What is growth hacking approach, and how does it work?

Concept

Growth hacking is a subfield of marketing focusing on the rapid growth of a company using a set of processes and digital skills. The goal of every growth hacker is to build a marketing machine that reaches massive audiences by itself. A growth hacker replaces traditional marketing (e.g., commercials and other paid advertising) with only testable, trackable and scalable tools like emails, pay-per-click, or blogs. Growth hackers are data scientists who use information differently to achieve growth.

Background

Sean Ellis is an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and the founder of the Growth Hackers Organization, coined the term ‘Growth hacker’ in 2010 in a blog post, defining ‘A North Star Metric (NSM)’. NSM differs from other key performance indicators, and it measures three things: lead to revenue, reflect customer value, and measure progress. If a company can create one North Star Metric that accounts for these three factors and if every department contributes to improving this singular metric. It will grow sustainably over the long term compared to its competitors. Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown wrote two books: ‘The growth engines’ in 2014 and ‘hacking growth’ in 2017, using growth hackers to explain how today’s fastest-growing companies drive breakout success.

How does it work?

Ryan Holiday in his book ‘Growth Hacker Marketing’ 2014, identified three key steps to handle any growth hacking: (Ryan Holiday, 2014)¹:

Step 1- Begin with a product-market fit

A growth hacker will begin by developing a compelling product that a group of customers will buy. This process can be done by observing people, understanding issues, crafting solutions and prototypes, experimenting, and implementing.

Step 2- Finding your growth hack

Like the old model, growth hacking still requires pulling customers in, except you seek to do it in a cheap and new way. For example, the founders of Dropbox have crafted a fun video that walked potential users through the service and broadcasted it on Digg, Slashdot and Reddit. Any new business should first attract early adopters (evangelists), who will be the significant support for the growth. The following are some tips for finding early adopters:-

Reach out to sites where your target customers are reading with a pitch email about who you are, what you are offering, and why you exist.
Upload a post to Hacker News, Quora or Reddit.
Write blogs on subjects relevant to your business.
Use the platform Kickstarters for exposure with prizes.
You can use a service like Help a Reporter Out (www.helpareporter.com) to find reporters looking for people to include in stories they are already writing about your space.
Provide attractive offers (e.g., gifts or free uploads) to potential customers.

Step 3- Going viral

The best way to ensure virality is to apply the contagious rules STEPPS proposed by Jonah Berger (the book: Contagious), which guides your business to go viral. STEPPS are processing steps to reach contagious through practising functions: S: social currency, T: triggers; E: emotion; P: public; P: practical value; S: stories.

This post is sourced from my new book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation.
For more information about the book: https://growenterprise.co.uk/your-guide-to-reach-innovation/
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Final note: the book- Your Guide To Reach Innovation, is an actionable guide to innovation from beginning to end. Enjoy reading the book, and I look forward to your reviews.

Author: Munther Al Dawood

www.growenterprise.co.uk

maldawood@growenterprise.co.uk

References:

Ryan Holiday, 2014. Growth Hacker Marketing, Profile Booking LTD, UK.