Definition:
Growth hacking looks for new marketing strategies to obtain the maximum number of users using a minimum expense. It is the replacement of billboards and television ads by unconventional thinking and user psychology. Growth hacking professionals invent non-traditional solutions to obtain new users.
Startups are the main followers of growth hacking. They are forced to look for innovative marketing techniques, as their tighter budgets usually prevent them from traditional practices. Growth hackers deal with a wide range of areas, including SEO, content marketing, social media, and email marketing.
What are Growth Hackers for
Growth hacking is testing and always pushing the boundaries with unconventional acquisition strategies, often entering gray areas where more established companies do not usually get in. Growth hackers are not afraid to work throughout the system, hence the word “hacker”.
A growth hacker is an IT professional who uses elements of marketing and market research, along with technological and technical strategies, to provide marketing solutions to clients or employers. In this case, the use of the term hacker indicates a use of logical processes and technology to achieve a specific end goal, in this case, customer retention and sales, rather than other uses of the word, which refer to illegal or aggressive conduct towards IT networks and systems.
There are many opinions on what this relatively new term means. In general, growth hacking is used to describe those who use sophisticated logic processes in marketing campaigns. These types of processes are often based on algorithms or other logical resources, where technology helps humans make more accurate decisions. One way some describe the role of a growth hacker is that it fuses marketing principles with engineering principles in order to create more accurate marketing strategies.
Growth Hacking Methods
The usefulness of growth hacking is proven, and not a “fad” as it may seem. Among the most common methods are:
- Viral acquisition: is the use of product features to encourage existing users to share your product with new users.
- Acquisition by payment: There are many types. To name a few, there is search engine marketing, such as Google AdWords; Facebook ads; display ads; mobile ads; radio, television and many others. Also entering is affiliate marketing, or providing incentives to third-party marketers who then promote a product.
- Call centers/Sales Teams:Leverage cheap outsourced labor to help a small business. This can range from sending email in bulk to your potential customers to creating hundreds of SEO-friendly pages.
Content marketing: Is the use of blogs, infographics, and viral videos to increase brand awareness and site traffic. It’s about converting those visitors into users. - E-mail Marketing: to encourage users to participate or encourage them to spend more money.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Startups use SEO effectively to build a scalable infrastructure that applies to tens of thousands or millions of pages.
- A/B Test and Analytics: Although this is not an acquisition method, there is no doubt that data-heavy analysis and A/B testing makes acquisition and conversion funnels better.