2 minute readPublished 3 December
For those of us who hadn’t heard the term Growth Hacking, we could be forgiven for thinking it was a phrase used to describe a Californian farmer taking out his frustrations on a poorly performing Avocado crop!
It was, in fact, coined 3 or 4 years ago at the new frontier of unfathomable business jargon – the tech start up Wild West of Silicon Valley. It seems that those tasked with Business Development at these 21st century prospectors were somewhat underwhelmed with such a prosaic job title when surrounded by Information Architects, User Experience Gurus and Web Design Rockstars – and so the Growth Hacker was born.
What exactly is Growth Hacking? In one sentence, it’s the process of promoting your business without any sales, advertising or digital marketing budget. Now that got your attention!
By empathetically utilising digital channels – email, search, social, content marketing – to generate interest, encouraging sharing through incentives and raising awareness by providing branded resources, startups are known to have achieved huge numbers of subscribers or leads in incredibly short periods of time.
startups are known to have achieved huge numbers of subscribers or leads in incredibly short periods of time.
For example, take that hugely useful and popular cloud based web hosting Application Dropbox. When they were ready to bring the App to market, Dropbox designed a simple link baited landing page comprising nothing more than a short explanatory video and a ‘Sign up’ button.
This was quickly picked up by the tech community and Dropbox leveraged this interest to the max by incentivising subscribers to recommend a friend, connect their social media accounts and share, with the offer of free additional storage space for each action.
Did this strategy work? Well, they apparently achieved around 70,000 sign-ups in the first 24 hours!
So, very simply, this is Growth Hacking and it will be interesting to see if, over the next few years, there are less Creative Marketing Managers in the UK and more Growth Hackers!
