking themselves this question. Quickly explained I would say: Growth Hacking is about growth. Efficient start up methods that are used to enable rapid growth. Efficient here means by far cheaper than normal off or online marketing methods of big companies like billboard, radio or TV advertising or massive display, AdWords (SEA/SEM), or Facebook Ads campaigns. Here also my blogpost about Growth Hacking DIY.

Growth hacking marketing freshestweb

The slightly longer explanation of the term growth hacking

The slightly longer explanation of the term Growth HackingaGrowth Hacking comes out of the online marketing of start ups. Analyses are carried out quickly, marketing methods & experiments & A/B tests are quickly considered, decided, executed and with the results a new cycle is started. This means building an analysis system that is as seamless as possible, collecting data with it and evaluating it continuously to increase conversions and conversion rates. The ideal profile of a Growth Hacker is often described as T-shaped. This means in short: a broad basic knowledge of marketing + some statistics and programming skills plus specialization in various online marketing and digital marketing methodologies.

With these results you have the first tool to think of methods (growth hacks) to get new users / customers quickly. Then it’s time to brainstorm which things you could try out. These are then planned as quasi experiments and carried out. The results are discussed and learnings are analyzed and then it’s back to square one. The methodology is also strongly based on agile project management (e.g. Scrum) and Scrum is often used in growth hacking teams and departments. The goal of the whole exercise is to identify the projects or channels that also bring the greatest return on investment (ROI).

The tools that are often used in the first step are: SEO (search engine optimization) and search engine advertising, social media advertising, accurate website analytics and content marketing. Mostly the digital strategy has to be adapted as well. That was a bit much theory, so let’s put it into practice.

growth hacking - growth marketing - freshestweb - google analytics

An example of growth hacking:

The most famous growth hacks are the use of the “follow these 5 users on Twitter first” function in the Twitter sign-up / onboarding process. Or also the Dropbox hack, quasi “friends recruit friends” or “customers recruit customers” instead of expensive marketing measures. The carrot in front of the nose would be at Dropbox quasi the 200mb cloud space for free for each new user that already existing customers can invite and acquire in the end effect. Very efficient can be however also still very discreet things, like for example the addition in each Hotmail email at the beginning of the rise of Hotmail “this email was sent via Hotmail”.

So it is often small things that bring big improvements. As a growth hacker, you also have the task of finding and exploiting these.

Here is another small example:

Customer xy has an app in the App Store. In order to reach even more customers, the data collected is constantly monitored via inApp Analytics or Google Analytics on the website. The app installations are going well, but not exponentially. The customer’s goal in the first phase is to reach as many app installs as possible.

A growth hack in this case is an idea that has the potential to achieve more app installs with as little money / resources as possible. One idea would be to program a Facebook Chat Bot, because we have programmers in house who would like to try it out. The idea is discussed, implemented and the result of the traffic that the chat bot achieves and thus brings more app installs is evaluated. If this one “hack” is successful, you will have achieved something more with as few resources as possible in the direction of the big goal – more app installs.

What do I offer now to do growth hacking & growth marketing:

Through my years of experience in the online marketing industry and the interest in analysis methods I came across Growth Hacking a few years ago. It became clear to me that this is exactly the “recipe” I have always followed in my projects in the agencies and companies I have worked for.

Together we develop the strategy based on the company’s goals. I build a seamless analysis system. Find the right KPIs. Figure out the exact methods how we can best measure and present these Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. And then we start experimenting with growth marketing.

What other creative marketing avenues could we explore? Which marketing tricks have not been used yet? Which channels are already being used and which are not? Is there still hidden potential in other channels? What do users actually want at the moment? Why don’t users actually use the offer / the app / the product anymore? How can we get the users back? We ask ourselves these and many more questions together and find ways to set up growth hacking experiments to find answers and the optimal solution to achieve the defined goal.

What is the goal of growth hacking now actually:

  • Maximum effect with minimum use of resources (get the low hanging fruit first)
  • Win new users and customers (faster)
  • keep and inspire these users and customers (longer)
  • constantly improve the product (for the user)
  • increase sales and of course ideally find the hack to grow exponentially