Growth is the holy grail in all startups and many companies consider adapting growth hacking methodology. Many think that it is absolutely necessary to have an engineer in marketing team and ideate black hat strategies that are borderline illegal to even start thinking about doing “growth hacking”.
The truth it, growth hacking is a combination of marketing tactics with a product development strategy. The goal is to maximize growth - because it is directly related to selling the product or service, either on your website or any other distribution channel. It doesn’t have to be online. It doesn’t have to be illegal. It does, however, differ a little from Agile Growth Marketing methodology.
Growth hacking nowadays is kind of a marketing strategy based mainly on tools available on the web. As the name suggests, it's about hacking growth - i.e. wise use of available tools in a new way, thanks to which we grow much faster than the competition investing in traditional marketing methods.
Although growth hacking does not exclude paid advertising, it definitely prefers methods that require minimal costs, at least at the experimentation level. For growth hacking methods to work well, you must first have a good and strong product. If your product somehow defends itself, gives real value and helps in solving real problems, these types of methods work extremely effectively. If you don’t have a Unique Selling Point, or your product is barely on the level of competition (or you don’t have any product market fit yet), you absolutely need to start on product level. Most of growth tactics will not bring any results unless you fix your product issues first.
Agile Growth Marketing is more of a strategical methodology. You set up goals and metrics first, and then design drivers and experiment. Agile methodology is based on sprints, units of time to produce deliverables in forms of learnings and results from your experiments. That’s quite simple, but let’s review the process:
1. Set up key metrics
First of all, you need to set up key metrics for your business, that drive growth. If you had to choose just one metric, what would it be? Now, you can choose another one, only if you don’t have the first one clear. Try to define no more than 3 metrics that best describe what drives growth to your business.
2. Define your goals
What would you like to happen with these metrics over specific period of time? The response to this question is your goal. If you key metrics is a number of contracts and you want to close 5 in next month, here you have your SMART goal for the month. Try to keep your goals clean, from 3 to 5 at the time.
3. Design sprint
Agile Growth Marketing is based on a sprint model. Sprint is the amount of time in which you want to deliver results and learnings from the experiments you will be setting up. Set a meeting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, in which you will discuss the results and decide what to experiment on for the next period of time. Remember: learnings are essential in the process, so make sure you empower your team to focus strongly on learnings and their application during the sprint.
4. Set up first drivers
Drivers are ways in which you will achieve your growth. A driver can be a hypothesis of buyer persona, growth channel, product variation… anything that will help in your growth and that you will validate or reject through experiments.
5. Ideate experiments
Experiments are ways to test a driver. In Hypertry we provide you with community ideas that you can check out and decide to implement as experiments, depending on the drivers you want to work with. Experiments are key to growth, you need to experiment fast, go out of your comfort zone and make sure you ideate as much as you can.
6. Apply learnings
Each and every experiment will bring valuable learnings to your business, both those that worked and those that didn’t. Learnings should be applied for future experiment in order to, well, never make the same mistakes again.
Alright, so, what about the actual techniques and “tricks”?
If you’re starting from scratch, you should focus on getting data and contacts. The larger the base you have, the more you can do with it. An effective and well-acquired database can be source of income for years.
How to do it? Content is your best bet. Good-quality, substantive content is not something that will bring you a client an hour after publication. This type of content will work for you for years.
To successfully start work, think among other things whether you can implement automation on your website. There are mechanisms that are partly automated. For example, you can start by placing an invitation on your website to leave an e-mail in exchange for an e-book.
There are hundreds of different hacks and ideas (we update and upload new ideas every day in Ideas space in Hypertry), so if you want to implement the methodology and make the most of growth ideas, start Hypegrowing now.
