History of the term "growth hacking"

Growth hacking came into existence in the year 2010 by Sean Ellis, who coined the term, and is very popular in the startup culture as they have limited budgets and other resources. Startups have come up with the most experimental methods for growing their businesses and optimizing their products for better reach. Slowly and steadily, the marketing process lured large companies like Tiktok, Shopify, etc., and they started with growth hacking on a higher level by hiring growth hackers and teams for quick results.

How to get started with growth hacking?

The very first step is to understand your product and test it to get an idea of whether people like your product or not and whether they are willing to pay for the same. Now you can collect the data as per the above trial and be well prepared to target growth marketing techniques accordingly.

Make sure to update your product regularly and collect feedback. A self-checking procedure will make you more creative and attentive to the minute details and amendments.

The 3 Keys to Growth Hack Marketing:​​​​​​​

Psychology: Psychology is the science of convincing your customers in such a way that they agree with what you are offering. Making people believe in the essence of your products and services is the key to marketing and the very first step to making them buy the product. An example would be selling large packets at a lower price than medium packets, and so on.

Technology: With the use of technology, you can make the idea come to reality. By utilizing various technical tools, you can optimize your product and make it more accessible to people.

Marketing: Now that you are done with the above two, how you represent it in front of your customers is all that it takes. The buyer persona and creative content will wave the wand for you to get leads.

Growth hacking strategies

Growth hacking is a very broad term as it includes different types of marketing and non-marketing methods, but all hacking strategies mainly fall into these areas:

Product marketing: This means making your product presentable and more appealing. This includes affiliate marketing, offering rewards for referrals that will benefit both the user and the referrer, etc.

Content marketing: Different content marketing techniques include:

Quality blogs, creative social media content, podcasting, contests and giveaways, webinars, influencer marketing, SEO, etc.

Advertising includes campaigns and advertisements.

Some famous growth hacking examples:

The referral programme of Dropbox-

Dropbox was one of the very first companies to come up with a referral programme that offered its users 250 MB of extra storage space for every new user they brought to the platform. The invite procedure is made easy through Facebook, Twitter, or email invites.

This proved to be a great success for the company, as it grew from 100,000 users to 4 million users in 2010. It was a very strategic and viral marketing tactic of that time.

eBay-bot and PayPal-

PayPal wants a payment position on eBay to receive a small commission per transaction. At first, eBay had no interest in this deal. The PayPal team manually approaches their products to big sellers on eBay with the question, " Can we pay you via PayPal ?" The sellers were unknown to PayPal and were losing the deal. They demanded eBay integrate PayPal, and after enough requests, eBay turned to PayPal.

Growth hacking is not at all easy to nail down, but rapidly experimenting with your thoughts and ideas with different marketing tactics and advertising efforts will generate sales. It's all about generating engagement, whether through small metrics or by throwing money at various contests and giveaways.

Only we know what's best for our business, so till then, keep experimenting with the above tricks and trials or make your own growth hacking techniques to be on top of the game.