Growth Hacking: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Growth hacking promises momentum while also operating on the premise of being scrappy. It’s most often associated with unconventional and modern techniques to expand a customer base, support customer engagement, and bring in more sales. Below, we present the concept of growth hacking, outline its defining traits, and discuss how it can be a departure from traditional marketing.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking brings together domains like marketing, technology, and some elements of circumstance. Business leaders rely on elements like experimentation, iteration, and continuous learning to make decisions about growth strategies. Growth hacking first entered the vernacular about 15 years ago when it became popular in the Silicon Valley startup scene. However, it’s relevant to organizations outside that niche. In fact, a business of any size or stature can adopt a growth hacking mindset.

Growth Hacking vs Traditional Marketing

For some time, marketing has been rooted in advancing brand awareness and generating leads via strategies like advertising and public relations. In contrast, growth hacking doesn’t follow convention per se. Growth hacking is still a relatively new concept, though it has gained ground in the last decade or so. Entrepreneurs and startup leaders who align with this strategy tend to invest their time and energy into the following areas:

Low-Cost Tactics

Growth hacking is associated with relying on resources that have a low barrier to entry to scale. You might be familiar with areas like content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. These help growth hackers achieve results without much financial investment upfront.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Growth hackers are all about tracking metrics to see how their efforts are shaping up. These findings can help them refine their strategies.

Innovative Techniques To Drive Growth

People who subscribe to growth hacking are open to out-of-the-box approaches. Think viral marketing, referral programs, and other ways to accelerate progress.

Customer Focus

No business can sustain itself without customers. Smart growth hackers know they need to keep customers’ needs and preferences front and center to develop products and push out marketing campaigns that hit the mark. They also aren’t afraid to ask for feedback. They know that even criticism can help them come out stronger on the other side. After all, you can’t fix a problem you didn’t know existed in the first place. Try your best to approach complaints with grace and consider them teachable moments.

Also, don’t lose sight of the fact that the best products solve a real need in the marketplace. To be effective in the long run, a product needs to have a clearly defined market. Company leaders need to be intimately familiar with the target audience and how their offering makes their lives better or easier. For instance, the technology solution Airbnb helped connect people looking for short-term renters with a pool of property owners and built a community of loyal followers along the way.

However, your customer base likely isn’t a monolith. Every company would benefit from customer segmentation, which is a key principle of growth hacking. You can classify your customers by demographic and psychographic traits, hobbies, buying behavior, needs, business value, or geography. Many brands find it helpful to create buying personas or customer avatars to further drill down and create messaging that speaks to their situations.

This work should inform your larger marketing strategy and next steps to court prospects. For example, you could create niche email lists so that you only push out updates that apply to where customers are in their buying journey.

Creativity

Growth hacking, in contrast to conventional approaches, empowers business leaders to think outside the mainstream and dream up big ideas that can help their cause.

Growth hacking is one way entrepreneurs and business builders can hit milestones at faster rates. The combination of ingenuity, data-driven insights, and experimentation can help them bring in new customers and boost sales.

7 Growth Hacking Strategies

Growth hacking appeals to business builders and marketers because it can promise serious results with little investment. By relying on proven techniques and analytical data, business owners can go further faster. These popular growth hacking strategies can move the needle:

Brainstorming

The most effective growth hackers aren’t afraid to imagine what could be possible. They consider their goals and then come up with ways to get there. Whether it’s on the back of a napkin or in a Google Doc, what matters is that you entertain the possibilities and don’t get too fixated on the downsides. Growth hackers are open to imagination, which can be an untapped resource in a world so focused on numbers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is predicated on the premise of creating highly shareable content that spreads like wildfire across the internet. Business builders can aspire to create viral marketing campaigns by focusing on engaging content, understanding target audiences, and tapping social media influencers to help the content spread faster.

Content Marketing

The purpose of content marketing is to create value that prompts your target audience to want to engage further. Content marketing includes assets like blog posts, long-form articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts. A consistent content schedule can put your brand on track to stand out as a thought leader. It’s also a smart way to bring organic traffic to your startup’s website.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms invite customers into the conversation. Business builders can use these forums to reach a target audience and protect and promote their brand. These places are also great sources of customer sentiment, so be sure you’re tuning in. In the process, you might uncover some truths about your brand that could help you improve and win more customers. Feedback is data, and data is king. Use this information to help you take your growth hacking efforts to the next level.

Email Marketing

Email marketing offers a cost-effective way to reach and engage customers at scale. A quality email list and targeted campaigns are great ways for brands to nurture leads, increase conversions, and sustain customer loyalty.

Email addresses can be a gold mine because electronic communication is an easy way to reach people. You can push out updates and relevant insights that keep your brand top of mind. Email marketing is a technique your startup can take advantage of even if you haven’t launched a product yet. There’s something to be said for building excitement and anticipation. Then, when it’s time to share your product with the world, you already have a cohort of loyal followers. That’s a milestone that every brand builder and marketer wishes they could achieve.

Paid Promotions

Though they do require a marketing budget, growth hackers can look to channels like paid ads, promotions, and giveaways to increase awareness and engagement. You don’t have to dedicate the entirety of your budget to these avenues. They can supplement these efforts with other affordable strategies and growth hacking tactics and still get results.

SEO and SEM

Business owners can find great value in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). Both can help in the way of increasing online visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Putting forth the time and effort to improve your website’s content and structure is an investment that can pay dividends. The same goes for running targeted ads. Both can bring you more traffic and potential sales.

5 Digital Growth Hacking Techniques

You can use other digital growth hacking techniques to your advantage and grow faster. Consider these options:

A/B Testing

Experiment with different images and copy on your website, landing pages, or social media to see which ones have the most potential. You might learn a thing or two about your target audience from this exercise.

Automation

Use automation solutions to handle repetitive tasks and save time. You’ll have more time and energy to focus on problem-solving tasks that require human intellect.

Data Analysis

Run reports on your website, social media, and other channels to see how your growth hacking efforts are contributing to your goals.

User Experience Optimization (UXO)

Confirm that your website and landing pages are easy to navigate and the experience is intuitive.

Referral Programs

Encourage happy customers to refer people in their network to your business through referral marketing programs.

These strategies and techniques can shape your growth hacking trajectory. Over time, you might find that you experience rapid market dominance, increase your number of followers, and exceed sales goals.

4 Growth Hacking Tools

Growth hacking happens when business builders embrace creativity, lean on data-driven decision-making, and have the right resources at their disposal. With that in mind, these tools can help you implement effective growth hacking strategies:

Google Analytics

You stand to gain a lot by using this free tool. It can present helpful insights into your website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. Metrics like pageviews, bounce rate, and time on site can help you see how your growth hacking efforts are stacking up. A sticky website can bring in more sales, while one that’s lacking in this area will come up short in terms of conversion. Ecommerce giants like Airbnb have mastered the art and science of optimization. Small business owners can adopt the same principles to see results.

Hotjar

You can use Hotjar to get a clear picture of how visitors engage with your web presence. If you’re in the habit of capturing interactions and customer feedback, you can use this information to enhance the user experience and close more deals.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a solution that tracks user behavior and helps you understand how they interact with your offerings. In turn, you can use this information to your advantage to better understand follower journeys, call out areas for improvement, and modify your product accordingly.

Buffer

Buffer can schedule and publish content on a host of channels. Buffer’s analytics tools can also help you fine-tune your social media strategy to hit the mark.

Invest in Podium for Growth Hacking

Growth is more about the journey than the destination. It should be an ongoing process that’s rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and data-driven decision-making. Next-level growth happens by design, not chance.

However, you don’t have to go it on your own and hope for the best. A tool like Podium can make a meaningful difference in growing your business. The intuitive messaging platform allows you to build relationships with customers, dial in your referral marketing efforts, and collect feedback along the way that can help you improve. By taking advantage of all the features, you can win more customers and help your bottom line grow faster than it would organically. Watch a demo and explore Podium’s possibilities. You owe it to yourself and your company to invest in your growth hacking journey.