marketing, business-model, growth, target-market, lean-startupWikipedia defines the term as follows
Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.
My question is how does it differ from activities that come under digital marketing like search engine advertising, banner advertising, social media marketing, viral marketing etc.
I understand that growth hacking may of course include some aspects of digital marketing but my question is on what are the unique characteristics (or “hacks”) of a campaign run with growth hacking as compared to digital marketing.
The difference between the two is fuzzy at best.
At a somewhat superficial level, a marketer and a growth hacker worry about the same things:
They do this by:
Every single tool and technique available to the marketer is also available to the growth hacker – and pretty much vice versa. To me the two are the exact same thing, and Growth Hacker is just a buzzword that could apply to any competent marketer with enough technical skills.
This technical component is where some would argue there’s a slight difference. The resulting focus ends up on the lead generation part of the conversion funnel, by “borrowing” traffic or devising viral growth strategies that one cannot execute using off the shelf products.
A canonical example to illustrate this could be AirBnB. What they did, basically, to bootstrap their growth and user-base was reverse engineer the web forms used by Craigslist. They then automatically posted AirBnB ads to Craigslist in order to skim its traffic.
As you can imagine, a marketer who isn’t technically oriented wouldn’t have the skills to pull that off – nor, possibly, even have the idea to do so. Nor could he mine stats, or create viral sharing forms, or what have you.
My reply to that, though, is that a marketer with technical skills can, will, and indeed did consider this kind of stuff long before growth hacking was a thing. (And when you think about it, black hat SEO and related dubious marketing practices are growth hacking in all but name.)
Now, in my own experience (I tell my prospects I’m a marketer or a growth hacker depending on who I talk to), actively searching for huge growth opportunities such as what AirBnB pulled off amounts to trying to search for things about as rare as unicorns. There are some here and there, but if you’re hiring someone with the explicit job of trying to find them upon reaching “industry standard” conversion rates, you’re basically wasting your money.
Because in practice, the single-most effecting thing one can do to increase growth in a startup or a small business, is to get the very down to earth basics right (they usually aren’t), and set up a proper and efficient sales process. Doing so yields less but more qualified leads (decreasing costs) and significantly increases conversion rates (increasing revenue).
Growth hacking overview:
Growth hacking is only a few years old, around 6 years old. The term was first coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis. Growth hacking is a way to increase the social reach of the brand or product. The word hack means a way which is different than the traditional way of doing things; the hacker uses innovative and creative ways to get the job done. Unlike the detailed marketing strategy, the focus of growth hacking and growth hacker is to focus on end result i.e. increasing sales and generate more and more brand awareness. Growth hackers, with their knowledge of product and distribution, find new and technologically advanced ways to promote the product and find new avenues of growth.
Growth hacking and Digital marketing, what’s the difference?
Well, for most of the people the terms are chaotic or sometimes used interchangeably but there is borderline between growth hacking and digital marketing. Growth hacking deals scalable methods to increase sales and generate brand awareness. It includes everything that drives traffic to your website, retention of customers, word of mouth or anything that promotes your business and motivates the customers to come back to your website. It can be your email signature or a leaderboard in your website or anything that entices and engages the prospective customer.
On the other hand, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s about promoting brands through different ways and medium.
To sum it up, it can be said that growth marketing is a level up of digital marketing.
Check out my write up on Growth hacking – your tool to success
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