Growth Hacking Introduction It’s no secret that every marketer is looking for the next best thing to make their campaigns successful.
But with so many new tools and new marketing concepts popping up on a daily basis, it can be hard to know which ones are worth trying.
That’s where this guide comes in! ??
In this article, you’ll find an overview of some of the most interesting and innovative marketing trends we’ve seen over the past few years – Growth Hacking .
Growth hackers
As marketers ourselves, we know how hard it can be to stand out from the crowd these days when so many companies are fighting for attention.
No matter what your marketing experience level is, there will be something here that sparks your interest and helps you take your skill-set to the next level. So let’s get started!
Table of contents: What is growth hacking? What skill-set does a Growth Hacker need to have? How does a Growth Hacker work? 5 Steps for building your own Growth Hacking Process A Growth Hackers Funnel The Pirate Metric Funnel Funnel Conversion Rate Conclusion What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking, also known as growth marketing, is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify scalable growth opportunities. It’s a relatively new term that was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, who is often credited as being the first growth hacker.
Growth hacking is about understanding how your customers think throughout their experience with your product or service. A big part is about finding creative ways to cut through the noise to reach potential customers, but also use the acquired data and customer feedback to improve the product.
In contrast, traditional marketing relies on mass advertising to push your message out there – the main focus lies here in acquiring new prospects. Traditional marketing methods are expensive and time-consuming – but the cost of acquiring new clients may be worth it for some businesses.
What’s important to remember is that no matter what you do, your marketing strategy should get people inside your doors. Traditional advertising does that well for popular brands, but will quickly get expensive if an unknown company or product wants to get its name out there.
What skill-set does a growth hacker need to have ?
Every company will have its own challenges and require a certain set of skills. Therefore, Growth hacking is not a one size fits all approach to marketing, so you need to have a unique skill-set. This skill set may vary depending on the company’s needs.
However, one of the most important skills for any growth hacker is the ability to embrace failure. Failure is a natural part of the growth process, and it’s important not to be afraid to experiment with new strategies.
As growth marketers, we often don’t know with 100% accuracy the impact certain strategies and experiments will have. Rapid strategy testing is a great way to figure this out. By experimenting with different tactics, you can slowly exclude those that didn’t work and focus on the ones that show the most promise.
Growth hacking is more a mindset rather than a set of fixed skills. It’s all about the willingness to learn new skills and experiment with different strategies.
Our T-shaped Growth Hacker Skill-set Framework will give you an overview of the types of growth hackers and the skill-set they bring to the table.
T-shaped Growth Hacker Framework 2022 | Okaygrowth How does a growth hacker work?
A growth hacker will work with all the stakeholders (product manager, sales, marketing, finance etc.) in the company to identify what is making their customers unhappy. This approach is also called Product-led growth, where growth hackers are obsessed with finding Product-Market-Fit.
They will quickly gather data related to the customer’s experience and will use this information to make changes that have an impact on the customer but also on the product.
Product-led growth is not about externally marketing your product or giving away freebies—it’s about reverting back to iterative improvements of your product in order to resonate with your customers. There are 2 types of product-led approaches:
Product-led growth focuses on how customers use your product, understanding where they struggle, and then improving customer experience through additional features or design tweaks. Product nurtured growth is focused on improving your product through research, ideation, iteration, and validation. Product nurtured growth can rely more heavily on experimentation with different features or design tweaks to understand which are most effective in resonating with customers. As more and more companies are turning to growth hacking as a way of establishing early traction, the demand for experts with these skills is going up. In this article, we’ll explore what a growth hacker is, how they work and what you need to know if you want to become one!
5 Steps for building your own Growth Hacking Process
The process of growth hacking is not straightforward, but it can be broken down into five steps:
1. Ideation – Ideation, the first step in the process, is about gathering data and doing research about what products or services your customers would like to have.
The best way to identify what kind of product your audience wants is by leveraging search listening data. Understanding the psychology of how people do their online research is gold for developing a minimum viable product.
2. Building an Audience – The second step, building an audience and developing ideal customer personas. Understanding your ideal persona doesn’t happen overnight and is often a challenging task and will definitely need but among the most important part of your marketing strategy.
It saves you time and money because it helps you find out who is likely to buy your product, how they like to be marketed, where they spend their time online, what information would persuade them to purchase your offer and more.
3. Product Development and Product-led Growth – Product Development, the third step in the process, is about developing your product. This means improving or tweaking your product to make it resonant with customers. Product-led growth is used for this very purpose: finding Product-Market fit.
Product Development should start by defining an MVP, which should be the core features that will provide the best customer experience possible. It’s important to create a functional product that can be validated by potential customers, often called an MVP (or minimum viable product).
4. Defining your North star metric and KPI tree – The fourth step is one of the most important steps in developing a growth hacking strategy is to define your North Star metric.
This is a metric that will act as a beacon, guiding all your other efforts. It is the metric that you will be most focused on and will want to see an increase over time. Once you have defined your North Star metric, you need to develop a KPI tree. A KPI tree is a visual representation of all the metrics that are significant to your business – the KPI tree is aligned with your buyer journey.
This will help you track and measure your progress towards your goals. The KPI tree should be updated regularly, so you can see how you are progressing.
5. Developing Experiment Backlog – The fifth and final step is growth marketing. Once you have developed your MVP, you need to find out if it’s resonating with customers by testing growth hacks and marketing strategies.
For this stage, we develop an experiment backlog, which is a list of all the growth hacks and marketing strategies you want to test to see if they resonate with customers. It’s important to have this list, so you can track what’s working and what’s not.
This can be done in a number of ways, but often involves using different channels to reach a large audience as quickly as possible. Try different channels and see which resonates the most with your target audience.
Paid advertising is regularly used at this stage, as it can quickly help you reach a large number of people. Remember to always track your results (Impressions, CPC, CTR, etc.), so you can gauge the effectiveness of each channel. Keep in mind, if it is not measurable, it is not manageable.
A Growth Hackers Funnel
The importance of a marketing funnel is clear: without one, you’ll be wasting both time and resources. Funnels are used by marketers for this purpose since it makes it easy to understand which step in the process needs improvement.
For example, some marketers will implement a series of tactics that move visitors down the funnel towards conversion faster through persuasive copy, landing pages and everything in between before they reach their final destination page – an email list or purchase.
The Pirate Metric Funnel
The Pirate Metric Funnel or AARRR Framework is a powerful framework that you can use to track your marketing and sales funnel. It was designed by Brian Balfour, the VP of Growth at HubSpot, and it has been proven effective for both big companies like LinkedIn and small startups alike.
The Pirate Funnel Canvas The Awareness Stage
In this stage, the user has been exposed to a product or service that they have not yet interacted with. This is done through an email, social media ad or blog post. This is the stage in the Funnel where you need to grab their attention and drive them towards some form of action for example website visits.
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself: What growth hack tactics can we implement to grab people’s attention and drive them to our website or app?
The Acquisition Stage
In this stage, the user has completed a desired action like a website visit in order to be redirected to an activation page. Once the user is in this stage, you need to work on converting them into a customer. This is done by providing them with valuable content and offering them unique incentives that are only available to customers. This could be signing up for a free trial, filling out a form or lead magnets.
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself : What growth hack tactic do we need to implement to increase engagement on our website or app?
The Activation Stage
The activation stage is the first indication that someone might be interested in your product. Funnel conversion also takes place at this point, where you can convert a browsing user into an active one through demos or sign-ups etc., so make sure to pay attention and understand what they want!
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself: “What are people looking for?” By understanding the customer’s needs, seeking out new goals based on these needs and testing what works, they will be able to better serve their audience.
The Retention Stage
The retention stage is one more challenging stage; it’s where you want to keep your customers happy. This is done by providing them with great customer service, continuing to offer valuable content and ensuring that they are getting the most out of your product or service.
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself : “How do we increase customer lifetime value?” Increasing CLTV (customer lifetime value) is one of the best ways to grow a business. It’s important to focus on tactics that will increase the average amount a customer spends with you over time.
The Revenue stage
The revenue stage is where you make money. This is done by converting customers into paying customers, which can be done in a number of ways such as through subscriptions, one-time payments or upsells/cross-sells.
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself: “How can we improve our customer service?” and “What more can we do to help our customers get the most out of our product or service?”
The Referral stage
The final stage of the Funnel is the referral stage. This is where you connect with your customers and ask them to share your product with their contacts. Word of mouth has been shown to have a significant impact on Funnel conversion rates, so it’s important to make this as easy as possible for your customers.
One way you can do this is by using a customer acquisition tool like ReferralCandy, which provides a range of tools from referrals emails to social share buttons that will increase the number of visitors viewing your Funnel.
What a growth hacker needs to ask himself: “How do we get our customers to refer us?” Make it easy for your customer to share your product or content through integrations like social media, email marketing and more.
Funnel Conversion Rate
Funnels are a great way to break down the process of “getting someone’s attention and driving them towards some form of action” into manageable stages. Funnels help marketers understand what stage they’re at in their customer acquisition process, how best to reach that particular audience with valuable content, what might be holding people back from converting (such as low engagement on your website), and more!
It is important to understand the conversion rate (%) at each stage of your funnel. For example, if we find out that activation has a low percentage but there are other stages that have higher rates then you might want to work on improving those parts of the process or providing more valuable content for people in order to make them decide to purchase from you rather than someone else; this way less time and energy will be wasted since only certain aspects need improvement when all areas contribute equally towards customer acquisition
It can also help narrow down what exactly needs attention by looking into individual numbers such as how many clicks it takes before someone becomes an actual paying client vs just signing up with their email.
Conclusion
To summarize, growth hacking is a highly competitive and lucrative industry that will only continue to grow as more companies look for quick wins. If you’re interested in this field but don’t know where to start, we recommend reading the ultimate guide on how to become a growth hacker.
You’ll learn about what it takes to be successful in the world of marketing and everything you need to know if want to break into this fast-paced industry!
