5-step process for growth hacking
Growth hacking is accomplished through the following process and it will be repeated between ‘Hypothesis establishment and planning’ and ‘Verification’ depending on the verification result.
Goal Setting – Status Analysis – Hypothesis Establishment and Planning – Execution – Effect Verification
If you want to follow the steps above to go through the process of growth hacking, you should be aware of two things:
Objective indicators through data should be the basis of the data.
You need to constantly repeat small improvements, not all at once.
The growth hacking usually involves at least 15 tests a week, and one or two improvements should be found. Because of this, growth hacking can not be done by only one person, and it is a strategy that the organization or the whole team must execute in unison.
What if the organization or team is too busy or lacks manpower? In this case, you divide the existing work and the work for growth hacking to about 80:20. And then, you can do less testing than your existing process and make improvements.
Level 1. Set Goal(KPI)
Set up a funnel by visualizing goals and conversion paths based on your site. The target KPI must be per page.
KPIs vary by service, but can usually be the number of requests for data, memberships, or service billing conversions. If you have an SNS like Facebook, you can set a KPI for your number of followers.
For example, if you set the “Number of inquiries” to KPI, the conversion path to the inquiry will go through the “main page > detail page > price check > contact” path.
That is, you can set the number of main page visitors, the number of detailed page visitors, the completion rate of each form, and the number of conversion button clicks.
Level 2. Status Analysis
Status analysis is the process of collecting data for each KPI and conducting analysis based on the measured data. Identify the bounce rate, clickthrough rate, and clicks on the primary button to determine what state the service is currently in. After that, the hypothesis will be established. This hypothesis can be a way to improve the site.
Level 3. Hypothesis establishment and planning
After understanding the current situation, we establish a hypothesis based on this analysis. If you take the example of the conversion path for the above inquiry, you can draw the following hypothesis and project.
- Main page: Bounce rate is too high. We need to improve the UI to prevent escape.
- Detail page: Create a summary page and improve the position and color to make the button more visible because there are too few users to see all the details.
- Confirmation of price: The number of users who go to membership after confirming the price is small. In addition to the GNB, we add a subscription button so that it leads directly to membership after reading the price on the page.
- Input inquiries: Since the information input completion rate is low, we simply change the input form and improve the UI.
If there are various improvements mentioned above, you can not make all improvements at once. Therefore, it is necessary to prioritize the numerical value of how much it will have when actually improving.
Level 4. Implementation of improvement plan
Once you’re done comparing how you’re contributing to conversions, we’ll apply the service improvement plan and test it. The simplest test method is to change the Web site elements such as Layout, Main Visual, Navigation, Catch Prize, and Action Button into different patterns and then perform a comparison test.
The AB test is basic growth hacking because it can be verified by just changing a few and you can see the changed effect immediately.
To accurately determine the outcome of an AB test, you need to ensure a certain level of visitor traffic to your destination page.
Level 5. Verification of effect
Once the implementation is complete, the effect is verified. The result of this verification will help you to identify new knowledge and improvements and to consider the next improvement.