Before answering why it is so relevant to "cultivate" Growth Hacking within your startup, let's take a step back.
How many times when opening LinkedIn, looking at the role occupied by our contacts, do we happen to read "Growth Hacker, Growth PM, Head of Growth Manager"?
This is not new, these are roles that are expanding widely and seem to be taking on a major importance in product business growth, in fact we can consider Growth Hacking as a kind of organizational innovation characterized by the fusion of product development together with marketing.
Any environment with an entrepreneurial spirit needs a good dose of Growth Hacking within it.
Let's talk about philosophy, strategy, mindset, let's call it whatever we prefer but, the truth is that there is no single formula to do Growth Hacking perfectly and straightforwardly, however, there are many tips, a lot of data analysis, a lot of field tests and many relevant Case Studies that talk about it.
The function of the Growth Hacker and the roots of the term
The goal of the Growth Hacker is to find the most effective methodology to grow the startup business, and the core of the methodology is found in product development, data analysis, and digital marketing.
Growth Hacking was born in Silicon Valley, and if startup brings with it the concept of speed, Growth Hacking brings the concept of growth .
But let us turn to the literalanalysis of the term:
- Growth: growth (already explained at length)
- Hacking: meaning is related to the field of information security, but it is a terminology used when referring to the use of skills such as creativity, problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking when we need to find a solution to a problem. This is because those in this role must possess this kind of mindset.
Lead Acquisition
It is necessary to dwell on the sore subject of the "growth" of a product: as of today anyone has the opportunity to launch their product within an e-commerce, the problem is the distribution of the product itself.
Acquiring leads is the real challenge, particularly acquiring that segment of leads that reflects the target audience we want to attract through our products. It is now widely known that the likelihood of a product being purchased and then subsequently used depends on the number of other people consuming the same good.
So by logic, acquiring leads is the basis of a startup's growth, and it is therefore very important to find the appropriate channel (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Discord & Co.) to distribute our product, but even more important is to engage our users.
User Engagement
To get the call to action toward the purchase of our product, we need to leverage another very particular but at the same time essential element: the emotional involvement that the product generates in the user, or rather: user engagement.
It is clear how the product must provoke emotions belonging to those that fall into the "positive" category, in addition, it is necessary that the user experience of the product is pleasant, this in order to achieve excellent retention rates and long-term sustainability of the enterprise.
Among the key elements of user engagement we find: content useful to attract the user's attention, interest, curiosity, aesthetics to support the content, originality, novelty, consistency of the messages we want to get across to the user with our communication campaigns, and primacy we find the visual influence and interactivity that the product manages to generate among users.
People want to seize market opportunities, and the Growth Hacker must know how to strategically use all available information and channels to accompany users along a rewarding path(customer experience), both for them and for the startup.
New startups in the consolidation phase need to find the most direct way to gain trust and consent from leads, they need to take care of their reputation and especially the expectations generated (by the published content marketing ) towards users, even before contact with the startup itself has taken place.
It is therefore extremely important to understand the consumer, going to analyze his real needs and not those imagined by the Growth Hacker himself, to understand the motivation behind the consumer, to be able to formulate a product that meets his needs. It turns out to be unavoidable not to study user behavior, in order to achieve optimal involvement in the product experience, because lead acquisition: the most important and at the same time delicate part for the startup.
Achieve user engagement in 3 steps
Capturing the moment
Well yes, sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right moment: according to Elliot Shmukler, head of product and growth at Wealthfront.com, the first step in getting more co-involvement from users is to discover their "AHA" moment-that is, the point of understanding the product and the benefits derived from it. The Growth Hacker's job lies in discovering this moment.
Conversion through email
Email should be leveraged to contact consumers in the most direct way possible: currently, email messages remain the most effective (and preferred) means of engaging and communicating with your customers.
Cultivating active users
They are a key element, the spokespersons for the brand and the experience with the brand, those who make judgments, who, if positive, incentivize the purchase of the product by speaking positively about it.
The importance of S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Within a Growth Hacking process, it is critically important to determine goals and understand what metrics you need to monitor.
Along with the measurement of metrics, a key role in successfully scaling one's business is taken on by S.M.A.R.T. goals, which provide insight into whether or not the marketing strategy we are applying is yielding significant results.
How to choose S.M.A.R.T. targets?
To determine whether a target is of type S.M.A.R.T., it must meet these 5 criteria, the target must be:
- Specific: Is my goal Specific? A goal must be tangible and clearly express what, how, and why you want to achieve it.
- Measurable: Is my goal Measurable? It must be able to be expressed numerically, quantitatively.
- Achievable: Is my goal Achievable? It must be realistic, commensurate with the resources available.
- Realistic: is my goal Relevant? Has something really relevant to invest time and money in.
- Time-Based: based on a defined period of time.
Following their definition, key metrics for implementing an efficient strategy are identified.
An example of a successful strategy: the case of Spotify
Spotify is a music service that offers on-demand streaming of a selection of songs from various record companies and independent labels.
From its launch, Spotify enjoyed high expectations of the service from users who would use it: with a freemium business model, earnings derived from the premium package, and advertising, when it came out in the United States the service was available by invitation only, and many celebrities began talking about Spotify on Twitter as well.