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Growth hacking is a subfield of marketing focused on the rapid growth of a company. It is referred to as both a process and a set of cross-disciplinary (digital) skills. The goal is to regularly conduct experiments, which can include A/B testing, that will lead to improving the customer journey, and replicate and scale the ideas that work and modify or abandon the ones that do not, before investing a lot of resources. It started in relation to early-stage startups that need rapid growth within a short time on tight budgets, and also reached bigger corporate companies.
A growth hacking team is made up of marketers, developers, engineers and product managers that specifically focus on building and engaging the user base of a business. Growth hacking is not just a process for marketers. It can be applied to product development and to the continuous improvement of products as well as to growing an existing customer base. As such, it is equally useful to everyone from product developers, to engineers, to designers, to salespeople, to managers.
Those who specialise in growth hacking use various types of marketing and product iterations to rapidly test persuasive copy, email marketing, search engine optimization and viral strategies, among other tools and techniques, with a goal of increasing conversion rates and achieving rapid growth of the user base. Some consider growth hacking a part of the online marketing ecosystem, as in many cases growth hackers are using techniques such as search engine optimization, website analytics, content marketing and A/B testing. On the other hand, not all marketers have all the data and technical skills required by a growth hacker, therefore a separate name for this field is applicable.
Sean Ellis coined the term "growth hacker" in 2010. [1] In the blog post, he defined a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth." [1] Andrew Chen introduced the term to a wider audience in a blog post titled, "Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing" [2] in which he defined the term and used the short term vacation rental platform Airbnb's integration of Craigslist as an example. [3] [4] He wrote that growth hackers "are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of 'How do I get customers for my product?' and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph." [5] [4] In the book "Growth Hacking", Chad Riddersen and Raymond Fong define a Growth Hacker as "a highly resourceful and creative marketer singularly focused on high leverage growth" [6]
The second annual (2013) "Growth Hackers Conference" was held in San Francisco set up by Gagan Biyani. [7] It featured growth hackers from LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube among others. [7]
To combat this lack of money and experience, growth hackers approach marketing with a focus on innovation, scalability, and user connectivity. [8] [9] Growth hacking does not, however, separate product design and product effectiveness from marketing. [10] [11] Growth hackers build the product's potential growth, including user acquisition, on-boarding, monetization, retention, and virality, into the product itself. [12] Growth hacking is all about intention and efficiency. So there is always a chance you'll hit on something huge and have a viral campaign. [13] Fast Company used Twitter's "Suggested Users List" as example: "This was Twitter's real secret: It built marketing into the product rather than building infrastructure to do a lot of marketing." [14] However growth hacking isn't always free. TechCrunch shared several nearly free growth hacks [15] explaining that growth hacking is effective marketing and not mythical marketing pixie dust.
The heart of growth hacking is the relentless focus on growth as the only metric that truly matters. [16] Mark Zuckerberg had this mindset while growing Facebook. [17] While the exact methods vary from company to company and from one industry to the next, the common denominator is always growth. Companies that have successfully "growth hacked" usually have a viral loop naturally built into their onboarding process. [18] New customers typically hear about the product or service through their network and by using the product or service, share it with their connections in turn. This loop of awareness, use, and sharing can result in exponential growth for the company. [19]
Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Pinterest, YouTube, Groupon, Udemy, Instagram and Google are all companies that used and still use growth hacking techniques to build brands and improve profits. [20]
Below are the examples of growth hacks and are the most well-known acts of growth hacking. Often people see growth hacking as merely repeating these growth hacks, but one should know that the 'hacks' are only the result of a repeatable growth hacking process, [21] which all growth hackers use a way of working. Below are some of the most famous growth hacking examples:
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.
Referral marketing is a word-of-mouth initiative designed by a company to incentivize existing customers to introduce their family, friends, and contacts to become new customers. Unlike pure word-of-mouth strategies—where customers independently share information without company involvement or ability to track—referral marketing actively incentivizes and rewards existing customers for referring new ones, allowing the company to influence, track, and measure the referral process.
Customer engagement is an interaction between an external consumer/customer and an organization through various online or offline channels. According to Hollebeek, Srivastava and Chen, customer engagement is "a customer’s motivationally driven, volitional investment of operant resources, and operand resources into brand interactions," which applies to online and offline engagement.
Wrike, Inc. is an American project management application service provider based in San Jose, California. Wrike also has offices India, Dallas, Tallinn, Nicosia, Dublin, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Prague.
Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads a receiving function will engage, in order of priority.
HubSpot, Inc. is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.
Turo Inc. is an American peer-to-peer carsharing company based in San Francisco, in the United States. The company allows private car owners to rent out their vehicles via an online and mobile interface in four countries and new corporate owners to rent out their cars in France in addition to the four previous countries.
Ryan Holiday is an American marketer, author, businessman and podcaster, notable for marketing Stoic philosophy in the form of books.
9flats is an online marketplace enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging. The company does not own any lodging; it is merely a broker and receives commissions from both guests and hosts in conjunction with every booking.
Wimdu, powered by HomeToGo, is an online marketplace for booking lodging, accessible by website and mobile app for iOS and Android. The company does not own any lodging; it is merely a broker and receives commissions from every booking. It is set up as a "clone" of similar websites. Wimdu searches and redirects users to the website that has the relationship with the lodging provider such as Expedia, Booking.com, HomeAway, Vrbo, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, FlipKey, and Airbnb.
SendGrid is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the Techstars accelerator program. As of 2017, SendGrid has raised over $81 million and has offices in Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Irvine, California; Redwood City, California; and London.
Patrick Vlaskovits is a New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur.
Gagan Biyani is an American of Indian descent serial entrepreneur, marketer, and journalist. He was a co-founder of Udemy, an online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company.
Product-market fit, also known as product/market fit, is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.
Sean Ellis is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup advisor. He is the founder of GrowthHackers and was previously the founder and CEO of Qualaroo, an automated user research tool.
Evergage was a cloud-based software that allowed users to collect, analyze, and respond to user behavior on their websites and web applications in real-time. In 2020, Evergage was acquired by Salesforce and was rebranded as Interaction Studio. The company positions itself as a "real-time personalization and customer data platform (CDP)".
Oracle BlueKai Data Management Platform, formerly known as BlueKai, is a cloud-based data management platform which is a part of Oracle Marketing that enables the personalization of online, offline, and mobile marketing campaigns.
Braze, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company based in New York City. It is a customer engagement platform used by businesses for multichannel marketing.
SimpleReach is a content data platform and performance measurement company that provides a platform to measure social action and track social behavior on published content. Their machine learning and AI data help marketers adjust their content to better serve customers. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Edward Kim and is based in New York. As of March 2019, the company operates as a subsidiary of Nativo, Inc.
Hopper, Inc. is a travel booking app and online travel marketplace that sells flights, hotels, rental cars, and short-term rentals. The company is headquartered in Montreal, Canada and Boston, Massachusetts.