What is Growth Hacking?

The term ‘Growth Hacking’ has become a buzzword in the marketing realm. The way people market their products has changed with the emergence of the Internet and social media. Furthermore, from consumers’ perspective, how they understand and/or are attracted by a product also evolves.

So, what is growth hacking, to be exact? Who should be considered to be a proper growth hacker? Former Product Expert at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Josh Elman, shared his views on the cores of growth hacking. Here are some takeaways that I get from his account.

What is the definition of “Growth Hacking”?

To straighten things out, growth cannot literally be hacked. But for the sake of discussion, growth hacking is the new process of getting and engaging consumers by combining conventional marketing and analytical skills with product development skills.

In growth hacking, marketers and product developers should focus on understanding the users and how they discover and adopt the products rather than spending big cash on marketing to acquire new users or assuming what users want without measuring and understanding the impact of product changes.

What is growth hacking about?

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Growth hacking is about retaining existing users and organically acquiring new product users. In other words, this is a concept of organic, sustainable growth.

It appears that a growth hacker should be product-oriented when it comes to making active users loyal to your product and, as a bonus, make them acquire new users.

How do we “hack” growth?

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The soul of “hacking” growth is the organic approach. A growth hacker should not make an artificial attempt to acquire more users. Spamming on Facebook or Twitter, using BOT accounts, or hacking App Store or Google Play Store download charts will rarely result in retained users.

Those shortcut techniques will appear manipulative and undermine consumers’ intelligence.

Instead, you must rely more on a data-driven approach, optimize the analytics results and carefully analyze the data to find out the pattern of what makes the existing users loyal to your product.

Accurate data about your customers will also allow you to grow new users. On that note, a more organic solution, such as applying perfect SEO landing pages, can be used to develop new product features or better content.

How will growth hack benefit your business?

The benefit of this concept is that every business will pay more attention to their products to accommodate both active and new users.

Additionally, businesses will have to consider analytics data to understand how active users may attract new users, which will also help engineers make better solutions.

Growth hacking is an efficient way to strategically support the product marketing of a business.

In conclusion, growth hacking is a strategy suitable for a lean startup—a startup business that focuses on poor practices to save time and money. It is efficient at its cores amidst the saturation of mass marketing as it employs analytic-driven approaches like social media, viral content, or SEO landing pages combined with innovative marketing strategies.

Do you have any experience in growth hacking your business? Share your story with us by writing it in the comment section below!