Growth Hacking Process Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide For Your Startup

Are you ready to grow your startup? Let’s have a look at the actual growth hacking process that you can implement to grow your business in 2021.

This guide will help your company grow,  win more clients, increase brand awareness, and generate more revenue.

Before we get into the growth hacking process, let’s explain what growth hacking is, how it works, and why it’s efficient at helping you grow your business.

Finally, we will share some specific instances of growth hacking approaches so that you could obtain a clearer picture of it.

Overview

A new business growth strategy has revolutionised the way marketers execute their work in the past five years.

Direct-response marketing was popular in the past, and it was followed by web marketing, guerilla marketing, and viral marketing. Today’s marketing term is “growth hacking.”

Everyone, including tech startups, eCommerce stores, and even government agencies, appears to be talking about it. Its attraction stems from the fact that it simply works.

Thousands of tiny software firms and lean startups have used growth hacking to rapidly scale up and become profitable, transforming them into market behemoths in only a few years. Because of the strength of growth hacking, companies like Airwallex have even achieved unicorn status (market value of over $1 billion) in comparable periods.

Given the buzz surrounding the term, you might be wondering:

How can I use growth hacking in my own business?

Is Silicon Valley just profitable for tech businesses with millions of dollars in venture capital?

If you follow the correct measures, you can apply a growth hacking strategy for your business or startup. No, you don’t need substantial investors or a fancy headquarters to do it.

If you’re curious about growth hacking, keep reading because today, you’ll learn what it is and how to apply a growth hacking plan for your own company.

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is a concept made by Sean Ellis, a seasoned and renowned IT entrepreneur. In the now-classic paper that spawned the growth hacking movement, Ellis defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.”

As this fundamental definition suggests, growth hacking is a practice that focuses on growing a company at any costs.

According to Ellis’ book “Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakthrough Performance” , growth hacking is characterised by success.

Growth hacking is a marketing and corporate growth technique that is data-driven, analytical, and pragmatic. Any growth hacking strategy’s ultimate objective is to attract additional users, or “scaling” as growth hackers refer to it.

How to Create a Growth Hacking Strategy?

A growth hacking plan is a framework that ties all of your marketing efforts together (growth hacks).

Ellis explains in his book:

The Growth hacking approach provides a set of actions that growth teams should undertake to find new growth opportunities and magnify existing ones by doing rapid testing to find the best performers.

The method is a continuous cycle with four essential elements:

• • • Data analysis and insight collecting
    • Idea-generation
    • Experiment prioritisation
    • Experiment execution, followed by a return to the analysis stage to examine the outcomes and choose the following actions.

To put a growth hacking approach into action, we’ll need to break it down into the four steps Ellis stated.

Growth Hacking Process: 4 Steps to Achieving Startup Success

Step 1: Information Gathering

Traditionally, marketers begin meeting preparation by compiling a list of all the topics they want to use. And growth hackers, being the analytical creatures they are, are well aware of this.

Consequently, the first step in the strategy is to gather all of the essential information to select the approaches.

The goal of a growth hacker is to go through all of the data they’ve gotten from all of the people they’ve joined till they’ve figured out who their various customer groups are and who their ideal client is.

Here’s how a company may begin growth hacking:

• • • Design and test your product to ensure that people desire it and are willing to pay for it. This will help with data collection, allowing you to better understand your key consumer demographics and adjust your growth marketing efforts accordingly.
    • Both a qualitative and quantitative investigation is required. You’ll need both “gut feelings” from your most committed customers to back up your claims.
    • In terms of qualitative analysis, you’ll need to conduct interviews and surveys to learn more about your best and worst customers, as well as the factors that influence their decisions. However, you’ll need to crunch information, uncover connections, and construct data sets to gain a complete picture of your consumers’ behaviour.
    • The data you acquire, on the other hand, should not be stagnant. Before making improvements to your website, you don’t look at the statistics and hope they’ll work. In a technique known as “high-tempo testing,” you do hundreds of trials.
    • You generate ideas, test them, and then add those that work on the site, while those that don’t are deleted and utilised in future testing.

Unlike other marketing methods that need extensive study and preparation before implementation, growth hacking focuses on testing one hypothesis at a time to see whether or not it works.

The results, whether positive or negative, are then documented and examined before moving on to the next one.

Also Read: How to Do Market Research for a Business Startup?

Step 2: Write Out A List Of Possible Ideas

List out all your ideas of improvement and prioritise them. This is a crucial step that many entrepreneurs miss out on.

It would help if you get as many individuals as possible from various areas inside your firm to provide suggestions. The more varied your group, the better your thoughts will be (think customer service and sales reps, engineers, marketers, and so on).

More importantly, these ideas are linked to the information you started. The produced ideas must be routed through a standardised process to eliminate any hassles down the line.

For example, a broad proposal would be, “Our sign-up technique is too complex ; it should be straightforward to follow.” A far better approach would be to spell out the specific modification to be evaluated, the reason for the change, how it would enhance results, and a brief description of how the outcomes recorded.

Each notion should include the following components:

• If at all possible, the name of the idea should be brief, clear, and self-explanatory.
• Idea description: It should look like an executive summary; it should address the who (the target audience), what, where, when, why, and how of the idea.
• The hypothesis should explain the test’s intended cause and effect.
• Metrics to track to analyse the test’s results include: It should specify the metrics used to assess the test’s results.

By the end of this phase, you should have at least a few hundred ideas that you can start testing immediately.

Also, check out 14 Sure Signs That You Have A Great Business Idea.

Step 3: Put Your Ideas to the test

This is the actual execution of the tests, and is one that most growth hackers like discussing. Now is the best time to start hacking.

If at all feasible, these tests should be done by growth hackers themselves. “Growth hackers are a blend of marketing and development,” says Andrew Chen, one of the first to describe the notion of growth hacking.

On the other hand, growth hackers may require assistance from other members of the team, such as designers, developers, and anybody else who can help them complete the experiment in the shortest amount of time. As a result, CEOs should give growth hackers as much freedom as possible.

The purpose of these experiments should be to look at the results so that growth hackers can find out what consumers want, like, and need.

Most importantly, the results of each experiment should help users to inform future practices and company decisions.

Growth hacking encourages an ongoing learning process that keeps the whole firm on its toes, absorbing new ideas and accumulating a depth of user knowledge that might help it become the most significant player in its industry.

Step 4: Collaborate with Corporations and Affiliate Marketers

Collaboration with applications and goods is an excellent growth technique for spreading the word about your product. Samsung and Dropbox in 2013 are excellent examples of this growth approach being employed by a well-known business.

Dropbox gave Samsung users 50 GB of free storage for two years when they bought a new phone or camera. However, the free plan only provided customers with 5 GB of storage space.

Among the other branding services employed in this growth hacking was the strategy of getting customers hooked to the 50 GB storage so that they may spend some money every two years to use the free space.

Another method is affiliate marketing, in which you create a network of individuals or businesses that advertise your product on their platform or circle. It works in such a manner that for each click the user makes and subsequent purchase, a tiny portion of the transaction is paid to the individual or firm. It is best described as a referral fee.

Affiliate marketers’ most valuable assets are online influencers and bloggers. You may either approach them directly to advertise your goods or engage with a marketing agency.

Bonus: Growth Hacking Techniques That Every Startup Should Follow

• • • Create an email list for the pre-launch.
    • Launch your product on product hunt or related platform.
    • Utilise the power of referral marketing.
    • Form new brand alliances.
    • Participate in and host community events and conferences.
    • Leverage adjacent markets.
    • Growth hacking on social media: build a community for your brand.
    • Keep an eye on your main competitors.
    • Develop a bold content marketing strategy.
    • Do guest posting.
    • Provide discounts to beta testers.
    • Display user stories on your blog.
    • Repurposing existing website/blog content.
    • Use quora to your advantage by answering relevant questions.
    • Form affiliate partnerships.
    • Set up email drip campaigns.

Begin Your Growth Hacking Journey

Growth hacking has changed the marketing and IT sectors because it blends the analytical, disciplined mindset of scientists and engineers with the creativity of marketers and designers.

As a result of this, businesses have learned from their customers and grown from the ground up. Enterprises have become leaner, more efficient, more productive as a result.

If correctly implemented, the growth hacking method provided here might become your company’s secret winning recipe. It has the potential to be the lifeblood of your startup.

I hope I effectively expressed all of the processes required to develop and expand your business concisely and straightforwardly. I would like to conclude this guide by pointing out some more growth hacking techniques that you could leverage for your business:

• • • Do market research to determine what items customers are genuinely seeking and how your products or services may save them.
    • Define your target audience after conducting market research. Internet technology has made it simple to locate clients who want your stuff.
    • Design your marketing strategy and identify your target demographic. Because you can’t sell your products and services to everyone, a well-thought-out marketing strategy will help in bringing your brand to the attention of your target demographic.
    • Acquire potential buyers to expand your client base and keep them to provide long-term service. Use customer acquisition strategies to entice and persuade new consumers to become your customers.
    • Finally, evaluate your growth hacking efforts to see how they’re doing and make adjustments as needed.

Final Thoughts

Many companies have always struggled with growth. The underlying issue is that your market and target audience aren’t often exposed to innovative marketing efforts.

In such a competitive climate, the only way to develop your firm is to make it Growth Marketing-ready with the aforementioned processes.

While there is no wrong in attempting new things (in fact, this is the most common piece of advice from experts), startups must focus on implementing tried-and-tested development tactics. There is no single hack that will fix all of your problems. Don’t be afraid to experiment with fresh growth hacking techniques in the future.