What is Growth Hacking and Why We Should Care?
Growth Hacking: Applicability
Growth hacking has been a buzzword during the last years. Its appearing in the world market is an event. We can observe how random companies experience high growth rates annually. Growth hacking is a business theory of prosperity in the short term. Each startup needs this specialist. Mastering the basic principles leads to millions of customers, significantly increasing income subsequently. Here we are going to speak about the deeper meaning of growth hacking and its influential factors.
Growth Hacking: the birth and definition
The father of growth hacking is Sean Ellis. He cultivated this expression in 2010. Being CEO and promoter, he is famous for several successful startups such as Dropbox. Growth hacking is a complex of marketing and promotional approaches focused exactly on upping. According to this statement, growth supposes achieving rapid outcomes with minimum expenses. The core principle is searching for ice-breaking solutions to shorten the way towards the outstanding profit. Sean Ellis is a guru of growth hacking. Startups who applied for his help in expanding their client base got fantastic results. The results came fast that helped Sean Ellis to gain a steady authority in the world of sales. It was a challenge that he has been coping with successfully assignment after assignment. His next step was to broaden the network and search for more professionals who can assist him. He received many CVs from marketers with a rich professional experience, but hardly any of them could handle what he intended to do. Let’s speak about who is the growth hacker in detail.Why a marketer and a growth hacker is not the same?
A growth hacker is a worker who is responsible for the high profits of the company (classically, this is a team). The crucial difference consists in their decision making. Each step of a growth hacker (strategy, tactic, ambition, etc.) has the intention to grow in the core. A marketer has somewhat similar aims, but the force and level of achievements vary vastly. An excellent grown hacker must be inherently obsessed with this idea. This single-minded and unflinching concentration is the main factor of exponential upping. The responsibility of marketing specialists covers multiple tasks, in particular, the management of information streams between a company and social environment (or simply RR). Growth hackers pearl off all techniques and approaches except those connected with an uptrend. Growth is a broader concept than it looks because it also possesses flexibility. Either you are a one-person startup or a corporation settled worldwide, growth hacking can provide impressive results regardless of the scale and size of your business. The discrimination factor is absent. The modern digital world has turned into a battlefield where various marketing specialists struggle hard for an advantage. The offline market has many burdens such as budgetary limitations, overloaded amount of suppliers, etc. The online market is similar yet includes even more incitements due to high speedy technology progress (various tools, platforms, innovative solutions, etc.). Conservative methods in growth hacking are not gainful.The Basic Mechanism Of Growth Hacking
Growth hacking has a dynamic development path. Newbies might find it complicated, so let’s start from the simple thing: an overview of the entire course. The actions of a growth hacker is a chain of sequentially connected measurements toward achieving the settled aims for each company individually:1. Determination of feasible goals.
Growth is the destination of the route. Focusing on the final goal may leave you disoriented during the factual process. Therefore, growth hacking excludes sandcastles and foggy-mind praising a narrower way of achievement rather than too broad. The most efficient method is focusing on small tasks. As soon as you reach success, you can become closer to your central aim. So separate your global mission into several more efforts than you can handle.2. Project deliverables.
You have done a big job determining the feasible goals. How and when can we know that our plan is working? These questions you are going to reply, specifically:- do you have a sophisticated system of metrics and analytics?
- Is your metrics and analytics system covers the whole content?
- Can you monitor the gadgets that visitors use to enter your page or site for proper content settings corrections?
3. Reckon your abilities.
Do your very best to spend a little amount of energy and receive great results instead of taking an overwhelming amount of work. For instance, you have a choice between the creation of the «What’s new» category and sending informative letters. If you have a hefty client base and an excellent working e-mail delivery system, the most beneficial choice would be mailout. If your «What’s new» category is almost ready and finishing this process may take a couple of days, but your colleagues are hectic with other types of work, it’s better to fill up the blog later. This advice relates to various cases where you intend to reach quick results with minimal input. The most significant factor of choice is how profitable your step will be.4. Use innovations.
Once you have determined your step (in our case, informative mailing), arrange your system to put it into practice. While trying new things to do, remember the basic rules:
• Plan what you are going to do. Your statement must be the collection of your viable ideas about what’s happening and what you expect. Whatever you do, make sure that you understand the reason for this action.
This work may seem complicating or even excessive. But your draft is not gospel, and you might make a mistake. For example, according to your theory, the mail outs will be annoying for users and decrease the number of clicks. But in your experiment, you might notice the opposite effect with increasing the number of clicks after the second letter. This conclusion is even much more meaningful than the mailout itself.
• Set realistic goals for the test. Regardless of the stage of your working process, failures happen. To diminish the risks, you should inform all the team members about the new-coming process. This step will make your command well-prepared and ready for the emergent reaction. One more backup is being aware of resource restrictions and keeping that in mind while planning the coming events. For example, Thursdays are a rush time on the servers, so avoid any activity to exclude pushing up the traffic. And finally, be concrete in time frames. If you know beforehand that a task completion will take some time, make sure that you have it or add some more days if possible.
• Do not be stuck on the first results. Doubtlessly, you pin your hopes that each innovation is a breakthrough that will raise your business to the top of Everest mountain. Perhaps, you are sure that the decision that you have made is the one and only.
An optimistic approach is excellent but remember that it is a business, not a fairy tale. Falling into frustration when something goes the wrong way or the way you had not foreseen is unwelcome. Be wise and struggle for your idea but think out various scenarios and hold in stock at least several approaches. They may be wrong, but the chances to find that right solution increase very much.
• Learn from your mistakes. Any knowledge you receive during the working process is valuable regardless it is a failure or a success. And all these data collections are far not the time-wasting. You might not estimate their value right at the moment when you receive the result, but this lesson will come in handy someday. All data are a field for analysis and new steps in the future.