The term ‘Growth Hacking’ has become a buzzword in the marketing realm. The way people market their product has changed along with the emergence of the Internet and social media. Furthermore, from consumers’ perspective, the way they understand and/or are attracted by a product evolves as well.
So, what is growth hacking to be exact? What 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.
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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.
On growth hacking process, marketers and product developers should focus on understanding the users, 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.
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What is growth hacking about?
Growth hacking is about retaining existing users and organically acquiring new users of a product. In other words, this is a concept of an organic sustainable growth.
It appears that a growth hacker should be product-oriented when it comes with an effort to make active users become loyal to your product and, for a bonus, make them acquire new users.
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How do we “hack” growth?
The soul of “hacking” growth is organic approach. A growth hacker should not do artificial attempt of acquiring more users. Spamming on Facebook or Twitter, using BOT accounts, or hacking App Store or Google Play Store download charts will rarely result retained users.
Those shortcut techniques will appear as manipulative efforts and actually undermine consumers’ intelligence.
Instead, you must rely more on 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
Having accurate data about your customers will give you the ability to grow new users as well. On that note, a more organic solution, such as applying very good SEO landing pages, can be used to develop new features on the product or develop a better content.
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How will growth hack benefit your business?
The benefit of having this concept is that every business will have more attention for their products to be more accommodating for both active users and new users.
Additionally, business will have to take into account analytics data to understand how active users may attract new users that will also help engineers to make better solutions.
Growth hacking is an efficient way to strategically support product marketing of a business.
In conclusion, growth hacking is a strategy that is suitable for lean startup—a startup business that focused on lean practices to save time and money-as it is efficient in its cores. Amidst the saturation of mass marketing as it employs analytic-driven approaches like social media, viral contents 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!
