An overview of Growth Hacking

What is Growth Hacking?

Simply put, growth hacking is a process involving the experimentation and trying out of several marketing strategies in order to identify the ones that produce the best results.

When it comes to getting word out about certain businesses, what works for one business might not work for the others due to certain factors, hence growth hacking.

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Origin

The term was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of Qualaroo.

Sean Ellis job entails helping different startups attain speedy growth. He would work for startups until they are established in the market taking some as far as IPOs for equity and payments after which he would leave for another company.

He came up with the term “Growth Hacker” as a job description for finding replacements of himself in any startup he was going to leave. He usually has a tough time while looking for the right fits for the job during each replacement episode which was why he came up with the term to complement the job description for the prospective candidates.

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Growth Hacker

. According to widely acknowledged “Godfather of Growth Hacking” Sean Ellis

"A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth."

A growth hacker should always have growth as the foremost and only goal, every action and resource implemented by should be directed towards solidifying the position of the startup.

Growth hacking goes hand in hand with flexibility, always being on the course of applying new techniques and strategies.

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Justification of Growth Hacking

It is of great long term advantage for new startups to focus less on competing with bigger brands in their niche or coming up with strategies to counter the market share of more established competitors, instead shift their attention to establishing themselves as an authority, source of solutions and information and nurturing their user base into maturation.

Successful startups and multinational corporations do a lot of growth hacking and every startup is on the lookout for “Growth Hackers”. Growth hacking has been one of the major contributing factors behind the fast growth and generation of large amount of revenues for major startups like Snapchat.

A growth hacker is poised to ask this question constantly,

"How do I reach my customers effectively?"

He would then find ways to answer this question by implementing his knowledge in marketing and “coding” and conducting tests.

Methods

As a counter to lack of money and experience, the job of a growth hacker is largely centered on innovation, an ability to scale results and connect users while being inexpensive and creative.

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Growth Hackers VS Digital Marketers

Growth hackers cannot replace digital marketers, they are different lines entirely.

Since growth hacking focuses exclusively on growth, most of the tools, methods and practices do not follow the conventional approach used in traditional marketing.

A growth hacking team can easily be created out of a pre-existing marketing team which makes both fields quite complementary of each other.

The Growth Hacking Process

The growth hacking process can be customized using this general framework.

• Getting to know what needs are yet to be met in the market and using this knowledge to boost your product to meet these needs.

• Setting realistic and precise goals that increases the overall growth rate of the business

• Experimenting using different approaches to know which method works and which doesn’t

• Analyzing the results to see how far you are from your overall goal

• Optimizing the approach using the data gained from the analysis of your performance.
Growth hacking involves creating improvements on feedback.

As soon as experimenting is started using new methods, the growth hacker starts to gather feedback from the methods.
Insights from the feedback are then used to develop an improved model of the experimentations.

What is your opinion on growth hacking? Do you think it is something that should be greeted with wide open arms or there should still be a bit of skepticism in its acceptance.

Share your thoughts in the comment below. Kindly show your support by upvoting. Thanks.