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Let's face it, every business is out there trying to get customers to embrace their services and products. The cost of advertising may have gone up, but sadly its effectiveness is not what it used to be. So what's a good modern solution to level the playing field and give start-ups and other new businesses a chance to compete with the big players in the marketing world?
Growth Hacking Identifies Targeted Opportunities
As a data-driven, full-funnel problem-solving technique, growth hacking has what it takes to swiftly identify opportunities for:
- Driving revenue growth
- Reducing customer churn
- Improving customer acquisition and retention
Paid advertising is a traditional form of marketing that no longer holds a candle to the searing bonfire of the relatively fresh technique called growth hacking. It uses innovative solutions gathered from a range of different user experiences – including customer service and product design – to come up with reliable solutions.
Thousands of dollars are spent performing experiments and conducting surveys over the course of weeks and months to produce reliable market research. But digital tech like Google and Facebook Ads have turned that methodology upside down. Growth hacking now grants businesses superior insight in a matter of hours, if not days, and at much lower costs.
How Is Growth Hacking Different From Typical Digital Marketing?
In addition to being data-driven, all growth hacking is fueled by a rapid-experimentation marketing model that directly influences the full-funnel growth of a business.
And here is the huge surprise: growth hacking is not the same as digital marketing! They are similar, yes, but take entirely different paths to climb the marketing mountain.
With digital marketing, paid advertising, and SEO help businesses find and attract new customers. With growth hacking, the aim is not only about getting leads and traffic but focusing more on referrals and awareness. This is what 'full funnel' means.
Aside from helping reduce burn rates and improving business efficiency, growth hacking has also highlighted the art of thinking outside the traditional-marketing box. And companies all over the world want in.
Growth Hacking Capabilities
Agility is one of the most prominent benefits of growth hacking. This is what helps businesses keep beating the competition. Start-ups, with their need to make great impressions but with only limited resources to do so, need the cost-effectiveness and creativity that growth hacking provides to help them drive growth.
Only a few years ago, plenty of manual intervention was needed if some digital tools were to be used at all. Examples: coding websites from scratch, manually claiming and cleaning data, and back-end developers dealing with APIs to perform analytics.
These days, little to no expertise is needed to use similar tools and produce reliable results. Such technological advancements have introduced businesses to a world of ever-strengthening analytics, digital tools, and automation software. Growth hackers benefit most from this change in the technological tide.
None of this is to say that digital marketing is weak. In fact, it is still highly dynamic and demands businesses to be ready to adapt to market changes or risk losing customers and becoming irrelevant over time. Money matters! The last thing businesses want is to spend a fortune on marketing that has average or low chances of success. Growth hacking raises the success bar like never before.
Growth Hacking Myth-Busting
Before we explore all the core points that make growth hacking so desirable, let's bust a few myths that have accumulated around this outstanding marketing technique.
1. Growth Hacking Only Attracts New Users – WRONG!
It optimizes customer experience and increases revenue. With data insights granting growth hackers in-depth user knowledge, they can fine-tune their marketing and encourage referrals from customers. All this means improved customer retention rates. Growth hacking is not only about getting people interested; it is also about keeping them interested.
2. Growth Hacking Is Illegal – WRONG!
Unconventional ideas and techniques that do not play by traditional marketing rules do not mean they are risky or illegal. Growth hacking brings additional boundary-pushing creativity that will benefit brands. Data scraping and viral marketing are part of the growth hacking package and have proven to attract and retain customers. As long as your team stays ethical, law-abiding, and respectful of people's privacy, there is nothing illegal going on with their use of growth hacking.
3. Growth Hacking Needs Skilled Marketers – WRONG!
A basic understanding of different business elements like data analysis, marketing, web development, and product design will help improve your growth hacking techniques. That said, you don't need to gain mastery of this technique to effectively use it and see results. You'll be surprised to know that generalists, with their broad understanding of various marketing topics, make the best growth hackers as opposed to specialists per se.
4. Growth Hacking Is Just A Marketing Shortcut – WRONG!
Speed and shortcuts are two very different things. Growth hacking uses the former in combination with data-driven insights and creative strategies to drive growth for clients. Speed begets speed. Growth hacking is known for using innovative ideas to ensure swift growth. A clear understanding of how your business works and a dedicated team to work on your growth hacking strategy every day will result in success. Since so much of growth hacking takes relatively less time, people assume it is a shortcut when it isn't. Also, since so much of growth hacking is about experimentation and testing, nobody in their right mind can logically call it a shortcut. Once you arrive at the right growth hacking combo for your brand, the sky will become the limit.
Top 3 Growth Hacking Mindsets
"I think, therefore I am." French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes said that in 1637, and his words still apply in the modern era, particularly in the field of growth hacking. Let's explore the top 3 mindsets every growth hacking team needs to have.
1. Spontaneous
Being decisive and following that up with swift executive actions are the way to go with growth hacking. Whatever idea a brand or business comes up with, customers need to start liking it. So it's the growth hacker's duty to squeeze that idea for all it's worth. As you can imagine, timing is of great importance in growth hacking.
2. Adaptable
Failure is part of life, and that logic doubly applies to marketing. Getting it wrong is an inevitable part of the growth hacking 'experiment.' If seen in the right light, failures can also be critical and game-changing moments. Learning from one's mistakes and quickly adapting to a new idea or trend can be termed 'growth.' New strategies created based on what a marketing team learns from their mistakes can be a success 'hack.'
3. Data-Driven
This is the heart and soul of all growth hacking strategies. Data drives the decision-making process and informs the strategy and ideation phases. Online campaigns and user behavior contain vital data that can take a product or service to new markets. Such data also helps growth hackers learn from any mistakes they might make and work quantitatively on future goals. Quality data can also help create referral programs to boost a brand's profits.
Growth Hacking & Experimentation Are Bonded For Life
To ensure swift and sustainable growth for a brand, data and experimentation are the biggest tools in a growth hacker's kit. By testing marketing theories before implementing them in the real world, the act of experimentation becomes an important catalyst to drive growth at cost-effective rates.
Such experimentation also helps growth hackers study various marketing tactics in real-time before aptly scaling them to suit a brand's goals. Experimentation elements in marketing include multivariate testing, landing pages, A/B testing, and split testing (for campaigns).
The impact – target audience, design, brand messaging – of each experimental variable helps growth hackers understand essential metrics to help with customer acquisition, conversion, and finally retention. With a clear understanding of a client's business objectives for any given marketing campaign, growth hackers can choose where to focus their attention. This can be anything from getting new users to gathering important customer feedback.
Clear Metric Tracking For Accuracy
Only with a clear focus on a client's business objectives can the correct growth hacking experiments be tested to gain accurate outcomes. Defining clear tracking metrics helps growth hackers fine-tune marketing experiments, reduce errors, and increase chances of success.
Metrics can include KPIs (key performance indicators) like customer acquisition, retention, and conversion. They can also be based on distinct goals like how to lower the cost per acquisition or ways to increase customer lifetime value.
Thanks to clear metric tracking, the ideas your team creates can produce optimum results. Growth hackers can confidently sit down to play with targeting, design, and messaging concepts tailored to suit the demands or needs of specific customer bases.
Game Of Choices
Once the hypothesis phase is done – and even there, marketers need to make key choices – the insights you've gathered will need to be tested. But there's no sure-fire set of tests that is guaranteed to work for every business.
Based on a campaign's resource demands, feasibility ratings, and potential customer impact, you will need to make active choices on which experiments to test. For growth hackers, this means focusing on experiments that can yield the highest possible chance of success and, consequently, provide value to both the customer and the brand.
One of the core aims of growth hacking is to achieve all this without breaking the bank. Your choices during the testing phase will have a direct impact on how many resources you will end up spending on any given campaign. In the game of choices, choose carefully.
What To Do With Your Growth Hacking Experiments?
The time for growth hacking experiments is complete, and you are about to collect data on the results. What do you do? Almost all growth hackers turn to tracking and analytics tools. This helps them monitor the way users interact with various marketing or product campaign elements.
As a result, growth hackers gain vital insight into user behavior. This includes people's purchasing decisions, lifetime value, preferences, etc. By figuring out what works and what doesn't, growth hackers can adjust or modify experiments to make the most of successful ideas. They can even use the same successful ideas in future campaigns, with little to no risk of failure.
Most of these tools allow you to perform in-depth analysis and reporting on experiments conducted at any stage of the marketing funnel. Even if you face challenges, your team will always have the option to seek advice from other growth hackers worldwide. Marketing conferences and events are the perfect place to learn about how you can use a range of tools, methodologies, and techniques to drive growth and revenue for your brand.
Growth Hacking Experiments 101: Who Runs Them?
You can choose to have a third party run growth hacking experiments for you or let your own in-house team take on the challenge. For businesses, it is vital that their marketing teams know how to use growth hacking strategies to achieve rapid growth. In-house teams are especially beneficial in this instance. They come to know your business goals and brand image better than any external team ever will.
Should you choose to get an external team to run your growth hacking experiments, make sure to bring them up to speed on your business goals. You need to find growth hackers who have a deep understanding of marketing trends, user experience, digital tools, and product design. Most importantly, you need to ensure that these experts stay in tune with your company's goals and brand image.
The Madras Branding Company Offers The Full Package
The Madras Branding Company, located in Chennai, specializes in branding, digital marketing, and related services. With an experienced team, the company uses growth hacking techniques that are customized for each brand’s unique needs. Whether you're looking to improve customer acquisition, boost revenue, or retain more customers, The Madras Branding Company offers a range of services that can help you achieve your business goals.
Growth Hacking Tools For Your Business
Besides in-depth marketing research and advanced analytics, growth hackers use top digital tools to help you push your brand beyond limits. Here are three top tools you should know about.
1. Google Analytics
This is one of the most popular analytics tools. It lets marketers know where your users come from and how they behave. Google Analytics is the first step to understanding customer demographics and analyzing user behavior to help your business develop successful campaigns
2. Unbounce
Landing pages are a key aspect of growth hacking. They help reduce the bounce rate of campaigns and boost your conversion rates. Unbounce is one of the top landing page builders in the world, letting businesses build custom pages without needing to code. Growth hackers can also use it to experiment with landing page variations and see which one performs best.
3. Buffer
Social media management is often integral to any growth hacking strategy. With Buffer, you can streamline your content creation and distribution across multiple social platforms. The tool is highly customizable and provides analytics to track engagement and performance, ensuring that your social media efforts are effective.
Final Thoughts
The need for growth hacking has become clear. It is no longer just a trend but a must-have marketing strategy for businesses looking to scale quickly and effectively. As the digital world evolves, growth hacking will continue to shape how companies approach customer acquisition, retention, and overall business growth.
If you're looking to harness the power of growth hacking for your brand, partnering with a company like The Madras Branding Company could be your first step toward achieving unprecedented growth and success in your industry.