Haven’t we been Growth Hacking all this time? No, you haven’t.
Something that many ask when they first hear about Growth Hacking is, “This is not new. Haven’t we been growth hacking all this time?”
I know I did.
Admittedly, it is true that many of the tools in a Growth Hacker’s toolbox aren’t anything new to the world. Tools and topics such as analytics, cohort analysis, retention, referral, virality, feature definition, social, gamification, consumer behavior, testing, optimization, KPis, and on-boarding etc. all existed before the term “Growth Hacker” ever emerged. So does that mean we should dismiss it? Shouldn’t we divest from growth?
Whoa there. Not so fast.
There are two key pieces about Growth Hacking that are new.
- Products (particularly those with a digital component) now play a key role in marketing themselves.
- Dedicated people that have intense full-funnel accountability and growth goal focus.
Product now play a role in marketing themselves
This goes well beyond slapping a logo on a t-shirt. This goes into the realm of user onboarding, retention, and referral — features that are deeply baked into the product and product experience. This also goes beyond awareness marketing (read: spray and pray) and into quantitative-based tactics such as A/B testing.
By having product play a role in marketing itself — this reduces the need for marketing spend and at the same time, magnifies the impact of the remaining marketing budget.
In truth, products have to be less about adding more fancy features and more about being part of growing its own user-base. The role growth hacking plays here is to ensure that these marketing features take priority and are not left on the wayside. Towards that, growth hackers occupy themselves with finding insights in the data and using their instincts to inform them on what features should be focused on.
But again, one could argue, that none of this is new. Not really. A savvy product manager could bake in growth features into the product. Which brings me to the second new piece: focus.
Dedicated growth hackers focus on the full funnel and only growth goals
Historically, no one looked at the entire picture through a lens that was hell-bent towards growth. If you’ve ever worked at a large company — you know this to be true. Everything is matrixed. The bigger the company, the worse it is. This is why smaller companies are eating larger companies alive. They’re more nimble, more focused, more multi-disciplinary — more hungry.
In short, every classic function (e.g., product, marketing, etc.) has tasks that distract from growth. Distractions like sprints, burn-rates, out-of-home marketing, NPS, too many meetings,.i.e., things that while important, don’t lead directly to business acceleration. Only growth hacking distills all the noise and looks at the key pieces, the feedback loops, the one-metric-that-matters (OMTM), the core of the user experience — from acquisition to referral in a holistic way and ignores the rest. In a sense, growth hackers are the dedicated MacGyver-like product managers of business acceleration. They are the SWAT teams of getting growth done. Day-in-day out, they strive to achieve growth above all else.
Growth hackers have to be well versed in many domains and comfortably work with big data, understand the market, know how to get users into the product, and can talk shop with the product team. They get their hands dirty and know how to say, “No” to low-ROI activities.
So the difference between business growth with a growth team vs. business growth without a growth team is like the difference between shooting a bullet and rolling one along the floor. One has impact, while the other may get you there eventually — but it won’t be in time to make a real difference.
Really, this is how all companies that care about rapid business growth should do things. But the fact that the need for this function in today’s world exists (and it does) — speaks volumes about how much we need to accept that the ways things were done in the past are antiquated — and it’s time to do the right things now.
Now that would be something new, wouldn’t you say?
Happy Hacking!
Originally published at www.linkedin.com
