What is Growth Hacking: A Comprehensive Guide

Are you here to find an answer to what is growth hacking? If yes, you have landed right. Stick to the end to know details on growth hacking.

Everyone wants to grow their business and generate profits, which is only possible with the right strategy. Growth hacking and SEO are often used interchangeably by many. However, even though the end goal is the same, growing and monetizing a business, growth hacking and SEO are distinct, serving different roles for a business.

Let’s dive deeper to learn what is growth hacking and more details about it.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a special marketing strategy that includes various tactics focusing on business growth and generating revenue. The only goal of growth hacking is business growth. It’s a way of using tactics with creativity and tried and tested practices to grow the business and gain profits in a shorter period of time.

To put it simply, growth hacking can be a new idea or strategy to create content or offer products and services, or it can be a new marketing tactic to grow a business and monetize it. 

The common growth hacking tools are blogs, emails, PPC, social media, advertisements, and SEO KPIs.

Why is growth hacking important for business?

Businesses are sprouting at a great pace, and in addition to SEO, you have to compete to stand out, grow your business and achieve success. This is where growth hacking comes into the picture.

In the growing online world, only a few can achieve success. This is because traditional tactics can help your business to establish, but to succeed online fast, it needs continuous, fresh and different marketing approaches.

Growth hacking is a cost-effective, quick approach to growing a business and gaining profits compared to SEO, which aims to gain organic search visibility to reach a targeted audience. Unlike growth hacking, it takes time to achieve SEO results and success. 

Difference between Growth Hacking, SEO, and Traditional Marketing.

After learning what is growth hacking, you might have understood its basics. Even if the final goal is the same, to clarify more, here is the common difference between the three. The idea of defining the difference is not to give more importance to one as compared to the other. Each one is valuable on its own.

Growth Hacking- The sole focus of growth hacking is business growth, anyhow. It includes innovative ideas and tactics to market business, grow audience inexpensively, and generate revenue.

SEO and Marketing- The sole focus of both is to gain organic visibility and reach the targeted audience to convert and succeed. 

Pirate metrics and Growth hacking

While considering growth hacking, you should focus on a few elements that are valuable for business growth. These elements are referred to as Pirate Metrics.

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention 
• Revenue
• Referral

1. Acquisition

The acquisition is the measure of your reach, how people get to know your brand, and/or how you reach your targeted customers to bring traffic to your site. It can be either SEO, PPC, Social media, or email marketing. 

To measure your acquisition stage, you can assess your Click-through rate (CTR), Cost per click(CPC), Cost per lead(CPL), and the total number of generated leads.

2. Activation

The next element is to measure the Activation. It is the metric to assess whether the visitors you bring to the site find it valuable or not and how was their first experience and behavior on your site. 

The Activation totally depends on the content/product/services you offer. 

To measure your activation stage, you can assess your session duration, bounce rate, conversions, and Cost per action (CPA).

3. Retention

Another element to measure retention. Whether new users become your long-term customers or not. Whether or not they still like and use your product/services and are engaged with your brand. These will define your business retention capabilities. 

Businesses can retain customers by providing quality services and engaging with your brand by sending routine emails concerning Product offers, improvements, and benefits.

To measure your retention stage, you can assess your CTR, session duration, bounce rate over time, as well as returning customers, churn rates, and email open rates.

4. Referral

A referral is where your audience spreads the word about you and promotes your brand. The element is worth measuring if your product/service is amazing and you’ve built a loyal audience.

You can request or ask your customers for brand promotion. Additionally, you can start an affiliate program to provide benefits for bringing leads. 

To measure your referrals, you can use the Net Promoter Score.

5. Revenue

The last element to track is revenue generation during a particular period. This element assesses how you make money from your customers, for instance, whether your customers are signing up for your paid plans or buying your products and services and whether the revenue graph is growing or rolling back.

A point of consideration is the more customers you can retain for your business, the more profits you can easily generate. 

To measure your revenue stage, you can assess new paid users, returning paid users, and total income around that particular period.

All these effective aspects can help you strategize your growth hacking. 

The ideal growth hacking process.

Before going on the effective growth hacking practices, it’s important to assess your present situation and strategize your measures.

1. Determine your performance. 

Evaluate how your business is performing. Gather valuable data such as your search visibility, CTR, PPC, product popularity, audience reach, customers, ROI, and more. Find out what’s working and what’s not to strategize your efforts in the right direction.

2. Know your customers.

Knowing your customers is valuable to grow your business and generating revenue. Businesses can only grow by aligning strategies around customers’ interests and offering them what they want. 

Find out who your customers are, how valuable your product is for them, the merits and demerits of your products/ services, and how you can improve them. Evaluate how you reach your customers.

3. Assess your competitors

Competitor analysis is an efficient way to understand your competitor’s strategies. Look at your competitors and get insight into their performance. Evaluate their strategies to find out the gap. Understand their strengths and weaknesses to learn from their strengths and turn their weaknesses into opportunities. 

4. Develop creative tactics and prioritize

Once you have evaluated different aspects try developing innovative ideas for experimenting and finding the most profitable approach. Keep your performance metrics, competitor strategies, and customer evaluations in mind while generating cost-effective ideas and creating tactics. Once done, prioritize them based on their expected effectiveness.

5. Experiment with your ideas 

Growth hacking is all about testing innovative ideas, assessing their effect, and finding the best growth solutions. Test the tactics you developed one by one and monitor the results. Keep experimenting and observing to improve your business growth.

6. Pinpoint what you learn.

We know multiple tests will fail, and only a few turn into success. However, failures are valuable too. Learn from the trials, look for the areas of improvement, take ideas from the successful trials and develop a stronger way to improve business growth.

Effective Growth Hacking Tactics.

1. Blogging

Any business growth is dependent on its customers. The more customers, the more revenue. Blogging is the most effective and inexpensive way to get in front of your targeted audience. Blogs act as a hook, so give your users something valuable to read concerning your brand. Quality content on a consistent basis will boost your brand acquisition and help you retain customers for longer.

2. Search Engine Optimization

People can only value your business if you reach your targeted audience. And SEO is an effective and reasonable way to enhance search visibility and gain a higher ranking on SERPs. All marketing efforts will go in vain if your product isn’t optimized for search engines.

Ensure your product is high-quality and optimized for search engines to gain value.

3. Grow your audience reach and user-engagement

Reaching a greater audience and gaining credibility and trust enable you to build relations and bring increased customers to your site. The following are the ways you can increase your brand reach and build customers.

• Content Marketing

Market your high-quality content to reach a vast audience and gain trust. It’s an effective way to grab users’ attention and engage them with your brand. Ensure to create what users are actually interested to read in your niche.

• Social Media Marketing

Create your social presence, market your brand and strengthen your relationship with your audience. Social platforms are a great way to market your content/ product, engage with users and build customers for business growth.

• Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing, when done correctly, is the fastest-growing marketing channel for business growth. Sending emails to each and everyone you know is not the right approach. This is just like throwing stones in the well without getting any return. Ensure you email the users who are actually interested in your products and services. 

Build your email list by enticing users with offers and free trials and asking for their emails. This will surely provide you with better results. 

• Paid Marketing

spending money on your promotion is worth it to reach a targeted audience and bring more leads to business. Advertise your brand on different platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Quora, and Pinterest, as well as on search engines to reach your niche audience. The better exposure your business gets, the higher the chances to convert more people into customers and boost business.

• Content repurposing

Content repurposing effectively presents content to users in different formats in engaging and interesting ways. You can recycle your high-performing content into PDFs, PPTs, infographics, podcasts, videos, and more. 

This will engage your users with your brand, target different types, and bring new customers effectively. 

• Offer a free tool

Offering free tools related to your niche to your users is an effective and enticing way of engaging and inviting customers. 

This is referred to as engineering marketing. Presumably, users are more engaged with a brand that is more profitable and valuable to them. 

• Offer a free trial

You can also offer them a free trial of your product/services to help them decide. Users are more likely to turn into customers if they find you valuable and profitable. This is the next level of marketing, where you are confident of your services that users can’t overlook. This can help you boost your Acquisition and retention to grow your business.

• Reach influencer bloggers to review your product.

Influencer bloggers can help you grow your business effectively. You can reach them, build relationships and ask them to review your product. They can spread the word about you in front of their large fan following. 

This will help in your brand exposure and gain trust and customers. You can offer the influencer free products/services or accounts in exchange for honest reviews.

• Customer testimonials

Have you ever thought about how a customer can influence another customer? 

Promoting your products and services is essential, but showing users what your existing customers speak about you can greatly impact users. 

Display your user’s positive customer reviews from your happy customers to show your reliability and capability to influence visitors and turn them into a customer. 

• Data-driven marketing

It’s a systematic way of marketing where you assess your performance data to know which strategy is worth spending resources on and which is not. Experiment with different creative tactics you thought of, along with other traditional methods, and collect data from each trial. Additionally, focus on your site’s KPIs to discover opportunities and find the best method that’s inexpensive, analytical, creative, and productive.

This will help you take the proficient steps that will support your business growth and push you to the sky.

• Affiliate marketing

Last but not least, another effective method to grow your business is including an affiliate program in your growth hacking strategies. Let your customers become your promoters. You can offer them a free subscription, products, services, or commissions to bring leads to your business.

To conclude:

After understanding every element of growth hacking, you can start your growth hacking campaign to boost your business and generate increased revenue. 

The only thing to remember is your brand acquisition and retention, creative testing and monitoring, and self-created rapid growth strategies. 

Growth hacking seems similar to traditional marketing; however, its sole focus is to grow business and generate more revenue. It lets you test multiple methods and discover the most inexpensive as well as a productive method to boost business growth.  

Even though SEO is valuable, you can’t rely solely on it to bring more business to succeed in this competitive world. You have to be more creative and attentive to assess the opportunities and build your own way to success. 

Make your content, product, and services top-notch, determine your business and focus on the pirate metrics to boost your business.

We hope this write-up has helped you understand what is growth hacking in a better way.