“Growth hacking” is the new buzzword in town, and it seems that everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and be growth hacker. This is more so because in today’s digital world, digital popularity can either make or break a company’s reputation, and this is perhaps why more and more brands are willing to invest in Growth Hackers.
Who is a Growth Hacker, Ideally?
Simply put, a Growth Hacker is a marketing genius or a modern-day digital marketer who is responsible for triggering the growth in a start-up or established companies. The term was coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. Since then, Growth Hackers are in high demand, and if Jeffery Bussgang, who is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, is to be believed – every company needs a Growth Hacker.
Why Every Company Must Have a Growth Hacker ?
Call them Growth Marketers, or Growth Managers, or simply Growth Hackers – every company needs them. This is because of the recent change in the landscape. Back in the 2000s, simply bringing your business online was a step enough to build a lot of traction around your brand. Back then, companies were growing at random speeds and were able to secure funding quickly. Things were so fast that this whole scenario brought about a series of bad decisions and made way for weak foundations.
This was not true just for the small companies, but various big companies like Amazon became prey to bad judgments. Let’s not forget that Amazon invested in Pets.com, which is one of the biggest dot com failures.
A lot of the companies shut down, while others found it hard to sustain their existence. Then came the growth managers who used data and results to lead the strategies and drive results. They gifted the growth back to the companies and helped in achieving otherwise impossible targets.
This is the reason why various giants today like Dropbox, Uber, and even Google have growth managers working for them. The growth team at Pinterest is a wonderful example here. They were able to increase the new user activation by around 20%. They basically changed the on-boarding experience by providing a text-intensive explanation of the service and visually personalized feed, which ultimately brought better conversion.
Growth Hackers do not just play with data and figures; instead, they analyze your website, stay connected with the customers, follow the trends, and achieve the unachievable! In simplest terms, a Growth Hacker helps the company in driving growth, provides customer insights, and prioritizes growth initiatives and designs and implements tests.
With so much and a lot more on their plate, Growth Hackers undoubtedly deal with a lot.
So, What All Does It Take To Be a Growth Hacker ?
To begin with…
- You need to have prior experience
While you can jump directly into growth hacking, having prior experience, preferably in digital marketing, will give you an upper hand. In addition to this, having specific experience in marketing Google Adwords campaign, optimizing landing pages, and designing marketing funnels also works to your advantage and helps you in understanding the landscape better.
- You need to cultivate a community of customers
A Growth Hacker understands the brand inside-out and puts forward the right strategies by knowing the target audiences pretty well. They are great at identifying the ideal buyer personas and know all the channels, whether online or offline, where their target audiences reside.
An ideal Growth Hacker doesn’t just know the marketing funnel but also masters the art of developing a successful funnel that drives leads, and then replicates it for a larger group of audiences.
It is highly recommended to know your customers’ interests, occupations, likes and dislikes well to tailor your marketing messages directly to them, thus making it easier to get conversions.
- You need to be data-driven
As a Growth Hacker, you need to be obsessed with the analytics tools; there is no other way out, or else you are not a real Growth Hacker. This is because data-driven marketing tools not only equip you with the right set of stats and figures but also prepare you for making a well-informed decision. This helps the entire organization in planning ahead of time and tracking the results so obtained.
However, before you find yourself stuck amid a range of marketing tools, it is important to understand the right data type for your model. To begin with, it is important to identify the end objectives of your business, the goals for your objectives, and the key performance indicators for each goal. Based on the data so received, go ahead and segment your audiences based on each objective.
- You need to make data-driven decisions
No matter how strong your gut feeling is in favor of a decision, never let it overlook your data insights. As a Growth Hacker, you should always make decisions based on the metrics.
Keeping yourself equipped with the right set of data tools comes to your advantage here. Use them and extract every possible piece of information about them before arriving at a final decision.
- You need to be creative and customer-centric
In order to lead your company towards growth, it is essential for a growth manager to think like customers and be well aware of their intention, or else, all the marketing strategies can go down the drain.
Not only this, you need to be creative to develop new ideas and improvise and improve the existing ones to make things excel.
- You need to have an eye for improvement
No matter how great things are turning out to be, there is always a room for improvement, and as an ideal Growth Hacker, you should always look for the opportunities to improve and perform better.
With this in mind, it would not be wrong to say that the role of a Growth Hacker would soon evolve to be a standard function as more and more startups migrate to larger organizations.
