Growth hacking may be a term you’ve heard in passing at one time or another within the past few years but perhaps it didn’t quite register exactly what it meant. Unfortunately, the word ‘hacking’ seems to give a wrong impression at first, especially where the internet is concerned but, in this sense, it is a very, very good thing.
Growth hacking simply means a hack, a quick process, aimed at business growth. It involves any and all strategies, especially in marketing, aimed at business growth. Growth hacking, therefore, is aimed entirely at ways in which to accomplish rapid growth of a company, especially startups. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the ways to achieve this.
Marketing is the key to immediate success
Growth hacking is aimed at a threefold tier that ultimately is the key to success. What you would be told by a growth marketing consulting firm would be that they aim to:
- Get traffic to your business (online or land-based)
- Provide strategies for conversion (build a customer base)
- Ensure customer satisfaction (return business)
And, basically, that’s what growth hacking is in its simplest understanding. It’s a way to build immediate notice within your market and then give your business strategies aimed at conversion. Also, the key to building a massive customer base involves getting customers to come back. Little growth is possible if you are simply moving first time customers in and out the doors, virtual or brick-and-mortar.
How growth hacking achieves all that
In terms of marketing, it’s all about using data-driven strategies with a futuristic approach in mind. It’s about being a step ahead of the competition in terms of what consumers are likely to be looking for by the time marketing strategies are brought live. By the time many marketers hit cyberspace with strategies, consumers are already moving forward and looking for the next step. Growth marketing, then, needs to be able to interpret data in real time to see a pattern moving forward. Growth hacking is a science backed strategy of assessing market movement to project where it is going in the near, and sometimes more distant, future.
Strategies most successful
This is where you’d hear the oft-used cliché, it’s time to hit the ground running. Growth hacking involves using any, and all, marketing strategies to cover an entire market base. It involves:
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Social Media
- PPC
- Affiliate Marketing
And any other marketing strategy necessary to hit the market on all fronts. It’s an all-out attempt to let an audience know who you are, what you do, and how you can answer a need which other brands are unable to fulfil.
The fast and the furious
What this all boils down to is that growth hacking is a way to hack, take shortcuts, to accomplish things that could otherwise take years to accomplish. If ever there was a hack that could help startups and small businesses achieve major growth in a short period of time, this would be it. It’s all about building momentum today by keeping watchful eyes on the future. That’s growth hacking in a nutshell.
