What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is an entrepreneurial concept that primarily focuses on building a business’s customer base using low or zero-cost and easy-to-apply strategies. Aside from this primary goal, businesses also use growth hacking to improve their operational efficiency and some other general properties since this impacts how well a business handles a large number of users or customers. 

How is growth hacking different from traditional marketing? 

You may be thinking to yourself, what makes growth hacking different from traditional marketing? Both concepts are closely related. They are identical in the sense that they help businesses acquire and retain a high number of customers while also gaining traction in their market.

However, traditional marketing leans more toward product or service development, outreach, and sales. Growth hacking, on the other hand, facilitates the development of business products, outreach, and sales, and also supports customer retention and aspects of branding including business identity and operational strategy. 

Benefits of growth hacking

The first and most outstanding benefit of growth hacking is that it promotes explosive user growth for a startup. Other benefits then include the fact that;

• it is a cost-effective approach:

The basic idea of growth hacking involves using strategies that are less costly than traditional marketing. 

• it produces real and valuable results:

You are probably aware that growth hacking has been a thing in the business world for some time now. But instead of becoming obsolete or slowly losing its usage, more and more entrepreneurs are beginning to apply it in their businesses. The reason why this is so is that growth hacking produces real and valuable results. 

• it helps entire teams to become growth conscious:

Performing growth hacking will tune any team or business to building a growth mindset. You automatically become attentive to ways of promoting your growth as a business. 

• it works for any kind of business goal:

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have, what kind of product you're developing, or what kind of audience you’re targeting, there’s a growth hack for you. 

‍Also Read: Here are 6 Ways You Can Finance Your Startup

5 growth hacking examples you should know  

Want to know a true-story example of growth hacking? Well, there are a handful of them. A number of companies have successfully applied the concept of growth hacking to reach an amazing volume of users. 

Most of these companies have also recorded tremendous increases in revenue using this technique. Let’s take a look at five different companies and what they did to hack their business growth. 

‍Dropbox: As a storage and file sync tool designed in 2007, Dropbox had a reasonable number of active users. However, the company decided to scale up things a few years ago. Its growth hacking strategy involved providing incentives in the form of additional cloud storage spaces to users who were willing to try out more features of the product and also market them on Twitter and Facebook. Guess what the result was? The company attracted a total of about 500 million active users. 

‍Gmail: Google’s reputable e-mailing service Gmail, is another product that thrived using a growth hack. At present, Gmail serves about 1.8 billion users worldwide. It also reportedly accounts for over 27% of all new email openings. Gmail’s stunning growth came from an invite-only registration. This meant that new users needed to be invited to the service by existing users before they could register an account. 

‍Facebook: Facebook is one of the longest-existing and widely-used social networking platforms around. And how did the company get such good stats? Simple. It used a growth hack strategy that asks existing users to add up the people in their contacts. These existing users built their Facebook friends list through this and each one of their contacts when registered on the platform, also does the same thing. 

‍Groove: The story of Groove’s user base explosion is one of honesty paying off hugely. The company happened to implement a growth hack strategy when it began documenting the highs and lows of its growth journey. Original and freely accessible facts and figures like this provide interesting statistics for a wide variety of users. This attracted a huge number of users. But Groove didn’t stop there. It requested its SaaS customers to provide a list of topics they would like to know more about and the company turned this into a series of blog articles. 

Hotmail: Hotmail which is now redesigned as Outlook went really hot from a simple signature growth hack strategy that read, “PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.”  This simple line of text introduced a lot of new users, growing the email user count to over 12 million. 

‍Also Read: 5 Reasons Why Taking Risk is Good for Your Business

‍5 Growth hacking strategies you should be using 

Rather than picking growth hacking strategies out of the blue, let’s take a look at the strategies used by the companies we mentioned in the last section. 

‍Incentives: We saw that Dropbox successfully hacked its user base growth by offering more of what it already offered (storage space) to its users when they completed a task. It gave users an additional 3 GB of storage space when they used the camera upload feature on the app, an additional 250 MB of storage space when they completed a getting started call to action and a total of 625 MB of storage space for simple tasks including following @Dropbox on Twitter. 

‍Email Marketing: Hotmail successfully utilized email marketing by attaching an inviting signature to each user’s email. Another company that made good use of this growth hacking strategy was Facebook. The company’s strategy involved emailing non-users when their contacts who are active users mentioned them in a post. This worked because the non-users had to create an account before they could view the post they were tagged in. 

‍Article and Blog Post: We’ve told Groove’s inspiring story and from it, you can see that article and blog content creation is a growth hack. Your articles must, however, spark the interest of your website or blog visitors. It should also answer their questions or respond to their inquiries. 

‍Social Media Community: Building a social media presence is a valid growth hack, especially for new startups. Instagram proved this point. The platform developed an easier way to upload pictures than Facebook and Tumblr which were existing at the time. And not just that, Instagram climbed the shoulders of these existing social media platforms by making cross-platform posting possible. 

The strategy allowed users to upload pictures on Instagram and then also publish the same pictures on other platforms, therefore, bringing attention to the new picture-focused platform. The result was stunning. Instagram reached 10 million users in a year, hit 100 million users in the second year, and had 1 billion users in just eight years.

‍Referrals: Once you have your first set of users, you can employ them in reaching a larger audience. The referral growth hack is what founders use for this. It works as social proof since existing users will testify to the benefits of a business’s products or services. 

‍Also Read: Can I Start A Successful Startup During a Recession?

5 Growth hacking tools you should be using

A high-value tool is crucial to every growth hacking attempt. And since there is a long list to choose from, businesses must take the time to figure out which tool will be most helpful to them. 

Semrush:

Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform. The software enables marketing professionals to build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels to improve their online visibility.

‍Canva:

Canva is an online design and publishing tool that features everything from a curved text generator, video trimmer, image enhancer, video converter, and color palette generator. The service hosts a community of creators and it also offers free design ideas, prints, colors, and useful articles. 

Notion:

Notion is an all-in-one, customizable workspace. It provides businesses with the tools to develop product roadmaps, design repositories, standard operating procedures, and precise content management. 

ConvertKit:

ConvertKit is a creator marketing platform that helps users grow their audience and monetize their products or services. The platform is useful for email scheduling, audience targeting, and general subscriber organizing. It also enables users to set up an ideal customer journey.  

Adalo:

An important aspect of growth hacking is developing apps that facilitate your business operation or the delivery of your service. Adalo serves as a good tool here. It is a platform that makes creating apps as easy as putting together a slide deck. 

‍Also Read: Vesting: Here is All You Need to Know About It

Conclusion

The key ingredients for a successful growth hack are strategy and idea. Once you decide whether you want to try email marketing or incentives or whatever, you can then narrow down on what idea you will employ for your chosen strategy. 

Both your growth hack strategy and idea should take into consideration the type of business you run (whether it is majorly online or offline). You can also choose to test your growth hack strategy on a small or large number of users. 

The final piece of the hack is getting the right tool for the job. This will usually include an app development tool, a project management tool, a content management tool, and a graphic design tool.

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