The Truth about Growth Hacking
Growth hacking is not a new term, it has been used since 2010, coined by Sean Ellis, who defined a growth hacker as “someone whose true commitment is growth and all resources are directed to improving growth potential”. It has been described as the point where designers, marketers and data scientists meet.
There are hundreds of articles and books out there that stipulate growth hacking is a relatively new phenomenon, and doesn’t follow the traditional rules of marketing.
I’m going to show you why that's bollocks.
Check it out.
Myth#1: Growth Hacking Experiments will Slow Down my Time-to-Value
Let’s start at the very beginning. Growth hacking is a tool I use a lot. I love it, I know the process works, and I will continue to use it as part of my growth toolkit.
Growth hacking was created as a way for companies to test strategies, to find large returns, usually with a relatively small budget.
I mean, really, who doesn’t want that?!
The beauty of growth hacking is in that second word; hacking. It applies lean start-up principles of asking ‘what’s the least amount we can do to learn the most’? You have to be prepared to fail. But failing fast saves time and money in the long-term. This is where I believe growth hacking deviates from traditional marketing; in adding experimentation to the mix BEFORE your go-to-market strategy.
A good growth sprint (which you can and should repeat) will begin with data analysis and insight gathering, followed by idea generation, prioritisation of ideas, and then experimentation.
What often puts people off growth experiments is the idea that you have to invest a lot of time at the beginning, which some believe will slow down time-to-value.
What tends to happen instead, is that companies spend much longer rolling out generic and underwhelming campaigns, often on a global scale, and years (and vast budgets) pass before they realise they should have tried a different approach.
Growth hacking will speed up your time-to-value, it won’t slow it down.
Myth #2: Growth Hacks are One-off Strategies to Achieve Growth Fast
Saying growth hacks are on-off strategies is like saying footsteps are one-off strategies. They are only one-off strategies if you only apply them once – but in what scenario would you just take one step forward and stay there forever more?!
As I’m sure any successful company using growth hacking techniques will attest, nobody only does one growth hack and then hangs up the towel and goes home. It should become a process of continuous experimentation.
That’s not to say that you should run growth sprints back to back. Growth sprints are a fantastic way to solve big problems quickly, identify key growth levers for your business and grow fast. But you need time to experiment, to test and learn what’s working, to make small, incremental changes to your strategy. And to build the finer details of your strategy.
When you find the killer campaign, yes you roll it out on a larger scale. But that doesn’t mean you stop experimenting all together. That’s simply a quick route to becoming obsolete.
The ideal scenario would be to build in growth hacking into your long-term business strategy, and running growth sprints from every 6 weeks to 6 months. Depending on the strategy, you could run parallel hacks across different areas of the business.
So yes, growth hacks are strategies to achieve growth fast; only they are not one-off strategies.
Myth #3 Growth Hacking isn’t Traditional Marketing
It has, in recent months, become a pet hate of mine to read that growth hacking is not traditional marketing, or, like in the below quote, growth hackers have “thrown out” the traditional marketing playbook.
“A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable”.
RyanHoliday, Author of Growth Hacker Marketing
Bear with me while I explain my reasons, this one requires a lengthy explanation.
When these authors refer to “traditional” marketing, they presume marketing professionals have not applied traditional marketing techniques to the digital realm that we all have lived in since the late 1990s. If you are a marketing professional that hasn’t applied traditional marketing techniques to the digital era, then ok, I’m amazed you’re still in business, but ok, if so, then growth hacking is a completely different beast.
However, if, like me, you have worked across content marketing, digital marketing or product marketing, then you absolutely will have tested what you’re doing, tracked it, reported on it and then scaled it.
A Brief History Lesson on Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is one of the longest running, and still one of the most successful marketing strategies that ever existed.
According to Peter F. Drucker, ‘the man who invented management’ and ‘the patriarch of modern business and marketing’,inbound marketing took root as far back as the mid-1850s. Cyrus HallMcCormick, inventor of the mechanical harvester, performed market research to develop inbound methods for generating consumer interest. At the time, as I’m sure you can imagine, this was considered to be a radical evolution in farming.
By the 1950’s & 60’s, market research matured into a more focused approach in understanding consumer interests and habits. Customers began to feel involved in the buying process.
Fast forward into the internet age. The first search engine popped up in 1995, and SEO was coined in1997 (bear in mind most people didn’t have personal mobile phones at this point). Then early 2000 and PPC advertising began. Then came social media –LinkedIn (2002), Facebook (2004, YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006). As consumers became more internet savvy, their consumer habits changed drastically.
Around that time, we arrive at the official creation of “inbound marketing” as it is known today, with the birth of Hubspot. As students at MIT, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, in 2004, recognised that interruptive and irritating forms of traditional outbound marketing were not conducive to the digital realm. Their approach was simple; treat customers like people, and help them solve the problems they are dealing with. They did this via thought leadership, tutorials, certifications, etc. And the ACCD inbound marketing model was born.
Consumers wanted to be marketed to, not marketed at. It was this process which broke the marketing funnel down into the individual components of the consumer buyer journey.
Between 2018 and 2019, Hubspot moved from the traditional ACCD funnel to the Flywheel approach. In my opinion, the flywheel doesn’t actually flip anything on it’s head in practice, but it does graphically represent what is happening as businesses hit maturity.
Once you have customers, you are forced to question how to reduce churn and how to increase what was traditionally called leads at the TOF (top of funnel). In practice, a good marketer will use customer testimonials, case studies and partnerships to convince new leads to trust their brand. So the clients shown at the bottom of the traditional marketing funnel were never really forgotten.
However, the flywheel model was widely adopted, and we lost the C’s from our ACCD model. The convert, and close section was merged and absorbed into “Engage”, leaving us with 3 stages of the cycle; attract, engage and delight.
This is also the same process applied in Product Led Growth, common in tech start-ups. But that's for another day.
Growth Hacking Flywheel
Introducing the growth hacking flywheel.
Let’s break down the 7 steps from this Gray Group International model and apply the inbound methodology:
1. Awareness (Attract)
2. Consideration (Attract)
3. Decision (Engage)
4. Adoption (Engage)
5. Retention (Delight)
6. Expansion (Delight)
7. Advocacy (Delight)
I would argue that this“growth hacking” model is just a reworded flywheel. And as I have shown above, the flywheel was built on the inbound marketing model, which is based on traditional marketing techniques.
Thus, the notion that growth hacking is ‘throwing out the traditional marketing playbook’ is just nonsense.
Marketing is a strategic tactic for growth. Growth hacking is an awesome strategy that can be applied to ensure you build your marketing strategy upon solid foundations, and experiment so you KNOW you are working with the best strategies for your business.
Get in!
