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What is Growth Hacking? – An easy analysis of this digital topic.

growth haking_thedigitalhacks

For marketers and digital geeks, this term is almost a nightmare. You read and hear it everywhere!

It simply represents the new digital topic trend.

Although it is more than that.

All companies are looking for talented growth hackers, even if this profession has been around only for the last few years.

However many between the online enthusiast doesn’t even know what exactly it’s Growth Hacking.

Let’s take a step back and analyze the subject.

Article Structure:

1- Definition.

2- Process.

3- Examples.

1- What does Growth Hacking mean?

The term “Growth Hacker” was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010, to define a person who works with the sole purpose of achieving the rapid and exponential growth of the company.

It represents the mix of strategies that lead a startup to become a well-established company. 

A/B testing, Advertising, SEO, Email Marketing, Automation and website customizations. All these processes can take part in an overall growth hacking strategy.  

The goal, as usual, is to generate as many leads and sales as possible for the business. 

2-What does a Growth Hacking process include?

Usually, in a StartUp environment, there are not many resources. So, the Growth Hacker must be able to produce significant results with low investments. Habitually, when a new market is penetrated, to do that, you rely on what Neil Patel also calls as the “Pirate Metrics.”.

Its funnel included:

  1. Acquisition: How to make yourself known.
  2. Activation: How to make users try your product/service and are satisfied with it.
  3. Retention: How to get them back.
  4. Revenue: How to earn from them.
  5. Referral: How to get them to recommend you.

Acquisition.

Users acquisition techniques can be multiple SEO, Paid Ads, PR.
The objective here is to keep low the customer acquisition cost while trying to attract the maximum number of target users. In this phase, giving the limited budget is important to have clear in mind the users’ Bio Persona.

Activation.

Once we know who our target users are, it’s time to move to the next step. Create useful and free content.
Nowadays, none wants to give something for nothing. That’s why is critical creating some piece of content that we can give to the early adopters in a change to their emails/signup.

At The Digital Hacks what we do is:


A)- Build a Case Study or free Whitepaper.
To design a new piece of content we usually use Canva.


B)- Create a Landing Page in line with the piece of content.
A landing page is a page with no menu, where the user can opt only for a single action. For example, register into a form.
On that page, we ask the user to signup to receive the whitepaper.
Our landing pages are always designed on Elementor.


C)- We promote the landing through Blogs, Groups, Social, Ads etc… Oftentimes we use also Lead Generation tools like DuxSoup to automate LinkedIn prospecting by targeting your specific users with personalized LinkedIn outreach.

The email is the first step of our funnel because that way we can transform a prospect into a lead and try to convert it into a client.

What can we do if we don’t have the users’ email?
A process we can follow in order to generate leads is using LinkedIn to create company lists and then scrape those domains through tools like Hunter.io in order to find employee email addresses.

funnel marketing TDH

Retention.


The process to re-engage with those leads and gain them back.
Once we got their email address we can re-engage them through email marketing. At TDH we use Sendniblue as our email marketing and automation tool. This software allows us to build transactional emails and targeted campaigns.

Understand Users’ behaviour on our website.
Another essential component, after being able to send the user back to our website is understanding what actions he performs.

In order to understand users’ behaviour on your website, you can use a tool like Hotjar. This software allows you to identify the actions performed by the users so as to optimize their website experience.

How to convert an anonymous prospect into a lead?
Regularly happens to see website traffic increasing to our website without having the possibility to actually determine who is browsing through it.
Using Leadinfo you will be able to transform anonymous prospects into valuable leads. This software gives you vital info like email, telephone or website domain so then to re-engage with that traffic.

Revenue.

How much does it cost us to acquire a new customer? What is the profit? What is the customer lifetime value (CLV)?
All these analyzes are fundamental to define the KPIs needed to signal business growth.

Every sale is important, sure, but as an entrepreneur and marketer, you want to know which customers will generate recurring value for your business so you can invest more in re-acquiring them.

Referral.

If sales are important good feedbacks are vital.
In the digital world, a bad online reputation can destroy you in an instant. When you get the first satisfied customers, offer them discounts in terms of recommending your product/service to a friend.
This can help you grow very fast.

3- Examples.

paypal TDH

There are many examples of companies, especially digital ones, that in the last decade have exploited techniques inherent to growth hacking to obtain exponential growth in short spans of time.

Airbnb.

Once identified the market necessity Airbnb founders used the platform Craiglist to push users, through automated emails, to list their property also on Airbnb.

PayPal.

The payment platform started its gigantic growth using a referral scheme. Yes, in the early days the US company was paying 10$ to its user if they refer the App to a friend.

Uber.


The mobility app has attacked every new market depending on the needs of the public and the number of taxis and cars in circulation. The system is highly scalable as the drivers use their own means and the app only provides the webspace.

Slack.


This App created a market that users didn’t even know they needed. Yes, because information overload during working hours was a normal thing. Slack has arrived and has revolutionized corporate communication, making our life easier.

Would you like to know the must-have Hacks Tools List? Read the Article 👉  The must-have Hacks tools kit!

And here we are at the conclusion.
In this article, we have touched on one of the hot topics in today’s digital landscape. We have therefore defined what growth hacking is, some applications and finally some examples of companies that have benefited from it in the first years to recover exponentially.
If you have any doubts ask us in the comments.
I hope you enjoyed reading.

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