If
there’s one thing the world of technology, business and marketing love
it’s a buzzword and this year’s so far it appears to be the term growth
hacking, So what is a growth hacker, what does it mean and why could
hiring (or being) one make all the difference to your business?
Let’s find out.
The Struggle of the Start-up Phase
A growth hacker is someone whose skills lie in growing a business. According to Sean Ellis,
many companies in the start-up phase have a tendency to take on people
that have skills that are irrelevant to the business at that particular
point in time. By taking on a growth hacker, a business has someone with
the skills to ensure that they can drive sustainable growth, rather
than short-term.
A growth hacker can:
- Be responsible for early growth
- Tweak products and services to ensure the best value to the client
- Find sustainable business/clients
- Use automation/intelligence tools to enable a scalable business
- Prioritise
- Use creativity and analytical thinking
Isn’t a Growth Hacker just the Same as a Marketer?
Not exactly, no. Whilst most will have marketing knowledge
and it will be a part of their skillset, growth hackers are better
suited to the start-up environment than the corporate one. This is
because start-ups look for a higher level of growth than your average,
established, corporate organisation would.
“Start-ups (sic) intend to grow at 20 percent month over
month (or more), while corporations are satisfied with 5 percent year
over year,” says Gagan Biyani
in a Next Web article. He goes on to point out that most start-ups
don’t have the means or budget to facilitate growth, so need talent that
can really strategize it.
In fact, many would say that growth hackers should really
concentrate on product development itself, rather than marketing, but it
does seem to require a combination of skills and the best growth
hackers are rarely skilled in just one discipline. They will know about
business, as well as marketing and it’s this, coupled with creative
thinking and the ability to disseminate information that sets them apart
from ‘ordinary’ marketers.
Sean Ellis, the man who coined the term growth hacking explains why you need to know what it is in the video below. (50:31)
Avoiding the Trough of Sorrow
Looking at the figure below, what it’s necessary to avoid is the “trough of sorrow”,
which was a concept thought up by Paul Graham some years ago. Taking a
look at the diagram, the idea can be applied to most business, starting
from the outset when excitement is the main driver, to the novelty
wearing off and then a sense of disappointment setting in. How a growth
hacker or entrepreneur can overcome this is to first understand that
it’s natural for a new business to go through this process and separate
emotions from business.
(Image: Jon Yongfook)
This is how you really want your growth curve to appear, in stages and facilitated by strategy, not emotion.
How Can All This Help Drive Traffic?
When it comes to online marketing, Google Analytics and the
effective use of it can be described as a part of growth hacking. Used
alongside paid search and social media activity, analytics can be used
to see which part of a business is doing well and what needs improving. Remarketing
can be carried out to entice previous site visitors back to an improved
product (or site, come to that) and good SEO and content marketing
should also be a part of the mix.
According to Techcrunch,
a growth hacker can be defined as someone that “ha[s] a common
attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among
technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and
curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feat (sic) of growing
a user base into the millions.”
A Growth Hacker Gets in Before the Competition
A growth hacker then is someone that has a certain amount
of technical skill when it comes to marketing, business and analytics
and understands how to use this to facilitate growth. In order to do
this, it’s necessary to understand the sales funnel and how the site
visitor/buyer/user goes through certain stages.
These are:
- Acquisition – gaining customer attention
- Activation – getting them to take action
- Retention – keeping them coming back for more
- Revenue – retaining a constant source of revenue through subscriptions and similar
Additionally, there should be a certain amount of referral,
so that new business is being acquired through existing customers.
Social media is, of course, one of the best referral tools out there for
WOM (word of mouth) marketing.
Acquisition
These days, you have to make a splash if you want to
succeed and that means that even before launching your website, all of
your marketing efforts should be already well under way. Not only this,
but they should be tested to see which landing pages/social campaigns
etc. are the most effective. This can be done using A/B testing,
which uses different sets of people to test different marketing
techniques such as CTAs. For example, if you have a holding page before
you have launched your site, then create two using different colours,
language and layout and see which gets the best response.
Other techniques to boost interest before launch include:
- Press releases
- Asking bloggers for product reviews
- Social media competitions and incentives
- Crowdfunding
- Sign-up forms on social, via the holding page and through advertising
- Invites that only a select few will receive on launch
Activation
Now that you have everyone’s attention, it’s time to get
them to take action and this should take place around launch. You should
have generated enough interest to make potential buyers want to see
what you’ve got and the product should stand up to scrutiny.
Make a splash, launch the site in a blaze of glory and send
out an email campaign that invites potential customers to feel like
they are getting something nobody else is. Personalization
makes the customer feel special, so use marketing automation resources
to ensure that your campaign addresses people individually and if
possible, offers something that ensures they will bite and click-through
on that mail.
Announce launch through social channels and make it a big
deal, make sure that it sounds like an exciting opportunity, not to be
missed. If you sell physical products, then ensure that these are
presented in their best possible light through the use of images and
video. Make your users passionate about your site/product/service and
they will buy, tell their friends and come back for more.
Retention
This is where analytics really come in. What’s working and
if something isn’t, why not? You should already have created enough of a
buzz to have a user base, so what can you do to expand on this and keep
them coming back for more?
- Remarketing
- New product lines
- Marketing automation
The latter is important, as it frees up a lot of the growth
hacker’s time to concentrate on better things. You should also be
constantly carrying out new A/B testing to see how things can be further
improved and content marketing activities should be of an extremely
high quality and through every available channel that your customers are
likely to use.
It’s this commitment to constantly searching for new opportunity to increase sales that gives the growth hacker his edge.
Most importantly, know what your customers want even before
they do by testing and examining all avenues and this will lead to
growth.
Revenue
This is of course the idea of becoming an entrepreneur in
the first place, to make a good business that will earn revenue.
Whatever your business, this has to be maintained and ideally, it should
grow in more ways than one.
This means looking at other revenue streams as well as your
product return, such as subscriptions, selling advertising space, white
papers and so on. It may seem impossible if you sell a physical profit,
but it’s not – there’s always subscription discounts and loyalty
schemes, for example.
Nobody said it was easy getting all of this right, but this
is why it’s a good idea to hire a growth hacker if you feel that it’s
beyond your capability, or perhaps you’re simply too emotionally
involved with what’s essentially your baby.
A good online marketer is desirable, even essential, but
using growth hackers and/or growth hacking techniques will ideally send
business through the roof, and keep it there. It means keeping a clear
head, using all of the available tools for automation and analytics, a
good measure of creativity and sound business planning.
Getting it right is the key to becoming a successful
business entrepreneur and creating a resource/product that will keep
customers flocking to you for many years to come.
Source: http://positionly.com/blog/inbound-marketing/growth-hacking
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