So, What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking is a combination of marketing, data and technology.
A growth hacker runs experiments based on a process-based methodology to grow the number of customers or the business in general.
Growth Hacking is ideal for startups, because of the limited budgets and resources, but it also lends itself to larger companies.
For those startups, growth hacking was their way to beat the well established big companies. as they had fewer resources and budget to work the same way as the big competitors
In simple words growth hacking is to find alternative and creative ways to grow your business in cheaper and faster way. Hence the word ‘hacking’
What skills you need to be a Growth Hacker
Mainly 2 things:
1- Growth Hacking Mindset
A growth hacker sets the goal above the means; growing the business is his/her ultimate objective and which channel, technique or tools is used for this is secondary.
A growth hacker likes to deal with problems related to business, and always looks for bottle necks in the customer journey where he/she looks for alternative solutions.
For a growth hacker Speed is more important than perfection and he/she understands that you will have more success if you set up more experiments
Growth hacker are always open to alternative solutions, they know that "it is not one size fits all" and what's working for other companies might not work well for their business that why they do lots of experiments to discover their own hacks.
Growth hacker are Data-driven and they try to stay away from gut feeling choices. They work on the basis of figures and data because nowadays, you can calculate exactly which channel delivers the most customers for relatively the lowest costs. They also use data to find the biggest growth restrictions ( bottle necks ) by focusing on one main metric at a time
2-Digital Skills
It is so important that a growth hacker has a broad set of knowledge and skills in order to spot detailed problems and bring solutions to reality.
As a growth hacker, you have to be able to work quickly and therefore you have to be as independent as possible. hence he/she needs to have to following set of main skills
1- Data Tracking & Analytics
Data & Analytics is the #1 skill for growth hackers because growth hacking is a data-driven field;
Before you start experimenting, he/she needs the data to find the biggest bottleneck for a company. And afterwards, need data again to know whether you have solved the problem and whether the experiment was successful.
some of the Analytics tools that you growth hacker uses:
Google Analytics
Airtable
Hotjar,
Uber suggest
CRM programs
2- Digital Marketing
What should a growth hacker be able to do in terms of marketing skills?
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
SEM - Mainly Google Paid advertising
PR / Influencer Marketing
Paid Social Media (Advertising)
Organic Social Media (Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn / Tiktok, etc.)
Content Marketing
B2B outreach
Email Marketing
3- Web development
Building and optimizing landing pages. which dose't necessarily need coding skills since the emergence of all kinds of drag-and-drop landing page builders, such as Wix, Instapage, and Leadpages, but it is still a necessary to fully understand how web programming works and what are its capabilities
Understating UX ( User Experience ) and UI ( User Interface) process and its technicalities and being able to apply them on web pages or Apps
Design and understand colors, fonts, branding, etc.
And many more concepts/techniques, like conversion rate optimization, Artifical Intelligence in marketing, webscraping, chatbots, API’s, etc.
How Can I apply Grow Hacking to my business?
Before you start make sure that your product is market-fit which means that your product is Sell-able & Scalable ( have to possibility to grow) in your market.
In simple words Make sure you have a product people actually want
The best way to validate that is by getting feedback from your customers and conducting competitors analysis researches
Once you have the Product / Market-fit, then you start using AAARRR Funnel also knows as The Pirate Funnel where your analyse each set of the customer journey that is attached to your business model
Lets go step by step over each part of this funnel and see how you can use it
1. Awareness
Awareness is arguably the easiest part of the AAARRR funnel. Establishing a brand presence tends to be the most creative aspect of the journey — you’ve figured out who you are as a brand, who you want your customers to be, and how you want to put yourself out there.
To effectively growth hack awareness, you’ll need to understand and establish:
Who and what your brand is
How your brand is resonating with your existing audience
Who your target customer base is
How it can be hacked
Go for channels that your competition isn’t using. Establishing a brand presence means standing out in comparison to other brands that are trying to get the attention of your mutual target demographics.
One way to stand out is to experiment with new and exciting channels in the ever-changing digital marketing world.
Work hard, but also work smart. Your competition may be also looking into new modes of communication, so get to them first.
One way to do this is to invest more time into communicating directly with your audiences, rather than funneling all of your budgets into ads and beta groups.
Currently, Quora and Reddit AMAs (“Ask Me Anything” question and answer forums) are a popular new way of spreading brand awareness and getting your potential customers excited about and aware of who you are.
2. Acquisition
How people find you and transform into customers relies heavily on what you provide them.
How it can be hacked
Utilize email hunting, the tried and true method of finding the right people that hasn’t gone out of style quite yet.
Gather a list of businesses and individual consumers that could be part of your target customer base.
Establish your email signup on your website and promote it across social media.
Consider putting incentives into email signups — such as free content, coupon codes, trials, etc.
Consumers won’t simply sign up for your emails because you seem kind of interesting. People want something in return for something.
Research the people who are signing up through their social media profiles if possible. Who are there? Where are they from? What do they have in common? These commonalities will help you build personal details in your campaigns that will make acquisition explode across your marketing mediums.
3. Activation
Activation and acquisition tend to overlap a bit.
Acquisition is getting customers and potential customers to interact with your brand. Activation focuses on the first experience your customers have with your actual product or service.
Activation is tricky — while acquisition is getting people to download your store app, activation is getting them to not delete that app after using it once. There are a number of ways to achieve this.
How it can be hacked
Craft product tours that help, not hinder. Have you ever used a digital product that opened up with a tour of the app, but the content in that tour was long-winded, confusing, and rushed? This is a great way to fail at activation.
Instead, craft product tours that are genuinely helpful. Right after logging, use popups that let users skip the tour if they want.
Use simple graphics and instructions that are brief and avoid technical language.
Short copy, easy-to-follow steps, and extremely direct CTAs are what can keep a user instead of scaring them away, resulting in a quick uninstall.
4. Revenue
Now you’re ready to evaluate your customer LTV ( Live Time Value ) against your CAC (customer acquisition cost) . This first and foremost “hack” is to grow your revenue is to reevaluate your previous steps in the funnel individually and as a whole, but there are other examples to think about as well.
There are a number of ways to increase a brand’s LTV and lessen their CAC. Understanding how customers are moving through the AAARRR funnel and detailing each step for improvements is a good start. Looking at the product pricing and how it aligns with the target customer base is another way to improve that ratio.
In simple words Find the bottlenecks and try to solve them
How it can be hacked
Ask yourself “what if?”
This kind of analysis is an approach that lets a brand brainstorm what they could implement to improve ROI (Return On Investment)
“What if we added this totally new feature?”
“What is if we completely eliminated this aspect of the app?”
“What if we designed our landing page or product packages?”
5. Retention
Retention measures how many customers you’re keeping around, and how many are dropping your product altogether.
Why are they leaving? What’s keeping the others dedicated? Retention tracking can be tricky, but there are some metrics examples to consider.
How it can be hacked
Look at how often you’re directly communicating with your customer base.
Are you sending them emails and surveys after they’ve been using your products for a while?
In the context of digital consumers, are you using push notifications in your application to spark a conversation with your established users?
Obviously, getting a customer to just buy your product and then never return again is not the way to do business.
Keeping customers is cheaper than streaming in new ones.
There’s also more integrity in viewing business this way.
Look at how you can communicate new exciting things to your established customers, such as hot new offers, surveys, badges, gifts, anything! Make it clear you’re still invested in their support to build trust.
6. Referral
Advocates and brand ambassadors are just as much a part of your business as your actual employees.
Nurturing them and keeping them is also as important as facilitating them in the first place.
Growth happens when people are talking about your product and recommending them to people who trust them,
which makes referral the most underrated and important aspect of the AAARRR funnel.
How it can be hacked
Be direct and clear with your ambassadors. In your referral programs, be specific about who you want them to invite, such as friends, coworkers, family, etc.
Don’t force your ambassadors to think — be descriptive and permissible. The more specific you are, the better the chance of getting new customers becomes.
Offer incentives to get your ambassadors communicate with their groups.
Finally, please remember that growth hacking is all about testing and learning you try a few solutions - start small - and see if it delivers anything.
Best of luck!
Hazem K