Nowadays, this new growth hacking trend is the talk of the town, making the front pages of magazines and thousands of blog articles and videos on specialised channels.

• However, what is it really?
• And more importantly, can it be applied to investment banking?
• Can the investment banking industry really apply the growth methodology and active experimentation framework?
• And most important of all, how can it help me or my company in the industry?

Growth hacking is a relatively new approach in the field of marketing, which focuses solely on the growth of companies in the investment banking industry. The aim of its extremely effective methodology is to quickly test ideas that can improve the customer experience before investing a lot of resources, copy and scale up ideas that can work, and modify or abandon those that don´t work.

First, we start with metrics to measure the growth of our investment banking company. The key metrics should always be the ones that bring the best growth to your company, such as the number of current clients, client portfolio increment or potential highly qualified leads.

Once we know which metrics are the most important, it is time to set goals. Goals should be SMART, which means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Like increasing turnover by 4% in the next month, positioning the business in the expert network to generate better leads or increase the portfolio of clients by 5% in the next quarter. Think of objectives as a desired increase, or decrease, in your key metrics.

Once we know what growth brings us, which KPIs to focus on and also what the SMART objectives associated with them are, it is time to design or devise growth drivers. Growth drivers are hypothetical ways of achieving our objectives, and we will validate or reject them through small campaigns, called experiments. Possible growth drivers for the investment sector could be use of chatbots, user experience optimisation on the site, big data analysis for personality based marketing campaigns, smart remarketing, or increment of user trust through success stories. Which one suits us best, and which one should we focus on? This is what we are going to test through growth hacking methodology. Chatbots can be a great investment for your company.

If we know how to use chatbots in a smart way, we can minimise costs and provide exceptional customer experience at the same time. Optimising user experience can be another growth driver. After several years of digitisation, people have become increasingly empowered. They browse from different devices, process more information sources, spend more time making comparisons and ultimately demand more. This is why it is important to bring the digital transformation of the enterprise to the deadline. How can we make this possible? Every customer contact with a brand must be seamless, here the user experience has a lot to say. There should be no gaps in platform availability, no matter which platform is accessed from. In addition, it is also important to maintain consistency and continuity between different brand channels, but which channels are vital to our business?

• Which platforms should we start paying more attention to?
• How to consider the synchronisation of user data at any point of interaction?

By looking for opportunities to optimise the user experience we could increase sales and the conversion rate of leads to customers.

Finally, as part of the strategy, we could gain the trust and confidence of our investors.

Investment banking is an area where trust is key. In fact, they manage one of a person´s most precious assets: savings.

Therefore, if the client does not trust us, it is likely that in the end no product will be contracted. Ensuring that customer data and transactions are always secure is never enough resources. Mistakes here can have very serious commercial consequences: How can we give this trust to our customers, how can we differentiate ourselves from larger companies or companies with more advertising power, what should our short-term goals be with our investors? All these questions and more are the ones we have to answer to find the right marketing strategy, answering them from small tests that allow us to have a global vision of the most important thing: What can make us GROW. With growth hacking methodology implementation, we will test all these hypotheses through experiments and therefore, use learning path to build strategy through experimentation.

Finally, the lessons learned. Lessons learned are essential to document in order to know what has worked in the past and what should not be repeated. You need to have a regular feedback loop and keep track of the learnings on an ongoing basis.

Want to learn more about how to apply growth hacking to your investment banking business? Sign up for Hypertry and request a one-on-one session.