Growth hacking is seen as a rather new concept but that is definitely not the case. It is just an official way to talk about a specific type of marketing. Those that used SEO in the past already used growth hacking, most likely without even realizing it.
We cannot really fully define growth hacking as a term since the definition is going to be different from one specialist to the next. In order to properly understand it, we should talk about the following.
Regular Marketing Versus Growth Hacking
Growth hackers are normally both coders and marketers. They focus on how to get customers but also handle landing pages, email deliverability, open graphs, viral factors and testing. When focusing specifically on a startup, the growth hacker will try to make different technical modifications in order to increase site traffic, conversions and other factors of importance for profit generation.
Growth hacking is basically something you use to accelerate business growth. That is why it is so often utilized for small companies like startups launched in the past year. The rest of the marketing forms will normally focus on long term results. Growth hacking aims to get quick results. Everything will basically be focused on the brand’s strong points in order to get really fast results.
Growth Hacking Effectiveness
Just as the name implies, growth hacking is going to take advantage of hacks in order to make startups or small businesses grow. Common tactics that are utilized include:
- Paid Acquisition – With tools that are paid (for instance, Google AdWords), trying to draw attention towards specific products.
- Analytics and AB Testing – Startups manage to improve conversion rates because of using these.
- Viral Acquisition – It will encourage the customer to talk about the experience associated with buying the products/services of a promoted business.
We are basically faced with an increase in the interest noticed among the consumers. This leads to acceleration. The strategies above are often combined with content marketing, email marketing and even SEO. There are basically no limitations to what can be used as long as it will accelerate growth.
Tackling Specific Small Business Needs For Growth Hacking
The needs of a startup and those of a small business will be different as they are going to need hacking techniques at different points in time. A small business knows the customer base. In this case growth hacking is going to be much simpler as the only thing that is needed is to fix the problems that stun business growth.
A startup owner does not know what marketing potential exists and how the potential customers respond. Growth hackers will need to implement different strategies in this case so we can say that growth hacking for startups is normally going to be more complicated.
Do You Need Growth Hacking?
We have to conclude that growth hacking is something that is really beneficial for small businesses and for startups. However, it is also great for the larger companies but in this case the regular marketing strategies are going to be equally effective. Using growth hacking is something that is complicated but you can use the strategies associated when someone with experience handles everything. To sum up, there is a pretty good possibility that you do need growth hacking but you are going to need to hire someone in order to be successful.