"Growth Hacking”: If you’ve done some light reading at night on any of the marketing, technology or innovation blogs in the last 24 months, I’m sure you’ve encountered the term. It has quickly become the favourite term of SAAS start-ups and marketeers alike.
The term itself was first used in 2010 by Sean Ellis (once responsible for growth at a little company called Dropbox), to describe the type of marketing responsible he was looking for. His definition: “a person whose true north is growth”.
That’s it folks, nothing more to see here: GROWTH - making sure your key metrics go up each time, thus proving traction of your product or service
In my experience, growth is an explicit or at least implicit expectation every CEO has towards his/her marketing responsible, and rightly so.
And yet, marketing managers today are still too often evaluated based on soft metrics (number of campaigns, engagement, brand awareness), rather than a tangible contribution towards the company’s bottom line.
That’s were Growth Hacking comes into play: by putting traction at the centre of it all.
It’s simply an approach to marketing: using the channels available today (19 according to the book Traction) to grow your business, assessing what each channel generates, and then promoting/pushing the ones that excel. Examples are the number of:
So next time you think Growth Hacking, just think of a creative marketeer who is able to actually identify whether or not his marketing efforts are paying off and therefore knows where to put his money.
What is your experience with Growth Hacking? How did it contribute to your company’s growth?