What is Growth hacking? Essential skills of a Growth hacker
The concept of Growth Hacking is what is being searched for by many keywords. This is a relatively new and quite exciting concept related to growth. Implementing Growth hacking is the best solution for businesses to achieve their desired growth goals.
So what is growth hacking? What basic skills does a growth hacker need? Let’s find out with CleverAds in the article below!
1. What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking uses resource-saving and cost-effective digital marketing tactics to help grow a business. Or understand Growth hacking is an Internet marketing term for strategies focused on growth.
Growth Hacking is the intersection between two elements Marketing and Coding.
Startups and small businesses often use growth hacking to attract many users with a limited budget in a short time. However, growth hacking is a scalable concept that applies to any online business that wants to sustain growth.
2. Benefits of Growth hacking
2.1. ROI – tight control of growth rate
ROI uses data to inform every decision made and accurately track the performance of a growth strategy. From there, it can be easy to see which growth attack strategies are working as expected and which are not—persistence in implementing growth strategies with potential customers, eliminating unpromising customers.
2.2. Minimum cost
In essence, Groth hacking is designed to use your resources in the most economical way possible. This means using tactics like ensuring landing pages leverage SEO best practices to rank high in search engines for important keywords. Also, writing impactful content like a case study and sharing it widely across social media channels is a great tactic.
2.3. Resource optimization
Growth hacking strategies are typically developed and implemented by a single person on the product or engineering team and do not require implementation by the entire marketing team. Thus, implementing Growth hacking instead of other strategies will help businesses save resources, taking advantage of the remaining resource allocation to other things.
3. Difference between Growth hacking and Traditional Marketing
Many people think that growth hacking and traditional marketing are the same. However, there are pronounced differences.
Similarities
- Growth hacking is like Marketing in that its ultimate aim is to attract customers or encourage more people to use a particular product or service. However, due to its roots in the startup community, it relies heavily on tactics that don’t involve big-budget spending that is accessible to larger businesses.
Differences
- First, growth hacking focuses on growth, which means focusing on all marketing funnel stages. Meanwhile, Marketing focuses on attracting customers and building and positioning the brand.
- Growth hackers will execute the campaign from start to finish independently, while Marketers will use supporting data from developers, designers, analysts, and data scientists to build campaign ideas.
- Third, if Growth hacking relies on accurately measured metrics to optimize factors for growth spurts, then Traditional Marketing makes intuitive guesses.
4. A portrait of a Growth hacker
People who do Growth hacking are called Growth hackers. The term was first coined by Sean Ellis, founder and current CEO of GrowthHackers, who heads Dropbox.com’s growth among a multitude of other positions.
In a 2010 blog post, Ellis wrote:
“A growth hacker is someone whose real goal is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized for its potential impact on scalable growth.”
“An effective growth hacker also needs the discipline to follow a growth hacking process that prioritizes ideas (their own and others in the company), test ideas, and affords analytical skills to know which tested growth drivers to keep and which to cut. The faster this process can be iterated, the more likely they will find scalable, repeatable ways to grow the business.”
Growth hackers are experts at studying how people use products and constantly testing and optimizing every digital touchpoint to attract potential customers to buy and drive revenue for the company.
Basic skills of Growth hacker
- First, it is necessary to have the ability to analyze data the ability to be creative to “bounce” ideas from the database.
Only when performing data analysis can we know the status of the business growth problem, where the cause comes from, and then propose appropriate solutions for the Growth hacking campaign.
- The second is to know how to implement the test.
Testing what works and weeding out what doesn’t are central to growth hacking. Only through a consistent process of hypothesizing, testing, and refining can the tricks to help drive business growth be discovered. In addition, any job or strategy needs an implementation process. Performing the steps in the correct sequence and linking the steps together will bring high results for Growth hacking.
- Third is the application of technology.
Because Growth hacking is Internet marketing, it is important to firmly grasp and apply technology to the strategy. That is, when a startup has an idea and wants to implement it on a large scale, it will have to move that product to an automated technology scale to be able to do it quickly, make it big and build a standardized process.
In addition to the above skills, an effective growth hacking person must clearly understand the product’s nature and the departments’ functions. This is an indispensable and basic thing for a Growth hacker, “knowing yourself, knowing you, winning a hundred battles.” Therefore, the best way that companies often do this is to focus on creating the best conditions for training internal employees capable of becoming experts in growth hacking.
5. Example of Growth hacking – Grab’s rapid growth strategy
Grab is a technology company providing transportation and commuting services that started in June 2012. Since the beginning of its business, Grab has constantly been expanding its boundaries and has even achieved remarkable growth.
After five years of joining Southeast Asia, Grab acquired Uber on March 26, 2018. After taking over, Grab has grown rapidly, launching food delivery services, a financial platform, and an open ecosystem. In 2019, Grab was valued at 14 billion USD, becoming the most giant unicorn in Southeast Asia. As of April 2021, the Grab app has over 214 million downloads and is active in over 400 cities.
With the growth hacking problem, Grab has broken down the goal, thereby calculating how each department will contribute to achieving that goal.
For example, to increase ten orders per day, the marketing team responsible for pulling customers to the app will need to do what the promotion department needs to convert how many people use the service. And to reach 100 orders per month, the marketing team would need to push 30,000 customers; the promotion team would have to convert those 30,000 customers into 300 orders and to fulfill 300 orders, it would take 40 drivers to complete.”
Breaking down the goal helps Grab carry out Growth hacking and understand how they will achieve their growth goals without having to wait until the end of the month and summarize the activities.
6. Conclusion
Ultimately, a successful growth hacking strategy requires product-market fit. Therefore, a growth hacker must try to develop and optimize a market-appropriate product before bringing it to market.
The above article is the basic definition of growth hacking and the skills required of a growth hacker. For growth hacking to be effective, businesses must have attractive advertising campaigns. Implementation of advertising will help improve measurement value, control, and save business costs.
