What really is growth hacking? Does it apply to all types of industries and businesses? This is a question that we receive a lot. If you work in the engineering industry and wonder if growth hacking is for you, then read on.

Growth hacking derives from Growth - growth in this case applied to business - and hacking, which is defined as the ability to find innovative solutions to real-world problems and connotes a certain sense of virality or spirality. It´s a broad definition, and it all comes down to how to implement the underlying methodology that is the key foundation of all business growth techniques.

Growth Hacking is a discipline that aims to increase the profits of any company with the least possible expense and effort. Depending on the type of services (or products) provided by the company and its sector of belonging, this can translate into acquiring more customers, increasing the average ticket, looking for new markets to obtain additional income streams, making a cost profitable ... etc.

For companies related to the engineering sector, both the perception and the positioning of the product are key. This requires the implementation of an active experimentation methodology that could be described as: we have this goal of getting more customers right now, how are we going to achieve it?

First of all, we set ourselves an objective, such as obtaining investments to develop new machinery or improve the existing one. Another objective could be to obtain public funds. This can be achieved, for example, by defining our new machine in a way that meets the necessary requirements for government funding. Any type of KPI that will make a company grow should be measured and then SMART goals could be established, which are basically the increase or decrease of these KPIs during a specific period of time, measured in the most realistic way possible.

The next step after setting a goal is to design the growth drivers. These are the theoretical ways in which an engineering company could achieve these goals. 

• Will we sell more if we send a semi-automatic email to several potential customers?
• should we instead focus on composing hyper-personalized emails to a few?
•  If we market our products as solutions to problems like pollution, will we get public funding?

How we achieve these goals are called growth drivers, and in the process we come up with as many of them as we can. We then tested these drivers through experiments.

Experiments are set up to determine whether a growth driver will make the company grow. Suppose your company sends an automated email to a large number of potential customers. Different types of emails should be sent to a fraction of potential customers. Then we should analyze which ones give us the most product sales and have the best performance metrics. Before doing something on a large scale, experiment with it. Decide if you achieve your goal and if so determine the most effective way to do it.

• Do semi-automated emails work better than hyper-personalized ones?
• What are the opportunity costs of both?
• How much time do we spend on both of them?

Regardless of whether we can validate or reject the growth drivers, we must write down everything we have learned and keep it well documented. This is crucial to knowing which strategies work and discarding the ones that don´t in the future.

By signing up for Hypertry, you can get examples of experiments, growth drivers, and learnings tailored to the engineering industry.