In business, growth is everything.

As the saying goes, unless you’re growing, you’re dying. Growth hacking is a powerful methodology that empowers entrepreneurs to uncover what channels and strategies fuel rapid business growth. 

 

To grow and climb a giant beanstalk, plant the seed.

 The principles that underlie Growth Hacking are inherent to the tech industry. Growth hacking isn’t not a new take on digital marketing; It’s an all-inclusive, purpose-build methodology that helps you engineer a self-perpetuating development and marketing machine to scale your business.

 

Growth hacking aims to help you uncover the ‘hack’ that will accelerate business growth. Product development should be an inherent part of the growth hacking strategy. You must build what your users want, not what you think they want.

 

I got my climbing gear, what do we do now?

The best way to build your customer-base is to get them involved from the outset so you can learn and understand what customers want in a product or service like yours. Then switch focus to the continuous optimisation of the product through short development cycles and testing in the real world.  

 

More than likely, you will undergo many creative product iterations until you discover the mechanisms that gain your traction: your growth hack. Without input from your early adopters, you will struggle to establish a presence in any market.

 

“Growth hacking is developing and utilising a continuously evolving mindset to approach the challenges that entrepreneurs face when building and scaling their business.”

 

For most startups, the growth hacking journey inevitably begins with testing marketing channels and applying quick wins that allow you to engineer traction, including hustling. The objective is to build a strategy that is based on a tested and proven understanding of your potential clients.

 

Data changes everything

In sports, the concept of a ‘Moneyball’ has transformed underperforming teams into champions without huge injections of capital. In baseball, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series and Liverpool Football Club are competing at the top of the Premier League How? Both studying the data behind every game.

 

The principle is based on using data to find out what is undervalued, what tactics perform best and to out-think rather than outspend the competition. The same is true of growth hacking. 

 

2 sandwiches, 1 orange, a bottle of milk and a 5K beanstalk climb.

For the most part, startups and product teams have limited resources; They have to be creative to acquire new users and retain them and grow.

 

Traditional marketing channels are expensive and, for the most part, saturated. The need for growth hacking is evident; harness unconventional channels that require testing, experimenting, and creativity to engineer a competitive edge. 

 

Most projects focus heavily on product, but today’s real challenge is distribution;. 

 targeting the right people, at the right time as economically and efficiently as possible.

 

ROI is more important than brand awareness = Finding out “what works”! An entrepreneur’s first goal should be to become profitable. Once you are profitable you can then focus on brand awareness. 

 

Felled a beanstalk before?

Growth hacking principles:

1. If you build something, will they come? Unlikely. You don’t acquire customers by chance, even if you have a great product  Only through testing can we determine whether something is likely to be a success, and only then with caveats. However, data helps fell the beanstalk, period. 
2. There is no gray area. Scale successes and kill failures. 
3. Test as much and as fast as possible. Speed usually wins.

 

Growth hacking is 70% best practices and 30% subversiveness – there is little evil in every success (you can’t do it all by the book break the rules to make new ground). 

 

 

Growth Hackers VS  Digital Marketers VS Data Analysts

Growth hacking teams rely on rapid experimentation while marketing teams traditionally make use of top-down planning. A growth hacking team works beyond the boundaries set in a traditional organization. The biggest difference is that marketing teams are focused on the top of the funnel, where they measure impressions, leads, etc. On the other hand, a growth hacking team is overlapped with product engineering and design. They comprise various different skill sets and raise ideas and experiments that go beyond traditional silos and boundaries. Furthermore, a growth team focuses on the entire funnel.  

 

The core components of growth are:

• The creation of a cross-functional team that breaks down the traditional silos of marketing and product development,
• The use of qualitative research and quantitative data to gain deep insights into customer behaviour,
• The rapid generation and testing of ideas backed up by rigorous data analysis to take action on the results.

 

Sales/Product funnel:

Step 1: Awareness – Get people to know your brand

Step 2: Acquisition – Getting people to visit your channel

Step 3: Activation – Ensuring users have a great  experience

Step 4: Retention – Making sure users come back

Step 5: Revenue –  Turning users into customers 

Step 6: Referral –  Customers invite their friends

 

Growth Hacking applies to the entire product funnel, whereas digital marketing traditionally only applies to steps 1 and 2. The other differentiator is that the growth hacker also has a strong technical skill set. 

 

Growth hackers function at the intersection of marketing and product development. They work with engineering, design, analytics, product management, operations, and marketing to design and execute growth initiatives. 

 

 

Smart*ss Giants?!@ Beware, they are smarter than they look.

Growth hacker knowledge

 

What do we expect a growth hacker to know; what is the width and depth of their knowledge? 

Growth hacking skills aren’t acquired overnight. You need experience across many different areas before you are a true growth hacker. Growth hacking is not a trick, to be good, you need experience and instinct. Growth hacking typically covers:

 

• Statistics – Conversion Rate Optimization; Virality; PR; 
• Programming – A/B Testing; SEO; SEM; Online Ads;
• Product Design & UX Principles – Photoshop & Wireframing; Tools; Marketing; Biz Dev; Email Marketing;
• Analytics – Funnel Marketing; Content Marketing; Direct Sales; Affiliate Programs; 
• Behavioural Psychology – Copywriting; Events; Conferences; 
• Brand Positioning & Storytelling – Database Querying; Platforms; Re-Targeting; Artificial Virality. 

 

Fact: Growth hackers who possess all of these skills are almost impossible to be found, which is why they are called “Unicorns that live on clouds”.

 

Most growth hackers have broad knowledge across all of these subjects but are specialized in two or three areas; that’s why growth hacking teams are the best option for entrepreneurs. Growth hacking teams represent the future of innovation and problem solving because they stand at the intersection of marketing and product development. 

 

Teaming up with a Growth Team

Growth hacker teams are small in size and generally comprise a designer, developer and marketer;  small data-driven and technical team aimed at scaling a company. They have helped pioneer a new era of data and product-driven growth. They perform at the intersection of product, data, and marketing. 

 

Growth hacking is the future; reflected in the inflated demand for growth hackers. Yet, there is still a shortage of growth hackers, and that is why the opportunity needs capturing. 

 

We are in an era of data-driven marketing; you need a good team that is qualified and organised to keep up with the pace of technology.  Increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence makes it both easier and harder to implement the right strategy because of the increasing demands of the market and the density of products/services available. This is the main reason why every company needs a high performing growth team; acquiring users is the primary goal and is the biggest obstacle that entrepreneurs face today. Without users, you have no data, no traction and no money. 

 

There are two types of growth hacking teams:

• Product-Led (Functional)
• Independent-Led

 

In the first model, the team reports to a product management executive. This type of Model tends to be utilized by companies with established organizational structures. If you are adopting this model you should have three growth teams:

• One for Signups
• One for Onboarding
• One for Notifications 

 

In the Independent-led Model, the team is centralised and reports to the VP of Growth or equivalent. This is the ideal structure because it gives more autonomy to the team, and a growth team needs freedom to experiment and manoeuvre. However, this type of Model is harder to implement if it’s not done early in the company’s conception. 

 

In an Independent-Led Model, it is highly recommended that you have a growth team for each phase of the funnel: 

• One team on Awareness
• One team on Acquisition
• One team on Activation
• One team on Retention
• One team on Revenue
• One team on Referral

 

Furthermore, you should consider the following factors when creating your growth team

• Channels – What channels are effective for growth?
• Focus – Is your company design-focused, product focussed, marketing-focused, or growth focused?
• Personality – Find similar-minded people for your team

 

A team  to slay the giant:

Head of Growth – the analytics risk taker, the hustler. The M-shaped marketer;

Coder (Developer) – full stack coder who is not scared to build stuff that is going to break;

UX/UI Designer – fast, with customer empathy;

Data Analyst – Sees stuff others don’t, what is broken and what works.

 

The Head of Growth: (M-shaped Marketer)

• Process-driven,
• Analytical Approach,
• Creative risk taker,
• M-shaped,
• Strong Personality.

The Head of Growth sets the OKRs (Objective and Key Results), the experimentation tempo and area of focus. They are in charge of weekly growth meetings and monitor the performance of the teams. The Head of Growth is the leader with responsibility for KPIs and metrics defined by the company. 

Basic skill set:

• Fluency in data analysis,
• Expertise or fluency in product management (developing and launching a product),
• Understanding of how to design and run experiments,
• Familiarity with the methods for growing adoption and use of the type of product/service that the team is working on,
• Good leadership and management skills.

 

The Developer – Full-stack:

• Fast iterations,
• Builds stuff that breaks,
• Loves data + tracking,
• Creative,
• Executes super fast.

A lot of growth teams hires a developer when their skills are needed, but this is a mistake. The best engineers provide insights and come up with highly creative ideas, mostly in regards to technical implementations and capabilities. A growth engineer has a specific mindset; most engineers won’t be thrilled with the prospect that they are going to write a lot of code that will be discarded, and that is essential when doing growth experiments.   

A developer performs coding for product features, websites, applications and experiments for the growth team. Having a sound growth engineer on your team is a competitive advantage. 

 

The UX/UI Designer: 

UX/UI Designers have knowledge of behavioral psychology and customer empathy. They are Front-end artist:

• Executes fast,
• Customer empathy,
• Design and copywriting,
• Front-end code,
• Concept first, polish later.

Designers are user-focused so they bring important insights on user behaviour and create customer journey maps, thus designing the actual experience to be tested. They provide valuable insights in psychology and usability research. 

 

The Data Analyst: 

A data analyst It is someone who truly understands data and who is able to find insight from data; a data magician!

• Small data sets,
• Large data sets,
• Back-end knowledge,
• Needle in the haystack,
• Data to insights.

A data analyst provides valuable insights and analysis of data for the team. A data analyst needs to:

• Understand experiment design, 
• Statistics, 
• How to connect and draw insight from different business sources,
• How to ask great business questions and discover answers with data analytics. 

It is always recommended that everyone from the team should have a solid knowledge about analytics, however, having a specialist is of crucial importance.

 

 

Fee-fi-fo-fum, what Makes a Great Growth Hacking Team?!

So what separates the ordinary from the brilliant? Just because you hire the four key team members doesn’t mean that you will end up with a crack team that will grow your product/service. 

 

A great growth team must be brilliant in the following areas:

• Process – Having a team that knows various prioritizing models and how to switch easily transition from one to another is crucial. 
• Experimentation Output – The essence of growth hacking is to constantly experiment, because the more you do, the more you learn and improve. It is a fact that around 80 % of the experiments will be failures, but if you have a high experimentation output, that is not a problem, and the knowledge that is gained from the experiments is valuable. 
• Experiment Design – Designing the separate variants to create an informative outcome no matter whether the experiment is a win or a fail. You have to be thoughtful of your variants, and make V2 different from CONTROL and V1. This will enable you to extrapolate your learnings.  
• The Ideation of First Principles – You should always focus on root ideas with first principles thinking. Always ask yourself: “Why should this work?” but don’t be technical in the answer, do it in a real life parallel through experiments. 
• A Growth Mindset – A great growth hacking team is always testing, learning new tactics and improving, and it is driven by the inner goal towards maximizing the quality of the user experience rather than towards having a lot of users. Once this is done, the users come on their own.  
• Goal-based prioritization – A high performing growth team prioritizes the level of impact against the level of effort. This is usually done in planning sessions.  

 

You can customize this how you want, but the general idea is that it’s a cross-functional team.

 with these two qualities:

• Comprised of high performing people.
• Incorporate incredibly rigorous growth and experimentation processes.

 

 

Like with all good magic beans, growth hacking is all about jumping.

For startups, growth is everything. Startups and product teams have limited resources and growth hacking is the most effective methodology for the digital tech industry to build a marketing machine and make their product a success. 

With the correct blend of talent in you growth hacking team, it’s certainly possible for a small start-up to scale and reach millions of users thanks to smart thinking and using the data to find out what fuels rapid growth. 

 

Growth hacking can be a true story of Jack getting his “magic beans”.