Welcome to the first lesson of our Academy, on the subject of growth hacking.
What is growth hacking? We’re sure you’ve wondered, because you’ll have heard a great deal about it lately.
In Italy there are few growth hacking gurus, because it’s a relatively new discipline here and genuinely expert practitioners aren’t numerous.
Bear in mind that growth hacking is about growing a business — growing it efficiently, without pouring budget into things that don’t work.
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Let’s explain properly. Here we go!
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What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking can be defined as an evolution of traditional marketing.
Growth hacking is nothing other than experimenting with multiple techniques and strategies to find the most efficient and effective way of growing a business. It’s really just a new approach to marketing.
That approach relies on constant tests, fast experiments and the use of monitoring and analytics tools, meeting creative ideas, collaboration and the integration of several tools.
So it’s neither a set of tools nor a low-cost marketing technique.
Plenty of people think growth hacking means marketing on the cheap… WRONG. Like other ways of doing and understanding marketing, it takes a budget. The difference is that the budget is used as well as possible, with an eye fixed on ROI. Growth hacking isn’t built on ideas such as brand awareness; it’s built on reaching measurable goals.
What’s the difference between traditional marketing and growth hacking?
We’d all agree this is still marketing, but growth hacking is said to be the future of marketing. And we think so too.
One of the biggest influencers in marketing, Michael Brenner, believes exactly that: “Growth hacking is marketing. It’s the future of marketing, and it’s what marketing should have been from the start.”
What are the differences between the two approaches?
To the point: growth hacking is a complete process. Where marketing aims more at brand recognition and customer acquisition, this approach carries on through further stages — activation, retention, revenue and referral.
Meaning what?
That this approach is built on optimizing performance right down to the deepest stage of the funnel, through rapid cycles of innovation.
The characteristics of growth hacking
The approach certainly has specific characteristics, which we can sum up like this:
- CREATIVE: you need a creative mind, able to find solutions even where there apparently aren’t any. Thinking outside the box, with an almost visionary streak.
- ADAPTABLE: you have to be ready to adapt to any change in the landscape. Bear in mind that the solution you find won’t last forever, and probably won’t work more than once. You’ll get good results for a limited time, then you have to be ready to change course.
- FAST: you have to find the quickest route to the goal. Running plenty of tests over a few weeks is what tells you which combination works best.
- SCALABLE: the method has to scale. Companies need that. Would your method work for one person, ten, a hundred, a thousand? Ask yourself — it matters.
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What are the steps of growth hacking?
You may still have a rather abstract idea of what growth hacking is in practice.
You should know that this approach uses web marketing tools: SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, email marketing, performance marketing.
What differs is the approach, the mindset and the lean techniques used to reach the goal faster — that goal being to grow a business.
So here are the steps:
- Set precise, achievable goals: without clearly bounded goals it’s hard to measure results.
- Make sure your analytics are solid: you can’t afford inaccurate measurement.
- Identify strengths and room for growth: how can we grow? What can we use to grow? Those are some of the questions to ask.
- Hypotheses and experiments: it’s fundamental to experiment and learn what results one marketing action brings versus another, according to your hypotheses.
- Refine the experiments: run A/B tests to see what performs better, and vary your target audiences.
- Repeat what worked: run the process again with a new experiment, or refine the one already tested and found effective.
Is growth hacking cheap?
The question of budget in growth hacking is muddled, and plenty of sources pass on wrong information.
How could any activity produce good results without spending money on the tests and the actions involved? It’s impossible. Budget is very much needed — it’s simply allocated differently.
Meaning what?
When you run a marketing campaign, you decide to allocate a budget to that campaign, which has a set duration and its own results. In growth hacking the budget is broken up into several parts — small mini-budgets used to run the tests and the experiments.
When the experiment producing the best results is found, the budget goes into carrying that working strategy forward — with the option of raising the budget further, because if the experiment works it’s because ROI is positive, so the more you invest the more you earn.
Having the right mindset matters
What do we mean by that?
To do growth hacking you need the right mind: prepared, always ready to keep learning, and therefore flexible. To reach your goals you have to be proactive.
You’ll need to combine study with practice, because sadly you can’t stay current without studying how things evolve, and you can’t start practising without the key ideas of growth hacking.
So keep theory and practice living side by side rather than treating them as separate things — in a landscape like this you always have to be ready for innovation and change.
Conclusion
By now you’ll have a clearer idea of what growth hacking is. Plenty of people talk about it, but few genuinely know what it is or how it works.
This lesson has given you a grounding in growth hacking and its various forms.
Stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy. In the lessons ahead we’ll go deeper and deeper into what growth hacking is and the techniques it uses.
Want advice on growing your business? Get in touch! With growth hacking we’ll work out and implement the best strategy for reaching your goal.
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Want to ask us something or just talk to us? Get in touch! That’s what we’re here for.