Growth hacking – your tool to success

Growth hacking has been around and the word has taken many business owners in its grip. Every new start-up is looking for growth hackers to make millions of money and ridiculously increase their sales figure. Those who are aware of the word, know what we are talking about but those who are new to this term, let me explain a bit about growth hacking.

Growth Hacking Overview:

Growth hacking is only a few years old, around 6 years old. The term was first coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis. Growth hacking is a way to increase the social reach of the brand or product. The word hack means a way which is different than the traditional way of doing things; the hacker uses innovative and creative ways to get the job done. Unlike the detailed marketing strategy, the focus of growth hacking and growth hacker is to focus on end result i.e. increasing sales and generate more and more brand awareness. Growth hackers, with their knowledge of product and distribution, find new and technologically advanced ways to promote the product and find new avenues of growth.

Growth hacking has 4 different phases:

• Product-market fit
• Growth is hacked
• Viral
• Retention and optimization

Why has growth hacking become a survival guide for startups?

Growth hacking is kind of marketing; the only difference is that it is only result oriented. Most of the startups initially lack funds and cannot afford to have a big marketing team to plan and strategize their growth. The upsurge of growth hacking has brought forth a modern and new approach that transmogrifies their business without spending much on marketing team and implementation of strategies.

The crux of the matter is that growth hacking is important for startups because:

• They are uncertain about the market response and a good growth hacking strategy works well for them.
• They need quick growth , although growing numbers is a dream of any business but the start-ups need to work fast and grow faster to make their name established in the market.
• They don’t have access to so many resources and brand equity.

There are various tools available which work as a survival guide for the startup, few of them include the following :

• Analytics
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Lead Generation
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• SEO
• Marketing Automation
• Landing Pages
• Social Media

Growth hacking and Digital marketing, what’s the difference?

Well, for most of the people the terms are chaotic or sometimes used interchangeably but there is borderline between growth hacking and digital marketing. Growth hacking deals scalable methods to increase sales and generate brand awareness. It includes everything that drives traffic to your website, retention of customers, word of mouth or anything that promotes your business and motivates the customers to come back to your website. It can be your email signature or a leaderboard in your website or anything that entices and engages the prospective customer.

On the other hand, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s about promoting brands through different ways and medium.

To sum it up, it can be said that growth marketing is a level up of digital marketing.