Growth Hacking: cut the crap, it’s just good marketing! Breaking through the myth: why growth hacking is applicable to every company

23/05/17 Growth Hacking

"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

Growth Hacking as mind-set to steer your marketing team

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:

  • converted visitors to your e-commerce platform through social ads,
  • leads passed on to the sales team through a piece of content on a blog,
  • cross-sale transactions, achieved through a PR campaign.

To assess which channel(s) deliver (basically a high ROI – however you define “return”), you’ll need to closely monitor your funnel.

Four simple insights you can apply from the most successful growth marketeers:

  1. Measure: If you can’t track it, you’ll never be able to say whether or not your successful. Seems straightforward enough, but the number of companies who can truly monitor their marketing results are unfortunately still rarer than the ones who don’t.
  2. Test: “assumption is the mother of all fuckups”, they say… so don’t! A/B testing is key to any good campaign and will teach you things you could never have predicted.
  3. Diversify and identify your growth channels: the number of channels you can use today to acquire your audience is huge (paid acquisition and viral alike),
  4. Put your money where it counts: double down on the channels that deliver.

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?

#Growth hacking #marketing #ROI
Bruno Aelbrecht
Bruno Aelbrecht

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