Growth hacking is a broad term used to describe strategies that focus on generating quick growth for a company. The idea is to get as much attention for your business as quickly as possible. Most often, growth hacking is a concept that’s sought-after by start-ups that need to generate a lot of growth, without spending a lot of money.

Over the years, growth-hacking has become something of a buzzword, with countless companies creating their own distinct definition of the term. Today, we’re going to explain the basics of growth hacking in a way that any business can understand.

How Does Growth Hacking Work?

Growth hacking is all about creating a product that your customers want, promoting that product, and making sure that you consistently develop growth using creativity, analytics, and tested metrics. Despite what some people think, growth hacking isn’t about tricking your way into a suddenly successful business or using black-hat techniques for success. Instead, it’s about solving marketing issues in an innovative way.

To begin growth hacking, you’ll need to evaluate your market carefully and come up with a product that you know people are willing to pay for. When you launch the product, you’ll need to keep testing and adjusting your strategy to make sure that you’re constantly optimising and improving whatever you’re doing. A/B testing is a common component of growth hacking.

Successful growth hacking isn’t as simple as it seems. Usually, to achieve your goals, you’ll need to try several different creative approaches and gather a lot of hard data. However, if you can get to the bottom of growth hacking, then you can boost your business prosperity in no time.

Growth Hacking Strategies

Over the years, experts in the marketing and promotional world have developed several unique approaches to growth hacking. However, for the main part, most growth hacking solutions fall into the following realms:

• Advertising
• Product Marketing
• Content Marketing

Depending on which avenue you go down with your growth hacking strategy, there are various low-cost ways that you can get the word out and convince people to start talking about your product. Content marketing is one of the most popular forms of growth hacking because it doesn’t require a great deal of initial investment, but the results can be phenomenal.

Choosing your Growth Hacking Plan

With content marketing, you may decide to launch your growth hacking campaign using something like video content, or a blog that shares valuable content with the masses. The idea is to share as much great content as possible, to drive your customers into supporting your brand. With product marketing, you’ll need to consider various techniques that make your product more appealing. Some options include:

• Gamifying the sales process with referral campaigns and rewards for people who send new customers your way.
• Leveraging the psychological phenomenon of “FOMO” – fear of missing out – with an invite-only product or service.
• Offering incentives for referrals that benefit both your new user and your referring party.
• Investing in affiliate marketing, which will also use some amount of content marketing.

The key to successful growth hacking through content marketing is knowing your audience well enough to create the kind of content that they’ll be drawn to. If the content you create is compelling enough, then your customers will begin to share it on your behalf, leading to word of mouth marketing, and even viral campaigns.

How to Start Growth Hacking

All successful growth hacking campaigns must start with a solid goal. With your business leaders beside you, it’s important to think about what you want to accomplish in the long term with your organisation. Importantly, when you’re establishing your goals, you’ll need to make them as specific as possible. It’s not enough to say that you simply want to double the number of followers you have on Facebook within six months. You also need to think about how you’re going to drive these goals, what sort of content you’re going to use, how you’re going to measure your success and more.

With your goals in mind, you’ll be able to begin tracking your progress, and making incremental changes to the campaigns that you run both online and offline. There are plenty of tools available online today that help with tracking digital campaigns, including social media management tools and analytics services like Google Ads. If you haven’t already sat down and listed all of the metrics you want to track, make sure that you do this before you begin growth hacking.