Growth hacking is the intersection between marketing and technology. What can you do and track as it relates to your web page design, email templates, purchase process, social sharing links, website analytics, content creation, search engine optimization, advertising creatives/landing pages, etc. that you can iterate with A/B testing, to continually improve until you find that “Aha Moment” that will lead to rapid, viral and affordable customer growth (as opposed to expensive traditional media buys which most startups can’t afford).
It is more than just the tactics, it is knowing how to apply and track them within the customer lifecycle:
(i) acquisition
(ii) engagement
(iii) purchase
(iv) retention
(v) referral
At each step within this process, you have to figure out the key datapoints to be managing and optimizing. As examples, maybe it is click-through rate from Google campaigns for acquisition, and contacts/unique visitors ratio for engagement, and transactions/contacts for purchase, and percentage of repeat clients for retention, and number of times a social sharing button is pressed for referral. Figure out what the key drivers are for each, and religiously A/B test and improve along the way. Growth hacking is a never ending process, that continues to iterate in a virtuous cycle over time.
Growth Hacking Framework
The top three companies that have built very large businesses via growth hacking tactics:
(i) Paypal offering a $10 bounty for all customer referrals sourced by their users
(ii) Hotmail including a “Get Your Free Email Account on Hotmail” link within all users’ email messages
(iii) AirBNB reverse engineering an automated integration with CraigsList for their rentals to be easily promoted to all of those users.
At the end of the day, growth hacking is all about driving as much growth as you can, with spending as little money as possible. And, good growth hackers are driven by the challenge and the “game” of it. So, make sure you find a proven growth hacker with the right DNA to help you here, that doesn’t need a lot of budget to do their job.
Read More:
1. Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics
2. The Top 10 Consumer Internet Growth Hacks? (that have been A/B tested)- Quora.com
Ref: forbes.com
Book for Growth Hacking Marketing
More on Wikipedia
