Today, in this increasing digitization-based market, it is not intelligent to rely only on the traditional marketing channels. You need to go beyond that to spread the reach for your products. Conducting A/B testing is not enough to understand the entire customer journey from landing on a website to purchasing. Suppose you are a small company fighting to create an impactful online presence and stand out from your competitors. How can you achieve this within no time? How can you give a solid fight for already established brands in the market and be capable of attracting most of the traffic to your website?
Companies are already using paid ads to attract potential customers. They are using tools for getting insights and understanding what online channels are bringing them more traffic. They are also testing various elements and making changes to their website on top. It does not end here as you have to make changes with time and make it up-to-date. Carrying out data-driven experiments to help your business grow is called growth hacking or growth marketing.
If you have not come across this buzzword yet, do not worry. We are creating this article to enlighten you about all information regarding what growth hacking is. It has been in the market since 2021 and has become one of the most commonly used marketing strategies. It is considered the simplest way to improve the creativity level of your website. So, tuck yourself to understand the hacking journey so far.
What is Growth Hacking? [Definition]
As people strictly rely on hard facts to make their decisions, growth hacking helps them make such decisions after conducting experiments with concrete results. Sean Ellis introduced it in 2010. It determines the practical methods that help improve your business’s growth. This process starts from the early product development phase and lasts until the SDLC process. The central point is that growth hacking does not get affected by your project’s budget and timeline.
Growth hacking helps you find the small and quick strategies to retain customers. It is associated with marketing. Today, you can confuse product and marketing. Thus, companies focus on having a dedicated growth team providing solutions with combined marketing and user experience efforts.
Growth hackers go through the entire funnel and analyze from top to bottom. Based on that analyses, they conduct tests to gather valuable insights contributing to the business’s growth. It is not a one-time process but you need to perform it again and again over time for more consistent results.
Source- https://growwithward.com/what-is-growth-hacking/
What is Traditional Marketing?
Unlike growth hacking, traditional marketing deals with the products under development only.
Traditional marketing can significantly increase your products’ sales and generate unexpected revenue. However, the methods used in traditional marketing are somehow similar to growth hacking, but their working approach and goals are entirely different to each other. But, with time it is loosing its effectiveness due to the latest tools and technologies in the market. So, to stay ahead, you need to adopt new techniques.
Who are Growth Hackers?
The growth hackers always look for efficient, effective, and small strategies to bring definite success with cost-effective solutions. They work to improve the websites’ performance by considering various factors that decide the overall website’s performance. But finding those factors can be challenging as you might not understand which factor impacts the sale. The team has to invest time, energy, and money without knowing the factors.
Source- https://www.spyfu.com/blog/growth-hacking-vs-traditional-marketing/
But, Growth hackers only consider what works and continue the testing process until they succeed and have optimized results. Growth hackers do not bother about the extensive process and your brand’s identity. They only care for the results that can drive your business’s sales. Growth hackers are successful because they use data to make decisions rather than assumptions. Thus, it is easier for them to calculate the results and success.
Growth hackers are a crucial part of product development, contributing to improving the product consistently. They analyze the entire market and competitor’s website to make the changes in the website and understand where they are lacking. They understand and analyze the entire marketing funnel to kick start the product/market fit (PMF) to ensure guaranteed growth.
Growth hackers optimize the entire “AARRR” sales funnel, which stands for.
- Awareness: create awareness about your brand among potential customers.
- Acquisition: how will customers reach you?
- Activation: how to influence customers to take the desired action.
- Retention: how to retain existing customers.
- Revenue: generating revenue streams.
- Referral: creating more satisfied customers with excellent service and user experience.
Growth hackers understand the customers’ pain points and make necessary changes.
How Growth Marketing differs from Traditional Marketing?
Today, the market is full of start-ups and is tremendously using growth hacking to stay ahead of each other. Start-ups with a small budget can find it challenging to have consistent growth. But with growth hacking, it is now possible to scale your business by analyzing the trend and using effective strategies to get optimum results. This is where both the strategies are at different ends of a line. You can go through the below-mentioned significant points that create a significant difference between traditional and growth marketing.
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Uncertainty in startups
Whether a start-up or an established business, both cannot be certain about their progress and when they will start getting traffic. Also, you cannot determine your potential customers in one go without experimenting with it for a specific time. But, without dealing with such challenges, you will not learn and cannot move forward and achieve your goals. To eliminate this risk, you must consistently analyze the market and other factors to gather enough data to make decisions.
This risky and challenging environment boosts the importance of growth hacking over traditional marketing.
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The product approach
The only difference in both approaches is how a product is designed. The traditional marketing approach attracts potential customers to certain products using innovative websites, unique ads, etc. In contrast, growth hacking makes your product unique and will automatically attract the customer rather than working on ads.
Thus, growth hackers are in a great demand who can make the products’ desired changes to make them more effective.
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Different approaches to promoting the brand
Both marketing strategies use different modes to promote the product to their customers. In the case of traditional marketing, the company has to make a significant investment by investing in paid ads on social media, platforms, TV, etc., and has to deal with a limited budget and plan according to it.
But, in the case of growth hacking, growth hackers come with innovative and cost-effective strategies, providing optimum results and guaranteed success with less chance of failure. They use the latest engineering and innovative techniques that increase the range of the products.
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The difference in growth rate
You will find it shocking, but start-ups tend to grow faster than already established businesses. There is only a single mastermind driving everything by using cost-effective techniques. In such a situation, a growth hacker can do wonders for your start-up, knowing that they will be working under limited resources.
But with traditional marketing, marketers cannot predict your business’s growth rate or progress. Due to dependency on development and budget, they might face slow growth-rate.
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Skillset
Marketers can act with enough knowledge about the online marketing ability, while the growth hacker needs to be an all-rounder. The growth hacker should come with a high-end skill set, such as online data analytics, programming, and automation. Not only this, the growth hackers should be capable of conducting A/B testing, designing customized landing pages, tracking customers’ behavior, and generating analytics reports for better analysis.
Steps for Successful Growth Hacking
Growth hacking can help any business to achieve exponential growth. Growth hacking is all about finding and implementing new ideas, testing, and optimizing processes. It finds the weakness within the system and tries to eliminate it with their creative ideas. Below are the most important pillars of growth hacking.
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Having a mindset for growth
Amidst challenging working environments, having a positive mindset can help you achieve your goals. You need to set your short-term goals and work specifically to achieve them by implementing new ideas.
For example, “to reach to revenue of 10 million by 2020.” for that, you need to analyze each trend, and customer’s activities, consider historical data and get to a conclusion. This will help the team members to stay focused on a specific goal. Growth hackers are risk-takers. But no effort goes in vain, as they calculate their steps before implementing. Thus, it is important that each growth hackers to have the right mindset to be productive enough to find cost-effective yet efficient methods to do the work.
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Creating a dedicated growth team
Unlike traditional marketers, growth hackers should be cross-skilled and efficient enough to take risks and act under limited budget. With skills, they know what to do if their strategy fails and how to convert that into success.
It is impossible to have a single person with all the required skills. Thus you might require a dedicated growth team with field experts. In the below-mentioned T-shape diagram, the horizontal bar reflects the skills required, and the vertical bar reflects how strog each niche should be.
Source- https://agileleanlife.com/t-shaped-skills-every-area-life/
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How and what to measure?
A growth hacker will be completely held responsible for all your and your team’s actions. If any of your strategies do not work as expected, you might think of your next step or strategy and start implementing it. Measuring every step is only the key to success. As growth hackers rely on data, the chances of success increase.
Growth hackers measures the latest trend of the market consistently that help them to achieve success without any chance of failure. Growth hackers use tools such as CrazyEggs, Google analytics, etc.
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Analyzing the market trends.
Many businesses fail to endorse their products in the right way or do not have the right product for their customers. But if you use the proper planned strategy, you can get instant results with a broad range of customers liking your product. You need to analyze the market and review your competitor’s website to understand what your competitors have to offer and what makes them unique. Growth hackers help your business by making that analysis beforehand before making the actual investment. They undergo a detailed market research to understand the customer’s behavior.
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Using the proper channels
There are several social media or online platforms that you can use to endorse your products. But, if you are not leveraging those channels properly, you might lose ample opportunities. Having an online presence on a single platform cannot bring business to your website. You have to be active on all possible channels where you can find potential customers for your product. Growth hackers will find those platforms, understand the customers’ needs, and analyze if their needs match your product or not.
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The Key to Optimization
After following the above steps, you can see the combined effect of all and get optimized results. To ensure a consistent growth requires continual testing process. Once you done analyzing, you can follow the below steps to efficiently optimize the process.
Ensure that you consistently monitor, measure, tweak and optimize for quick growth.
- Value: emphasize the potential benefits of the product you are offering with clarity.
- Relevance: make sure that your website is motivating and stimulating enough to influence the customers to make the desired action.
- Clarity: encourages clarity by eliminating the pain points of customers.
- Distraction: remove all the distractions, allowing the customers to focus on carrying out the desired action.
- Anxiety improves the credibility of your website.
- Urgency: show the urgency for people to take action.
Source- https://www.widerfunnel.com/blog/the-six-landing-page-conversion-rate-factors/
Conclusion
The science of growth hacking is constantly evolving to improve its customers’ user experience. Nowadays, many companies are focusing on using quick and efficient strategies to improve and fasten the growth of the business. This has increased to the demands of growth hackers in the market. The scope of growth hacking is rapidly increasing from small start-ups to well-established markets.
The top and successful companies, such as DropBox, Airbnb, Instagram, etc are now implementing growth hacking to get instant business growth. These companies believe that growth hacking techniques have helped them to create a grand reputation in the market with excellent results.
All you need is to have the right tools and technologies at your disposal that will fast-track the working of the growth hackers. So, gear up and hire a dedicated growth team to help your business grow.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
