Why Do You Need Growth Hacking? And How Should You Do?
In the initial phase of startups or a product, there is something that needs to focus on before building big marketing teams and increasing brand awareness. That is growth.
Startups, by their very nature, start with small teams and small budgets. For this reason, instead of making big marketing campaigns or launching day for their first products, they should ensure that the product they develop for the problem they want to solve first catches the Product-Market fit. Then they should try to grow in the target market rapidly, which is to scale. For this, they should put customer acquisition before brand awareness. One of the crucial criteria for doing this is to have a Growth Hacker in the team and work on Growth Hacking.
Sean Ellis, one of the best-known Growth Hackers, describes Growth Hacking as follows:
“A rigorous approach to fueling rapid market growth through high-speed, cross-functional experimentation.”
So How Do They Do This?
Making the Right Product
First of all, remember that you need the right product for growth. Aaron Ginn says “Even the best Growth Hacker is unable to grow a broken or missing product.”
Once you are sure that your product is truly something worth marketing, then you should only go after the method that will have a sudden big bang. For this reason, you should regularly test your product on users who have the problem you want to solve and work non-stop to make the most accurate product. In the early days, Twitter was running ten tests with its users every week to develop its product. It is beneficial for the long-term development of your product, not to think that you have developed the best product or service.
Sean Beausoleil, head of the Mailbox engineering team says “Whatever your current situation is, better is always possible”. For this reason, you should keep testing and collecting feedback from your users to constantly improve your product.
You Do Not Have a Recipe
When we search on the Internet or other sources, we see many strategies and examples of Growth Hacking, but there is no definitive recipe for this. Each startup draws a roadmap according to its product and target audience. You need to know your target audience and the problem they are experiencing. Which websites do users who have the problem you want to solve spend their time on? How are they solving the problem they are having now? What do they like? You have to master many topics about them. In this way, you can develop your strategies in the right way.
Should More Investment Be Made In Marketing If The Product is Not Growing?
If you think you can explain your service well enough but you can not grow, you should improve your product and service rather than increase your marketing budget. You should continue this process until it reaches a point where people can’t stop using you. Your investment in marketing may create minor sparks, but the thing that will turn those sparks into a fire is the product you develop.
Marketing For Brand Awareness Isn’t a Bad Thing But…
When you launch your product and testing your product with your users, you should be open to feedback and improving your product. Only in this way can you find the right solution for your target audience. In this process, it is much more important to try to achieve product-market fit instead of marketing expenses such as brand awareness. After you take your product to the scaling stage, such marketing expenses will be much more meaningful for you. Growth Hacking will prevent you from spending unnecessary money in your early days and help you to create a more sustainable marketing strategy for your product.
Not a Few Tactics or Tricks, Long Process
What a growth hacker is trying to do is learn as much as possible about the problem you want to solve and develop a sustainable way to grow the product you develop. Growth Hacking is a process that allows you to constantly examine and improve your product, rather than a move to be made and finished once.
Growth Hacking for Anything
You don’t have to own a startup or a digital product like Twitter to adopt Growth Hacking strategies. You can grow hacking on any product you want. This could be a book, a car, or even a health product.
One Dollar Shave Club can be a good example. They sell men’s grooming products and razors with a subscription model. The team initially created an entertaining video that could go viral for its target audience and has 26.9 Million views. Thanks to other strategies they implemented, they made a transaction of 600 Million dollars in 3 years and were purchased by Unilever for 1 Billion dollars.
Our goal is to transform a small but accurate core customer base into a large army in an innovative and unique way as at least as our product.
So what are the skills of Growth Hackers?
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