Growth Hacking, something for your company?

Kenneth Smit editorial | 23-02-2018

In this article we examine the term growth hacking and how this 'hack' can mean something for your company.

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Job title: Growth Hacker. On LinkedIn you see a job as a Growth Hacker coming up more and more often, but what exactly does a Growth Hacker do? In any case, it has little to do with magic and hacking, because in short, a Growth Hacker is a marketer who looks for the most effective and efficient way to grow a business. Everything is about growth. Growth hacking is therefore seen more as a mindset than a function. But make no mistake, growth hacking is not vague stuff. Companies such as Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest, Airbnb and Spotify practiced growth hacking and have become the largest internet giants of our time. In this article we examine the term growth hacking and how this 'hack' can mean something for your company.

The origins of growth hacking

The term growth hacking comes from the famous Silicon Valley and was coined by investor and entrepreneur Sean Ellis. In 2010, Ellis was a sought-after man among start-ups in Silicon Valley. He was the man who was going to put your company on the map in Silicon Valley. With his new processes, systems and instilling the right mindset, he created a flood of new users in no time. Then his job was done and he started looking for someone to take over. Unfortunately, things went wrong at this point. Ellis could not find worthy replacements, no matter how experienced and qualified they were. Ellis discovered that the traditional marketer had too broad a focus, something that a start-up does not really want in the initial phase of its existence. Building and managing a marketing team or a strategic marketing plan? No, a start needs something else: grow!

One of the success stories of Ellis' 'growth hacks' is Dropbox. Dropbox is a cloud service that offers users free space to store their files. This space is limited to a few GB, which you can expand for a fee. Another free way to get extra space is to invite your friends. The more friends you invite, the more space you get. In this way, Dropbox saw its user base grow exponentially, without spending huge amounts of money on marketing.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking focuses entirely on growth. To achieve this, growth hacking uses an interaction between creative marketing, automation, technology, experiments and data. This interaction is very similar to an agile process: brainstorming, prioritizing, designing, conducting an experiment, analyzing data and improving the process. All this in the most cost-efficient way possible with growth as the goal.

growth hacking

Source: GrowthTribe.io

The growth hacker

As indicated above, growth hacking has nothing to do with magic or hacking, but in order to meet all the skills, the existence of a growth hacker is a lot like the sheep with 5 legs. And that is true. There is hardly anyone who builds conversion-oriented websites, writes catchy copy, convinces everyone and also carries out extensive data analysis. Growth hacking happens in a team: the marketer & copywriter, the data analyst, the UX specialist, the developer and the growth hacker. The growth hacker is responsible for the KPIs, is an inspiration and the mentor who sets things in motion and sets the tone.

According to Ellis, a growth hacker

“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

How can you use growth hacking?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of growth hacking tricks to promote the growth of your company. We have already listed two 'hacks' for you:

Growth Hacking Tip #1: Loading time of your website

A slow website drives customers away. A second of delay can already lead to 7% less conversion on your website, let alone how many customers you lose with 4,5 or 6 seconds! There is no rule of thumb for the perfect loading time, but try to keep the loading time under 2 seconds.

Growth Hacking Tip #2: IFTTT

IFTTT stands for If This, Ten That is a service where you can link all kinds of services together. Take LinkedIn and Outlook for example: if someone changes their job description on LinkedIn, you can set it to automatically receive an email about this event. This is just one of many examples of how you can use IFTTT.

Would you like to discover even more growth hacks? Then discover the 100 Growth Hacks, Strategies and Techniques written by Wishpond

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