Are you a tobacco company looking for a way to attract potential customers to expand your business? Do you feel that in the tobacco industry, traditional forms of generating sales no longer bring the expected results? Find out what growth hacking is and how to use it in practice for any tobacco startup or corporation.

Growth hacking is not about magic tricks that will make your consumers spend thousands of dollars on tobacco products. There is more hard work, analysis, and observation in growth marketing than magic tricks that will get interested customers right down your sales funnel.

Growth hacking is a relatively young marketing technique that involves an unconventional approach to all marketing activities, especially in startups or businesses that have been somehow disrupted. Like the tobacco industry with its limitations and swift changes in past 20 years related to healthcare concerns with tobacco consumption. It is a technique that requires a growth hacker to go beyond the scheme of standard marketing campaigns and focus on innovative solutions that will guarantee the expected growth.

The Growth Hacker focuses on finding smarter, less expensive alternatives to traditional digital marketing, such as by making better use of social media, marketing automation, viral marketing, or PPC targeted advertising. The key is to understand your target audience and current market trends and efficiently adopt the demand for new information to supply. After all, if you want to reach the "baby boomer" generation, then you won´t go out of creative video recording on TikTok. 

It all starts with establishing SMART goals, which need to be related to what we call in Growth Hacking North Star Metric: the metric that best translates the value that you bring to the consumer. Your North Start in tobacco could be your sales, retention, repetition or any other metric that you and your management team establish as key. We know that in the tobacco industry it is all about building brand loyalty, and not about trying to convince people to smoke, so this brand building as a goal should be then translated into a specific metric, like repetition. 

Once you have your SMART metrics and your North Star, you design growth drivers. Growth drivers are hypothetical ways in which you can achieve growth: it could be channel related (for example, through partnerships with clubs, restaurants and resellers), buyer related (for example, through entering a new niche or trend, like vaping) or a mix of the two. A driver could also be a sport sponsorship or product innovation. The important thing is that a driver should be limited enough as for it to be able to be validated or rejected through experimentation.

Experimentation is the key to growth hacking and the baseline of the entire methodology. Think about an experiment as a small, narrow tactic that should have a specific result in order to validate or reject a hypothesis. Your drivers should be ideally easily validated by 3 to 10 experiments that should show whether a driver could, or could not, become a part of a scalable strategy for the future. 

Your experimentation cycle should have regular meetings in order to review results and also learnings. Learnings are absolutely essential for a growth hacking methodology to work, and all team members should regularly document and share their learnings in a consistent manner. This is the only way to grow in a transparent way and make sure you won’t make the same mistake again.

To learn about the most effective drivers and experiments for the tobacco industry, all you need to do is register with Hypertry. In addition, there you can also request a personalized consultation if required.