In your search to improve your digital marketing efforts, you may have encountered growth hacking more than once. In an industry full of buzz words and difficult lingo, it’s understandable if you feel confused with what the term actually means.
The internet increasingly becomes a powerful marketing tool as the world continues to become connected. As 40,000 Google searches are made every second, finding a way to capitalize some of that number into converted sales for your business will be critical. Growth hacking can secure your long-term success through its data-focused and cost-effective services.
This article will demystify what growth hacking is about, why companies of all sizes should use it, and the most effective growth hacking strategies to immediately improve your business’ bottom line.
Defining Growth Hacking
Let’s get the most obvious question out of the way: just what is growth hacking, anyway?
Growth hacking refers to a set of innovative and affordable strategies companies and individuals use to grow their customer base. This approach makes marketers look at the data, observe the growing trends in the market, and use specialized tools to come up with high-yield strategies to attract and retain customers.
The term comes from the phrase “growth hacker” that was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. Ellis is a critical part of Dropbox’s growth, and he invented the position when he tried to look for someone to take over his spot that is different from a traditional marketing specialist.
A Growth Hacker’s Tasks
Now that we have a working definition of what growth hacking is, it’s time to understand what a growth hacker can do to help your business reach and convert more customers.
Watch the Trends
The market is always in a flux, and there’s always the potential for an object or trend to completely change our lifestyle and purchasing habits. A growth hacker’s job is to watch out for these trends to ensure your marketing efforts are up to par with the industry’s rocket-speed changes.
Use the Ideal Growth Hacking Tools
The blossoming of growth hacking over the past decade brought new software and tools that help implement your growth hacking strategies properly. A capable growth hacker knows which tools can help them perform their tasks.
Achieve Their Business Goals
The main motivation that drives growth hackers into watching trends and using specialized software is to directly connect their efforts to the company’s business goals. You can rely on a capable hacker to increase awareness and inquiries from potential customers or improve your retention rates.
Does Your Company Need a Growth Hacker?
Today’s current economic climate require businesses to come up with aggressive and flexible tactics to get the attention of their customers. Due to the oversaturation of online content, having a unique product that addresses your customer’s pain points is no longer enough to ensure long-term stability.
A growth hacker is a necessary presence due to their custom-made conversion strategies. You can assign one of your marketers to learn the specifics of growth hacking and incorporate their learnings into your overall inbound marketing plan.
Training your own growth hacker doesn’t provide the immediate impact a professional offers, through. A knowledgeable growth hacker can quickly come up with tactics based on hypothesis and data to help you better sell your product’s USP to the market and drive more leads into loyal customers.
AAARRR Funnel: The Growth Hacking Framework
As we discussed earlier, growth hacking is all about finding the right opportunity to break through the market and capture their attention. However, that doesn’t mean that growth hackers don’t base their work on an established set of rules.
Hackers worth their salt use the AAARRR funnel to assess their strategies and identify which parts need work. The acronym stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral.
While this funnel sounds similar to the traditional inbound marketing funnel, they differ in the way hackers use them. Let’s go through each step and see how they can use the framework to improve your marketing efforts.
Stage 1: Awareness
This part of the funnel is usually omitted by some marketers, but this is also an integral part of the funnel. Growth hacking specialists look at the way consumers become aware of your brand. Your objective in this stage is to identify ways you can introduce your company and products to more people.
You can do this on your website by taking a look at your analytics. How many visit your website and which pages do they visit the most? What are their most common methods of reaching your website? Did they reach your seit through social media or a targeted ad? Answering these questions can make the next step of the process easier.
Stage 2: Acquisition
After looking through your website’s analytics and identifying the areas you want to improve, the next step of the process is figuring out which acquisition tactics are most effective in turning people into leads.
It’s critical to have a good understanding of your marketing channels’ performance so you can focus your efforts on the right acquisition avenues. Prepare yourself for a deeper dive into analytics as you look for track impressions, visit-to-lead conversion rate, and other statistics to single out which marketing efforts you should focus on.
Once these relevant channels are made clear, make customized content for these channels to better drive interest in your services.
Stage 3: Activation
If you’re on top of your growth hacking efforts, you should have a prospective list of customers who didn’t bounce after first visiting your website. They are the main targets of the activation stage: you want them to understand and want your product.
There are multiple ways you can activate this base into purchasing your product or service. Blog posts that address their pain points and showcase your offering’s USP are effective activation points. A custom-made app that empower leads into becoming customers is also a great medium. Another effective activation technique is to invite them to an exclusive mailing list where they can get customized content and offers.
There are multiple ways you can nudge your leads to becoming paying customers. As long as you’re open to experimentation, you will eventually find a technique that manages to stick its landing and get customers into the door!
Stage 4: Retention
The moment leads become paying consumers is arguably the most important point of the entire AAARRR funnel. Keeping them subscribed to your product or service is the main priority of the retention stage.
A great offering is usually enough for some customers to remain loyal to your brand, but coming up with customer retention techniques can do wonders for your bottom line. Trying different methods like regular email alerts for new products or events, implementing limited-time or event-based sales, and establishing customer loyalty programs helps create an atmosphere that customers won’t want to leave.
After all, customer retention is less costly than acquisition.
Stage 5: Referral
Once you have an established base of loyal customers, you now have an untapped resource that you can use to further accelerate your growth hacking program. This stage focuses on creating strategies that will turn loyal customers into willing brand ambassadors.
One of the most effective ways to drive the referral stage forward is a reward-centric approach. Give your customers additional benefits or discounts by referring new users to your company. Contests and challenges on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok also bring brand awareness to a larger audience.
Stage 6: Revenue
The revenue stage is tricky for growth hackers to position in this framework as customer behavior is hard to predict. Some may refer others to your product without purchasing at all, while others will only refer your offer after they purchased it.
Nevertheless, this phase is important in identifying how much your company has grown. A little bit of math will be needed to work on this stage properly: extract your income to the customer acquisition costs (CAC), and compare your CAC to the customer lifetime value (CLV) to identify which segments of your framework need further optimization.
You can improve the CAC-CLV ratio by figuring out how your product aligns with the customer, providing a great customer experience, and consistent refinement of your funnel to keep up with the ever-changing market.
Start Accelerating Your Company’s Growth Today!
Growth hacking is a different beast from traditional marketing as it focuses on explosive growth. While traditional marketing zeroes in on established frameworks and uses all possible mediums to promote their brands, growth hackers use optimized processes on channels established effective by data. it isn’t afraid to focus on experimentation to find cost-effective solutions to meet your goals.
If you’re looking for effective and flexible growth hacking services to improve your company’s bottom line in 2022 and beyond, you can count on Synapse Research Ltd. Our team of seasoned digital marketers offer customized digital marketing solutions to companies big and small to help them thrive in the digital space.
If you’re curious about our data-centric services, set an appointment with us today! We’re more than happy to answer your questions.