Growth Hacking

You often hear stories of one or two entrepreneurs who started from their garage and then grew into a large multinational.

You can also see a trend among large companies where they have a small group of people with limited resources who develop and test a new concept for new initiatives or ideas. This group checks whether it is a viable concept.

There has been a vacuum between classic marketing on the one hand and software and web development on the other, the use of technical tools, analysis tools, and new technologies.

In every area of a business, there are specialists, who excel in their discipline. But how do you connect them? An even bigger issue, how do you use all these possibilities as a smaller company or startup if you do not have the budget to hire a single employee for each discipline.

The term Growth Hacker originated in America from this background.

What is Growth Hacking?

In the Netherlands, the term hacking is usually associated with hacking into computer systems. The actual meaning is: "to achieve results efficiently with relatively few resources."

In this blog. I will explain what growth hacking is, what the background is and why growth hacking is so interesting. In the part "online growth in practice", I explain the online growth formula. In the online growth plan, I explain how a system is used to achieve this growth.

Growth Hacking is therefore with a limited amount of resources and smart deployment a significant growth in a business, using tools, techniques + strategies from multiple fields.

A growth hacker is both a marketer, who thinks who his target group is and how it can be reached. As a technician who uses tools to automate work where possible. As an analyst who sets goals and measures whether efforts lead to an improvement in results.

Growth hacking is a new discipline, there are no official growth hacking courses. Most current growth hackers often have a background as a marketer, developer, designer, copywriter and / or data analyst. They have grown from this core discipline and have expanded their knowledge with other disciplines.

Schematically you can place growth hacking as follows.

To make growth hacking more concrete, for example: improving the results of a website.

 

When you think of a website, the first thing you think of is "I want more visitors." With a new website, getting visitors is usually the starting point, where the first action must be taken. There are roughly 2 methods for this. Content marketing, or by making good content through search engines when Google gets visitors to your website. The term organic SEO is also used for this. The other method is to use Advertising. You pay for each click on a link to your website. But immediately ensures that you get top of the search results or a prominent place on Facebook. Of course, the costs are significant, and if you stop advertising, you will no longer have visitors. This is something someone who specializes in SEO or Advertising can support.

 

Although it is true, that more visitors generally will lead to more attention and sales. It is a shame to limit yourself to this. In addition to more turnover from visitors, you can also set up pages in which you try to obtain a lead. A lead means that you send someone to your website from Facebook, for example, and that they leave a name and e-mail address on your website in exchange for something valuable. Think of a registration for a white paper, webinar, trial subscription or coaching conversation.

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Hoe ga je vervolgens een lead opvolgen en onderscheid maken tussen iemand die de specifieke whitepaper gratis wil en een prospect die mogelijk ook interesse heeft in je product of dienst?

How will you then follow up on a lead and distinguish between someone who wants the specific whitepaper for free and a prospect who may also be interested in your product or service?

This process is called lead nurturing. It is generally known in the seller world that multiple positive contact moments with a prospect lead to a greater chance of selling.

By setting up a smart funnel you can build in various digital contact moments such as emails with prospects. And you can also collect more data about the lead and then take more targeted actions on leads/prospects who show a great deal of interest in your products, services or field.

Also, it is smart to test and make multiple variations of a page. So, for example, test a page with an explanation video and a registration form against a page with the same message in text with a registration form. When the winner determines which page yields the most entries, the process can be repeated by testing this winner again with a new variant. This process is called conversion optimization.

So a growth hacker is a kind of online superman who knows everything in the online field?

No.

People who are experts in everything do not exist. A Growth Hacker often specializes in several disciplines.

But also has enough knowledge and experience to oversee other areas. And by making smart use of a network of external experts, he can manage the process. 

Another way to provide insight into this multidisciplinary approach is the online growth formula.

Visitor x Average Conversion% x Turnover per conversion = Online result

For example, if you sell an e-book of 10 euros and 1% of your website visitors buy this e-book, then with 1000 visitors you have 10 sales x 10 euros = 100 euros turnover. You can improve this result by, for example, doubling the number of visitors. By improving 25% on all three points, ie visitors/conversion/turnover per conversion, you also realize a turnover doubling.

But what if you don't sell an e-book, but you are a Ferrari dealer, for example. In that case, you probably will not make a sale directly through the website. However, you can do things like getting leads from people who want to test-drive a Ferrari. If you can then determine what% of test drives translate into a sale, you can translate a test drive into a lead value. And after that, the above formula can still be applied.

By looking at this formula and explaining which part we are going to tinker with, improving visitors, improving conversions or combinations, it is often easier to explain what the purpose of certain actions is and how this translates into the result.

In summary, a growth hacker has many options for result improvement that are part of his arsenal. But where do you start now and ensure that the right tools are used? How do you keep an overview? I use a step-by-step plan for this.

A step-by-step plan for setting up an Online Growth Plan

A step-by-step plan is tailor-made and the details differ per customer case. However, I can broadly indicate how this process works.

The first step is to determine the most important target group (who are your customers) and to determine the USPs (why you should buy them from you).

Then comes a Zero measurement, where are we now, what has been done in the past and what were the results.

Quick wins, major technical or SEO errors that can be resolved relatively quickly.

Drawing up a growth sprint in which we choose a topic in which we will realize growth, for example, rank in Google on certain keywords, or build texts or a lead funnel.

After completing a growth sprint, evaluate what has been done. The results are measured and then will the next growth sprint be determined.

After this, this process repeats, in which a goal with associated actions is defined, implemented and evaluated in a short sprint of a maximum of one month.