Growth hacking is a methodology based on the assumption that all that matters in companies growth. For the translation and localization industry, it means everything you do should be analyzed for its potential impact on scalable business growth. Growth hacker as a specialist to contract combines marketing, sales and programming competences and overall, their sole purpose is to maximize sales throughout all the funnel:

• Acquisition: how to get more potential customers for translation and localization needs 
• Activation: how to activate the clients that we already have in the database (but, for example, they haven’t ordered any projects for a while)
• Retention: how to make sure the clients will come back to us when they need translation and localization services
• Revenue: how to get more revenue, for example, from affiliates and partners
• Referral: how to make sure that the current customers can refer us to others 

You probably know that the goal of any marketing should be long-term sustainability, not just short-term profit. Growth hacking is about both optimization and lead generation. Imagine that your business is a basket and your customers are water. You don´t want to pour water into a leaky bucket, it´s a waste of money. Therefore, a true growth hacker must, above all, take care of customer retention and in growth methodology we focus a lot on customer satisfaction.

This term is especially popular among companies and startups whose goal is to build the so-called product / market fit and achieve rapid growth in the early stages of introducing a new products or services to the market. Growth hacking focuses on reducing the cost of acquiring a lead, thanks to which, with a small budget (compared to competitors), you can generate the expected business outcome. Growth hacking skills combine marketing, sales, data analysis, design and IT proficiency. This doesn’t mean that in order to truly implement the methodology you need to have all of these skills at your disposal, but knowledge of these three areas allows, to conduct effective marketing and sales activities and achieve the company´s goals.

Sales skills are essential in growth as you need to know your target group and you need to know how to uncover  their hidden needs in order to make your marketing and sales message deliver new customers. In other words - you have to be a good seller! Marketing knowledge is a second must, since you must be able to run experiments through Google Ads, Facebook Ads campaigns, create cold mailing sequences, website optimization, content marketing or social media.

The ability to think logically is, however, the most important one of all. You have to be a good analyst, after all, your actions will include, for example, landing page optimization and conducting A / B tests. For this purpose, you should get acquainted with analytical tools such as Google Analytics or other tools for qualitative data analysis and user behavior on the website.

Proficiency in technological innovations - you need to be up-to-date and know what tools to use in order to achieve your business goals more efficiently. An additional feature that can make your work easier is the knowledge of the basics of programming, which, for example, will allow you to create various types of scripts that you will use in marketing activities.

These skills, with different intensity of features, will allow you to effectively navigate in the area of ​​growth hacking. Once you know that you have skills in place, you start by 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 translation and localization industry could be your sales, retention, repetition or any other metric that you and your management team establish as key. 

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 consulting services, web development agencies or other players that could need translation and localization services), buyer related (for example, through entering a new buyer, like a solopreneur that wants to expand new market on a price) or service related (if you decide to offer, for example, subscription based services that are a fusion of translation and marketing). A driver could also be a channel, like Facebook Lead Ads for specific target client or TikTok campaigns for new customer generation. 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 team meetings meetings in order to review results and also learnings. 

• Were the drivers narrow enough or should we create other driver?
• What experiments worked? Which did not? 
• What can we learn from experiments in past week?
• Were these experiments enough to validate our drivers? 
• Are there any new trends in translation and localization we could use? 

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.