What is Growth Hacking and how to use it for your business?
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking, contrary to its image, is not at all a magical method that will allow you to develop your business by “hacking” Facebook or “scraping” Google. It is actually a step-by-step methodology. A rapid experimentation process that has allowed many start-ups to successfully develop their business. Growth Hacking’s growth methods and marketing practices in the world of start-ups is not only reserved for start-ups. They can be applied to all types of business.
Ensure a product/service market fit for your Growth Hacking Strategy
This is the basis that some companies forget far too easily. That is, your product/service must meet the right target audience with the right message. It’s all about getting your target audience to absolutely understand what you are proposing. The conversion will be the purchase of your offer, and the recommendation the fact that they are talking about it around them.
Radically, if you don’t have a product/service market fit, drop Growth Hacking altogether. There is a certain case where Growth Hacking can help you achieve it. Notably by improving conversion or recommendation, but it would be more complicated to just start from scratch.
The AARRR Model for your Growth Hacking Strategy
AARRR is the model that allows you to consider your data in terms of a complete cycle of your customer on your product/service. It is only an acquisition tunnel. Its objective is to find a solution to quickly develop its user base and quickly recover funds. This cycle is divided into several parts:
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Acquisition
Acquisition describes how people find you and end up turning to customers. To consider an acquisition, start with your entire market. Who will benefit from your product? Once you have a potential customer base, think about how to effectively attract them. This subset represents the markets you can enter.
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Activation
During the activation phase, consider the product or experience you want to offer the customer. Activation is about turning users into qualified prospects. What does a prospect have to do to become a customer?
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Retention
In the retention phase, think about how to build customer loyalty. If customers subscribe to your product or service, how can you prevent them from becoming unstable?
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Reference
To think about referrals, start developing a marketing strategy to get your customers talking about your business.
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Revenues
In order to generate revenue, start calculating whether your business model is sustainable and how you should price your products or services.
These steps are not in this specific order. It is simply a matter of adapting the model to your business. The AARRR matrix is a very good tool for planning your marketing strategy, which is why each step is important and must be handled in the best possible way.
Prioritization of your Growth Hacking Strategy
There is no question of wanting to improve everything at the same time. It is necessary to prioritize the important points that seem the most critical to you at time T. To ensure sustainable growth, you will surely have to start working on the retention stage. This is valid for all types of business. If you don’t have retention at all, your business cannot be viable. One way to stay effective is to stay focused on a single metric and make it grow. By setting a timeframe and a goal while keeping an eye on revenue-related performance metrics.
This is called OMTM (One Metric That Matter), which is a quantitative indicator that captures the performance of your main objective at the time. The OMTM changes according to business and priorities. The main advantage of this process is that it provides an ideal framework for a fast and efficient experimentation process.
Experimentation process for your Growth Hacking Strategy
Growth Hacking is a cross-functional discipline that concerns the marketing team as well as the sales or product team and developers. More often, we need to do cross-functional project management by putting everyone more or less involved in this rapid experimentation process.
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Brainstorming of ideas
This is the most fun part because you have to be very open-minded. You can invite your employees who are concerned by the subject. It is also possible to invite outside experts for more specific topics. The idea is to have a large accumulation of data to improve the OMTM.
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Test Prioritization
To sort through this accumulation of data and prioritize tests, there are several methods. Notably the ICE method which consists in giving priority to growth experiments.
- Impact demonstrates how your idea will positively affect the key metric you are trying to improve.
- Confidence that shows how sure you are of the Impact. It is also about ease of implementation.
- Ease which relates to ease of implementation. This is an estimate of the effort and resources needed to implement the idea.
Each of these criteria is scored from 1 to 10, which will give you an average called the ICE score.
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Launching the tests
At a pre-determined frequency of time, you must run the number of tests you want to perform. For example 4 tests per week. For these tests you will have to define before the launch:
- An objective
- A precise description of the test
- A hypothesis
- How to check it
- How to measure it
- This makes it possible to validate the test
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Analysis of the results
A regular update will allow the results of the previous period to be analyzed. Although some tests may take longer, it is important to keep this on a short cycle. Don’t forget to draw lessons from each experiment for the next tests. For example, if a test did not work, try to replicate the experiment by refining the audience. This step also allows you to document the knowledge. That is to say, to know what worked and what did not work. But also so that someone who gets into the loop will take the information very quickly.
These 4 steps form a virtuous loop where each idea that has failed is abandoned or refined to be put back into the accumulation of ideas. The principle of this methodology is that one cannot know what will work or not. So the most important thing is the frequency with which you are going to do the tests.