Your Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking Infographic

Your Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking Infographic

Growth hacking has been trending around the startup world for a really long time now. Tons of definitions and numerous number of guides to growth hacking are available on the web to put someone in a dilemma of making the right choice.

Growth hacking: It is a word that is used mostly by marketers these days. Many companies and marketers think growth hacking is just limited to search engine optimization, social media marketing strategy, email marketing, etc but they fail to understand how to best use these channels in a cost effective way to boost growth. Your Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking Infographic shows how you can implement growth hacking in your business or startup.

What exactly is growth hacking?

As mentioned above, Growth Hacking is nothing but a set of marketing channels that will drive your business further in a cost effective and data driven fashion. And the secret ingredients to a successful growth hack are:

• Discovering a marketing strategy that takes your startup to the next level by brainstorming and experimenting with a number of hypotheses.
• Constantly optimising your efforts, cost per acquisition and user retention with the discovered hacks.

Growth Hacking Funnel

Sean Ellis, the first marketer at Dropbox defined the term “Growth Hacking”. A growth hacking funnel, has 5 steps – AARRR. Let’s have a look at what AARRR stands for:

• Acquisition: It is the initial stage where you make your target audience aware of your product or service. It is a first contact point between your product/service and a user/customer. These users are those who have just visited your website and are now aware of your existence.
• Activation: Once a user has landed on your website, they take an action defined by you after perceiving your product/service’s value for them. It could be in the form of signing up for your free/trial services or subscribing to your blog. It’s a crucial stage as they start trusting you and share their emails with you.
• Retention: Once you have an active user, it is important to retain them so that you can turn them into your lifelong customers. Nurture them by sending emails at regular intervals or offering some premium features as a trial. Keeping your customer happy is the key to form long lasting relationships with them.
• Referral: If the user likes your product/service, you can smartly use them as a marketing channel to reach out to their peers and broaden your target audience through them. You can ask them to refer your product/service to their friends in exchange for something that they would like to use. In this way, you can increase your customer base.
• Revenue: This is the final step of the growth hacking funnel where you monetize the users. Build a constant stream of revenue to make your startup sustain. For example, you can now invest in advertising to retain the existing users, get new users and to bring back those who abandoned your product/service.

Where has growth hacking shown its magic?

Building a successful growth hacking strategy could be learned from the leaders itself. Dropbox and AirBnB have successfully implemented growth hacking strategies to shoot up their user base. Let’s check how:

Dropbox used a referral program to increase it’s customer base. They smartly used their existing customers as a marketing channel and asked their users to refer Dropbox to their friends to get free cloud storage.

AirBnB helps a user to find accommodations for bed and breakfast. When they were in their initial stage, they got themselves listed with Craigslist, a third-party platform where you can buy and sell anything, find accommodations, jobs, etc. CraigsList already had a pretty good user base which helped AirBnB spread awareness about its existence.

Key takeaways from the above two case studies:

• Referral programs with giveaways help you increase your user base.
• You can use an already established website to make people aware of your existence.