Growth Hacking is a marketing strategy that will allow you to grow your company or business exponentially using some techniques that we will see now.
Growth Hacking is the meeting of digital marketing and engineering. The term was coined by Sean Ellis, a famous marketer known among others to be one of the first marketers at Dropbox.
For him, a growth hacker is someone who deploys a set of marketing 2.0 techniques with a very scientific approach and a bit of malice in his actions to promote a product or service.
All the major companies known today, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox or Airbnb used Growth Hacking strategies when they were start-ups.
For example, Airbnb in its development phase had difficulty finding supply on one side and demand on the other. Marketers therefore set up the following hack: when you posted an ad on Airbnb, they would send it in a single click directly to the Craig List site (The Good American Corner). At the same time, they sent emails to everyone who posted an ad on Craig List.
It is this Growth Hacking technique that allowed Airbnb to develop its contact list and find customers in a very short time, to get the website and the turnover through commissions off the ground.
The 6 essential points to take into account in order to trigger a rapid growth of your business start with the preliminary and crucial stage of the product market fit.
The product market fit is the meeting between a given product and the needs of the market. In other words, your product needs to find its audience, otherwise the deployment of an AARRR growth strategy would be useless.
The "AARRR" Framework (for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Income and Referral) illustrates the Growth Hacking strategy. It is a method that will allow you to analyze your entire conversion tunnel and the life of your users in your product, from start to finish.
How to start the search for new customers and attract prospects? Acquisition is the set of actions that allow you to capture the attention of people to come and visit your website. This can be done through digital prospecting (Facebook advertising, blog, SEO...) or even through telephone prospecting depending on your business sector. The goal is to attract the prospect on your platform, your mobile application or your product.
Next, activation is an action that the prospect will convert. People coming to your site will discover your value proposition, what you are selling and go to a certain action related to your product. This can be an email capture, a registration, a white paper download, a gift.
For example, if you sell software, the activation rate will correspond to all the people who came to your site that you managed to bring to download, install or use your application.
To achieve a good transformation rate, the work of UX and UI designers (interface, ergonomics and experience) is very important. These 2.0 sales techniques help to guide the user through the easiest and most playful path.
How many people will come back to visit your website?
Retention is all about getting the prospect to come back. For this, emailing is a good strategy. Send your potential customers regular emails to make them want to come back to your platform or application.
The retention rate is the number of people who will continue to visit your site regularly after the previous steps. The more people will come back to your platform, the more successful you will be because this is how you develop a user base.
If you attract 10,000 visitors to your website and no one comes back a month later, it's useless. Retention is the key to successful Growth Hacking. Encourage regular visits from your target audience in order to accompany them in their reflection and make the act of buying mature.
After withholding comes income. It is the fact that the user monetizes his activity. This is materialized by a purchase of your product or service. The income is linked to your business model and will be the result of all the actions that will make a visitor a buyer.
So there are several ways to measure this, such as the conversion rate, which represents the percentage of people who will use your premium product for example.
Finally, the last step is the recommendation (or referral in English).
The idea is to ensure that acquired customers are highly satisfied with the service or product, and that they share it around them, that they develop word-of-mouth.
Referral, or "social selling", refers to all interactions between the customers of your offer and their social circle. They will participate in the development of the notoriety, in one way or another, of your product with other people.
In this respect, it is important to capitalize on customer reviews, invite your customers to join your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter communities, in order to broaden your sphere of influence and develop engagement on social networks.
For each of these elements (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Income and Referral), you will have an indicator to measure to ensure that Growth Hacking is achieved. Some marketers say that you need one indicator per part of the tunnel, others two or three depending on different cases. It's up to you to see which option is best suited to your industry.
