Growth Hacking is like a marketing laboratory: instead of following traditional rules, you test unusual tactics to grow fast while spending little. It’s not just for startups – e-commerce owners, influencers and even consultants can use it.
Marketing teams – especially those working with tight budgets – use growth hacking techniques to quickly generate brand awareness and increase their customer base.
Today we’ll explain how this works and look at some examples for you to apply in your day-to-day life. Let’s go?
What is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is an experimental business strategy focused on achieving exponential growth in a short space of time.
To this end, growth hackers constantly devise and carry out experiments to attract new customers. When an experiment results in positive growth, they scale it up and iterate some more.
Growth hacking refers to specific marketing techniques and channels aimed at rapid, low-cost growth. That’s why many now associate the term with early-stage startups looking to expand quickly on small budgets.
The constancy and dynamism of growth hackers
Experimenting with new tactics and approaches is fundamental to growth hacking.
Usually, this means running several small experiments simultaneously. Once you know which tactics work best on a small scale, you can integrate them into your long-term marketing strategy.
A new e-commerce business needs to generate leads and create initial sales momentum, for example.
The marketing team knows that online ads generate results, but they’re not sure which tone of voice to use in the ad text. So they test two different versions and compare the results.
The version with a more direct and informal tone (Version “B”) generates more traffic and conversions on the site, which is why it is launched to a wider audience.
This process is called A/B testing and is a great way to maximize growth on a small budget. This way, the company can invest in ads that resonate better with customers – and perhaps use the winning text as a variant in a follow-up test.
What’s the difference between growth hacking and digital marketing?
Growth hacking and digital marketing share the goal of business growth, but differ in their approach and emphasis.
Digital marketing covers any use of digital media to promote a product or service.
While Growth Hacking is a subset of digital marketing. It focuses less on traditional tactics that have been proven to work and more on finding new paths to exponential growth.
These “growth hacks” tend to be creative and innovative, although they are usually driven by data and relentless experimentation.
Not all digital marketing techniques are useful for growth hackers. Strategies such as SEO, for example, require more consistency and time.
How can Growth Hacking help your company?
Here are four advantages that growth hacking can bring to your marketing strategy:
- Economic expansion: testing creative tactics can lead to significant growth with minimal investment;
- Data-driven decision making: Growth hacking involves a lot of trial and error. Data from A/B tests and other experiments indicate what works and what doesn’t.
This can help you make better-informed marketing decisions that lead to a higher return on investment (ROI);
- Minimal disruption: The “start small and repeat” nature of growth hacking lends itself to lean teams.
If you can’t sacrifice a lot of resources, you can start with just one or two employees in your growth hacking team;
- Greater responsiveness: when you quickly scale successful marketing strategies, you can adapt more easily to changing circumstances and markets.
The more growth hacking you do, the better prepared you will be.
These benefits make growth hacking particularly valuable for certain companies.
For example, startups often have limited resources but still need to grow and stand out. Growth hacking techniques can help them gain visibility quickly, without significant investment.
Discover 5 Growth Hacking techniques
Here are some examples of techniques that have been tried and tested by many business owners and marketing teams.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategy in which a company works with “influencers”, i.e. people with followers who are usually numerous and engaged.
The main aim of this is to promote products online in a natural way, demonstrating their use and sometimes showing ways of using the product or service.
In doing so, the company effectively takes advantage of the reach and trust of these influencers, which would otherwise take months or years to build organically.
When choosing an influencer, look for profiles in your sector with highly engaged followers. Lots of likes, comments and regular posts indicate that a collaboration could be fruitful. This is especially true if you and the influencer share a target audience.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based promotional tactic in which companies pay a commission on conversions attributed to an affiliate or partner.
Although affiliate marketing is now common practice for digital marketers, it started out as a classic growth hack. It certainly has the tell-tale signs of a low initial risk, but the potential for huge and rapid gains.
The more affiliates share your link, the faster you can grow. It all depends on the size of the audience of the people and brands you partner with, how well your brands align and how many of them you work with.
What’s more, the financial risk is lower, since the advertiser pays a commission instead of a fixed fee. This way, payments will be proportional to earnings.
Referral strategies
Referral marketing is a strategy that encourages existing customers to refer new customers to a company in exchange for rewards or benefits.
One example that worked very well is Dropbox, which had a campaign “How to refer friends to Dropbox and get more storage space”.
In this sense, positive word of mouth increases the likelihood of people buying.
Referral marketing fits into the growth hacking framework because it allows companies to take advantage of a non-monetary asset they already have – the trust of their existing customers – to build brand awareness and increase conversions.
Countdown strategies
Countdown timers are animated images in an email message or on a website that count down to a specific date or time.
Sometimes presented in GIF format, they sit alongside other assets such as images and text.
This type of resource can be used on websites, social networks, email marketings or other types of communication where you want to create scarcity triggers.
Countdown timers support rapid growth because they add urgency to customer-facing messages. They tell people: “This is your chance!” This can trigger the fear of missing out, which is persuasive for many buyers.
You can count down to various events to generate more conversions. Examples include:
- The beginning or end of a sales promotion;
- Early pricing windows;
- Physical events and webinars;
- Product launches;
- Account renewals.
Check if there is a timer feature in your web design tool, content management system (CMS) or email marketing software.
Online ads
Online ads can provide quick and measurable results to help your company grow quickly on a small budget.
These channels allow you to pay to present your company to target Internet users:
- Search engines;
- Social media;
- Applications;
- Websites.
Paid ads, such as Google Ads, appear at the top and on the sides of search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for related terms.
Conclusion
Growth Hacking stands out as an innovative and highly effective strategy for driving rapid and sustainable business growth, especially in highly competitive environments with limited resources.
With a focus on continuous experimentation and creativity, it allows companies to test different approaches to find the ones that offer the greatest return on the lowest investment.
By implementing techniques such as influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, referral strategies, countdowns and online ads, companies can accelerate their growth in a cost-effective and data-driven way.
These tactics not only increase visibility and the customer base, but also enable a rapid response to market changes, ensuring that the business is always ahead of the competition.
Now that you know all this, start applying it to your business and understand what works best for you. See you next time! 😉
