Growth hacking, a must?

Growth hacking is an increasingly popular form of marketing, where the hacking part involves borrowing from a range of alternatives to traditional marketing to achieve rapid growth for a company.
“Growth hacking” is used by both small and large companies, so what’s the concept of growth hacking and what kind of advantage could it bring to your business?

What is it?

Lots of people have heard the term, but few know exactly what it means. Growth hacking allows a company to grow its visibility fast and it could be said that growth hackers are the new masters of marketing. How, though, does it differ from conventional marketing and is it only applicable to companies at a certain stage of their development?
Let’s have a closer look at how and why businesses, entrepreneurs and SMEs can create value with growth hacking strategies.

Replacing old with new

Conventional marketing sets out to create brand recognition and its ultimate aim is to get customers on board to adore the brand. Growth hacking, on the other hand, relies on keeping in firm step with the market to drive the product’s growth. The questions it asks include whether people are already on-board with the product and if they’ll come back to buy more. One thing is for sure, the hackers have detailed knowledge of the market.
Growth hackers use all kinds of products, engineering and marketing channels, including social networks and mailing to ensure product onboarding.
Against a background where users’ attention is short lived and where it’s tough to gain customer loyalty and trust, it’s essential to go along the “customer multichannel experience” path. Bear in mind that every contact the consumer has with your product or service is important.

Examples?

Growth hacking is becoming a must-do process as it quite simply produces successful, popular products and a lot of companies have now experienced how growth hacking can take them in that direction.

Airbnb: this is one of the best-known examples. The celebrated worldwide lodging company needed to build up its user base and its reputation and attract as many customers as possible. The founders noticed that their potential clients often used Craigslist to seek out accommodation and they managed to essentially tap into the Craigslist user base and turn it to their advantage and rapidly build up a loyal customer base.

Instagram: Instagram grew through influencer marketing, whereby well-known influencers were among the first to sign up. The network also, however, used other techniques to drive its growth
– As it was a public application, the hack would uncover photos of complete unknowns, and use them to build commitment
– Instagram is designed to follow and be followed by people who are unknown to each other
– Instagram is connected to other social networks

Spotify: Spotify ‘s developers set up a feature for automatically sharing music listened to by users on their social network newsfeed. Friends of the users, seeing what they were listening to in real time, were tempted to try the service out for themselves. This “social proof” effect is one of the growth hackers’ techniques used for facilitating the decision-making process by imitating people around you.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, marketing strategy has been turning more and more to digital and with growth marketing, a company can quickly get itself optimal visibility on the web, thereby also driving its revenues and popularity.

Growth hacking is a low-cost operation, aiming at specific consumer categories by offering them a product perfectly in tune with their needs. Growth hackers also use referrals to drive virality and achieve rapid growth by onboarding large numbers of leads very quickly.