Sustained growth through Growth Hacking
If your growth slows, your competitors will move ahead. But sustaining growth is getting more challenging. Attention-seeking tactics, whether ads, events, or endorsements, are expensive, and often don’t cut through the noise. Marketing departments may hope costly campaigns or heavy discounts will attract new customers. But as soon as promotions stop, growth slows. Such tactics aren’t sustainable. So how can businesses realize sustained growth? A new approach, known as growth hacking, offers an alternative to traditional marketing. Growth hacking originated in Silicon Valley, and it’s been responsible for the success of some of the most famous brands to emerge in the past decade. Growth hacking has matured into a rigorous and powerful approach that evaluates all customer interactions with a brand, so these interactions deliver more value. The term growth hacking was coined by Sean Ellis, a noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Ellis notes three main components of the approach:
- Cross-functional collaboration, bringing marketing, product and customer service teams together
- Insightful quantitative and qualitative data on customer preferences and behaviours
- Quick generation and testing of ideas to improve the value of products.
The growth hacking mindset seeks to apply many small changes that work together to make products and services more valued by customers — and more profitable for companies. Growth hacking can be more cost-effect and agile than traditional marketing, which tends to rely on campaign events instead of incremental product improvements. Unlike traditional marketing, growth hacking is not focused solely on customer acquisition. It looks at how to improve customer engagement in all phases, addressing behaviours such as retention and referrals.
As growth hacking has gained popularity, some people have misunderstood it. Growth hacking is not a buzz word. Nor is about introducing clever new tactics to spike growth quickly. One or two tactics, no matter how clever, can’t deliver sustainable growth. New tactics quickly get copied by competitors. Companies need a process that can keep delivering results.
Growth hacking can benefit all kinds of companies, not just startups or technology firms. Firms of all kinds are concerned about growth. Growth hacking can help if:
- Your business growth is slowing and you face increased competition
- Your business growth has been robust, but you face uncertainty
- Your business growth potential is great but still unrealized.
Growth hacking helps companies discover what customers really love about their products, and how to make them love the products even more. Growth hacking makes products and services more compelling. Compelling products are more profitable.
Advertising won’t make customers love your product or service. How companies interact with their customers has a big effect on customer satisfaction. These interactions relate to channels, content, product features, offers, user experience, and customer service, among other factors. Sometimes, seemingly minor details, not immediately obvious, can have a big influence on how valuable customers find a product or service. Growth hacking identifies what factors have the biggest leverage, and how to improve these.
If you are new growth hacking and want help on how to set up a growth team in your company, please contact our team at The Next Big Thing.
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