Growth Hacking is a highly relevant concept today; however, few tend to agree on its definition.

In short, the Growth Hacker is the person whose true north is growth. It is often mistakenly assumed that growth hacking is useful only for startups and small digital companies. However, the methodology is applicable to all types of companies - including established ones - and also to all types of industries and less digital sectors such as the airline sector.

In this article we will discuss how airlines can use analytical, creative, innovative and low-cost ways to grow their customer base exponentially through growth hacking techniques.

The first step is to set a goal. It is not just any objective, the objective must be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Getting a million new customers next month is unrealistic unless your airline is close to these numbers or has consistent growth rates, a predictable growth method, and a set of growth drivers already validated.

The objective must always be related to what brings growth: new customers, repeat customers, etc. We should never focus on vanity metrics (such as site traffic or number of likes on Facebook) when measuring the success of growth campaigns.

Once we have established our goal and metrics that reflect the information on it, we can start to think about the growth drivers. Drivers are hypothetical ways to achieve this growth, and can be any set of specific ideas or tactics to try (or reject) through experimentation. A powerful growth driver for an airline could be a loyalty program. These programs often help reach new audiences and convert them into leads. Social media channels could be another growth driver, if an airline knows how to manage online reputation. We live in a world where people spend most of their time on social media, but rarely leave positive comments - on the contrary, the most common behavior on social media is to complain about some frustrating aspect of the trip, something that could hurt airlines, unless they have a powerful response and a good community manager who knows how to respond intelligently, responsibly and quickly. Influencer marketing is booming right now and is another potential driver for the airline industry.

Once we establish some growth drivers, we go to a stage in which we validate or reject these through experiments.

Experiments are the way to test your chosen growth driver: Is this really something my airline should invest in? Think of experiments as small campaigns that have one goal: Determine if the driver should become a "big project" or if on the contrary it is not a driver that works in our business. You should test the driver until you are sure that it works (validated!) Or not (rejected!) And always remember to document the learnings. If, for example, we opted for the loyalty driver, a possible experiment would be the realization of a powerful rewards system in which customers can obtain points, which they can then use on several trips or convert them into discounts. Thanks to these bonus points, the customer will always travel with this airline to get more points.

Both learnings and ideas are at the heart of the growth hacking methodology and it is important to have all the learnings documented in one place that is easy for new members to access and refer to in the future. Once an apprenticeship is documented, you know that your airline won´t make the same mistake again or invest in something that didn´t work in the past.

To see the latest growth ideas from the airline industry, all you need to do is sign up with Hypertry. There you can also ask a growth hacker specialized in consulting for assistance.