What Is Growth Hacking?

What Is Growth Hacking?

When you are starting a new company, the first main thing that you need is “GROWTH”. Not someone to build a marketing team or manage it, not just a marketing strategy to achieve marketing objectives and not someone who will manage the vendors. You need someone to bring growth to your company – and this is where a growth hacker comes in. The term “growth hacking” is actually not new, because it was coined by Sean Ellis who is actually a startup growth specialist himself. He coined this term in 2010 when his major role was to help startups to grow. Once a startup becomes established, he leaves the company, leaving a replacement in his place and heads over to help the next company grow. Unfortunately, the replacements, though talented enough with experience and marketing degrees, are but were not able to work his magic. The startups began to falters and fail. This was how “growth hacking” as a term and a concept was brought up.

Slowly, Sean Ellis’ growth concept became the standard norm for startups. It works when you know what to expect from it and its limitations. But the biggest mistake is when startups begin to expect more. Growth hacking doesn’t make a company soar high through magic. It takes hard work and by keeping your expectations reasonable, you can achieve reachable milestones. Thus, growth hacking is also something that makes a product virality, where the bitter truth is that virality doesn’t happen automatically, it is engineered.

Growth hacking Vs. Marketing

Nevertheless, you cannot replace a marketer with a growth hacker and vice versa. Both has its significance and role in the business world. Here is how growth hacking is different from marketing.

What is the main function of marketing? To make a product known to customers and to entice them to buy it, right? The main reason why any startup fails is because they do not have enough paying customers. A startup need not fail due to product development, it is because they are not able to get customers engaged in the product. So before you start with marketing, you must try growth hacking. Big corporations would definitely benefit from marketing, but startups are more likely to benefit from growth hacking. The reason for this is simple: As a startup, you are not fully aware of who your core customers is and you won’t know whether the people that you are targeting would buy your product/service. You might not even know what marketing channel to target. Big companies on the other hand, would have figured this out pretty well. While startups are trying to find the best car to build, big companies are just changing gears to make it go faster.

Growth hacking would be a good choice for startups that don’t have a brand equity or access to resource. Big companies have all this, which is why they prefer to go for marketing. Startups on the other hand have to educate their customers, and spread awareness before they start marketing their products.

Here are five of the most sought after tools of growth hacking

Colibri IO

Through this tool, you get to know where your audiences are engaged online. It helps you to monitor your brand online, improve your social media visibility and bring impressive rankings in search engine results. You can try the 14-day free version of the tool and then later switch to the paid version where you have to pay $95 per month.

Clicktotweet

This is a simple tool for Twitter users. All you need to do is create a message that you want others to read and then create a link that you want to share. You can also monitor the activity of the shared link. This tool is ideal for people who want to spread awareness about a new product. The best thing about the website is that you can custom fit the tool to fit your brand. Apart from measuring traffic, you can invite people to share your link across multiple social media channels.

Nimble

Do you want to keep a record of communication between your contact, keep track of what actions to take and make use of social media to get in touch with them? Then you must try Nimble, a very useful and result-oriented growth hacking tool. It helps you manage your relationship with any number of contacts, get notifications when they have birthdays and job changes and generate alerts when your contacts mentions you so you can reach out to them.

Hello Bar

A very useful growth hacking tool through which you can have a CTA button on a horizontal bar on your website. One of the best things about Hello Bar is that it would help drive traffic, keep track of the number of clicks received on the bar. You can also customize the bar so it would look aesthetically good in your website.

Pay with a Tweet

Are you in the early stages of a product launch? Then Pay with a Tweet is a tool you would benefit from because it is exclusively designed to help people who want to make their product known to a larger segment. People who like your content/product information can retweet and post it on their own. You can also use it to manage traffic, sales, geo data and clicks. There is a basic plan for free, after which you can buy their services for a nominal $19.99 per month.

Of course, there are dozens of other growth hacking tools in the market. You need to do a study on what suits you the best.

Interesting links about the topic:
Know More About Growth Hacking
Advantages Of Growth Hacking?
What is meant by Growth Hacking

The author: Reema Oamkumar is engaged as a thought leader at www.Software-Developer-India.com which is a part of the YUHIRO Group. YUHIRO is a German-Indian enterprise which provides programmers to IT companies, agencies and IT departments.