What is Growth Hacking and Why it is Important for Growth

There are a lot of ways to achieve growth in business and growth hacking is one of them.

When Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking” way back in 2010, it didn’t encompass so much as it does today. For now it has grown to become hype, a buzzword, a strategy, a technique, and an attitude to achieve growth in anything. It is what companies use to achieve extraordinary and scalable growth employing affordable solutions.

However, there are no rules or a specific set of tools when it comes to growth hacking. Interesting, right? Read on to know more about growth hacking and its importance.

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking involves rapidly experimenting around with a variety of marketing and product-development tactics to get quick results and attractive opportunities to grow your business.

As mentioned earlier, you don’t have guidelines or a specific toolset for growth hacking. Rather, you figure out how to best appeal to your audience and then create rules accordingly.

Growth hackers explore advanced marketing and product-development trends to help them steal their competitors’ customers and establish themselves as online authority.

Though you can growth hack any business, the approach is specifically useful in Knowledge Commerce (selling your knowledge to other people). This is because the product you sell is virtual and no one else can share your knowledge with their audience. This is unlike a physical product, which someone can fake by giving it a few tweaks or marketing it differently.

Why is Growth Hacking Important?

Growth hacking is for anyone who wants to grow. It can be an individual, a marketer, a corporation, or a startup. Let’s discuss its importance under several heads.

1. It helps you grow

Growth hacking’s importance lies in its ability to achieve its ultimate aim- growth! For, with a growth hacking mindset, you start trying different mixtures of product development and marketing efforts to come up with products and strategies like visual marketing that people love. 

When you finally figure out what works, what doesn’t, who your ideal buyers are, and more, you can come up with the best combination to grow quickly.  This increases your chances of winning over your competitors!

2. It helps you embrace a growth mentality

Growth hacking instills a growth mentality in you and your staff. For, you start understanding what growth is, evaluating how much growth your business needs, discovering where to seek growth, and assessing what kind of impact it needs to have on your business. 

While all businesses want to grow, not all will have the same needs or cravings to grow faster. So, if you proactively seek growth, you’ll discover those tactics that work for you faster. 

3. It helps gain new insights 

When you are into growth hacking, you keep creating, optimizing, and evaluating different techniques and trends. This helps you understand your industry, business, and customers more. You gain better insights into the driving factors behind things such as brand affinity.

You can put these to your business’ advantage to come up with brand new product ideas and business models. And this again increases your chances of flourishing by a more significant margin.

4. It helps build better products

With growth hacking, you understand what your consumers use and don’t use your products for and find a technique to track and evaluate that data accurately. If you find that your current products aren’t performing up to your expectations or aren’t accomplishing your intended objectives, you would have to modify those. 

This helps in building better products- ones that your consumers need and love.  This in turn would increase your brand’s word-of-mouth exposure too. This may even aid in the viral marketing of your product. Who knows?

5. It helps discover data-driven strategies

When you’re experimenting and evaluating various new strategies within your business, you’ll discover several strategies that work. For, in every channel that you can use for driving growth, there’s an aspect that you can use for growth hacking. 

For instance, you may find that one of the marketing channels you are using outperforms the others even if you’ve adopted undifferentiated marketing. Or you may discover an entirely new marketing medium which you’ve never ventured before.

6. It facilitates cost-effective returns

The ultimate goal of growth hacking is to grow without spending a lot on high-cost techniques like press releases, conventional advertising, etc. So, with growth hacking, you discover cost-effective strategies to increase ROI. 

You find these affordable strategies around you after you understand your target audience’s needs, the way your products meet these needs, and then nourish it further. 

Conclusion

Growth hacking has become a buzzword for numerous reasons, the best of which we’ve listed in our blog. So, you may intend to adopt it as one of your business growth strategies soon. However, before that, it’d be prudent from our end to alert you that not all growth hacking campaigns succeed. So, if you want to dive into growth hacking, be prepared to face contingencies where you spend a lot of time on initiatives that don’t turn out fruitful. 

Shivani is a content writer at InviteReferrals, which provides referral software that allows businesses to attract new customers from existing customers through referral campaigns.