Growth hacking is the act of implementing techniques to increase the number of users, customers or sales of a company. These strategies are based on experimentation; data collection and analysis; and understanding human behavior.
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, keep reading! In this article, we explain everything you need to know about growth hacking.
The origin of growth hacking
Before we get into a more precise concept of what growth hacking is , we're going to tell you a little about its origin. This term was first used in 2010 by entrepreneur and investor Sean Ellis, and popularized by Andrew Chen in his essay “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” who participated in the design of Uber's growth techniques.
The implementation of accelerated growth techniques had a great impact on the launch of Silicon Valley startups or emerging companies dedicated to the technology sector, especially with exponential business models.
With limited marketing budgets, business managers had to come up with innovative new ways to grow their businesses quickly and at minimal cost.
Exponential organizations, such as Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, are those that have a purpose for massive transformation and a scalable business model: they are not limited to a specific market, but their products or services can impact on a global scale; they are easy to use and their growth is determined by their number of users, advertisers or subscribers.
Due to the characteristics of their business models, they are considered companies that grow faster than their competitors and do so by investing less money.
For example, Dropbox provides a cloud storage service, which means selling disk space on servers that can be accessed over the Internet. As a business, you can buy or rent more servers to provide more space to new users, who can be anywhere in the world.
In this context, growth hacking techniques begin to have an important mission: helping Dropox to quickly increase the number of people who pay for its cloud service, at a relatively low cost compared to other businesses.
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is a set of actions implemented to quickly and significantly increase the volume of users, revenue and impact of a company, or a particular brand, with a minimum marketing budget.
Their techniques are based on data collection and the implem taiwan contact number entation of smart marketing techniques on digital platforms. Some specialists consider growth hacking as a way of acting, seeing and thinking about the strategies that a company needs to grow in a scalable way .
Holiday Ryan defines growth hacking as a set of marketing techniques developed by startups that use creativity, analytical thinking, web metrics and social media to sell their products and gain positioning in his blog post: “Everything marketing: How growth hackers redefine game” .
In the article, Ryan points out that a growth hacker is a mix between a marketer and a programmer, and that growth hacking is a discipline that navigates between marketing and product development. In this regard, growth hacking involves the vision of a creative marketer, a computer engineer, and a data analyst.
But this vision is given by a person who, in common jargon, is known as a “growth hacker.” Sean Ellis points out that a growth hacker is an external consultant and analyst whose only goal is growth.
This person must possess the creativity to imagine new ways to increase a company's positioning and must be disciplined to follow a process of prioritizing ideas, testing them, analyzing them and measuring them.
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Elements of the growth hacking methodology
The methodology for implementing growth hacking is based on continuous testing and optimization. The goal is to document all the learnings that have been collected during this process to apply them to future projects, and thus avoid making the same mistakes.
Due to the fast-paced and competitive dynamics of startups, they often have to use analytical, economic, creative and innovative methods to exponentially grow the number of leads, customers, visits or users of a mobile application or social network, for example.
To increase this type of metrics, the following elements are taken into consideration:
Data collection, analysis and testing: Forms, pop-ups and cookies are implemented to capture data, as well as Big Data and machine learning tools to process it.
Creative marketing: Impactful and innovative marketing strategies are used to promote a product or brand.
Conversion rate optimization: Strategies are designed to get users or customers to perform a desired action, thereby increasing conversion rates.
Learning marketing: Tests are planned to find out which type of action or content has the best results. This is known as A/B testing, which consists of comparing the receptivity of two texts, call-to-action buttons, images, ads, among others, to find out which is the best.
Marketing techniques: Marketing techniques are essentially digital, ranging from website search engine optimization (SEO) to high-impact advertising and commercial campaigns on social networks.
Behavioral psychology: for the growth hacker it is important to know and predict attitudes and actions of the target audience in order to design appropriate strategies according to their interests, tastes and purchasing process.
Improved user experiences: Technology products offered in an exponential business model must be easy to use and visually pleasing for users. Data collected in research is analyzed to find out how to improve user experience.
Programming and automation: Automated marketing is implemented to carry out some marketing strategies on a massive scale and with little effort, as well as Big Data and artificial intelligence programs to process, classify and distribute data for analysis.
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