What is growth hacking and how it can benefit your business

You have heard innumerable stories about how growth hacking helped a business scale in just 30 days. If the story has been stuck in your head and you’ve been trying to figure what growth hacking really is, and how it can benefit your business, well here is a quick guide on it.

What is growth hacking?

Coined by Sean Ellis back in 2010, growth hacking refers to rapid experimentation across marketing, development and sales of a business, to identify market opportunities and faster ways to grow a business.

To achieve business goals faster, a typical growth hacker will think out of the box to come up with unconventional marketing strategies. These strategies are aimed at not just acquiring more customers, but also increasing the business revenue at optimized costs and positioning the brand in the market with a competitive edge.  

What are the benefits of growth hacking?  

1. Faster branding

The only way to stand out in a competitive market, is to focus on telling your story and showing the consumers how different you are. Now while traditional marketing would use tactics like content marketing and social media to do this over a period of a few months, growth hacking focuses on finding the right conversations and jumping straight into them to promote your story while the audience is still interested in something similar.

Let’s just say, growth hacking gets you the attention to building out your brand on digital, faster.

2. Better lead quality

You write a blog post, syndicate and distribute it on channels that you believe your audience is the most active on. You even go ahead and promote it on social media using ads. While you’re definitely going to see the number of visitors increasing, there is a high chance than a good 70% of them are simply there to check out what the article has to say. They have absolutely no intention to make a purchase.

But with growth hacking, you’re focusing on finding consumer conversations where they are clearly stating their concerns or discussing possible solutions. By joining in at the right time, with the right message, you can turn this consumer into a lead that is more likely to convert in the funnel.

3. Converting campaigns

An average business is always running multiple campaigns on digital to promote their business. While these campaigns may drive in vanity metrics like follows, page visitors and shares, they are not even able to engage the few leads they generate, effectively. The reason being, lack of follow up on any of the channels – be it social media or email. There is a general lack of understanding here as to why a visitor behaved a certain why or why a lead chose to convert on a landing page, leading to not being able to optimize the channel for higher conversions.

Growth hacking doesn’t just look into the what and the how, it digs deeper into the why by tracking a user’s actions. It then focuses on optimizing that channel of conversion according to what the consumer expects, driving higher relevant engagement on the campaigns.

4. Increased search engine optimization

Yes, your consistent blogging and PPC campaigns are surely helping you boost your search engine rankings. But there’s only so much you can do when it comes to optimizing your content with the right keywords to drive in organic traffic. You can’t possibly overstuff your blogs with keywords!

That’s where growth hacking adds to your SEO efforts. Since it focuses on joining relevant conversations across the web, it places your brand on various channels, often leading to links driving more traffic to your site. The more number of conversations you join in on social media and other channels, the better you start ranking on the search engines.

5. Better pipeline management

Running social media and PPC camapigns can surely bring your business leads. But the moment your budget is exhausted or you pause a campaign, you will notice a drop in the numbers and your pipeline will start running dry.

With growth hacking, you’re diversifying the channels you use for lead generation. Instead of relying on only paid tactics, you’re focusing on consumer conversations across the web, leading to keeping your pipeline always full with prospects that have a higher lead score.

Let’s just say, if you’re running a business in a constantly changing and competitive market, growth hacking is a tactic that will further boost your marketing and sales efforts to drive in better results.

Have you implemented any growth hack in your business strategies?