A new term that has slowly been gaining traction in marketing is growth hacking for a business. Unlike other trends that ebb and flow, growth hacking is one that has shown consistent growth owing to the fact that it has yielded tangible results. If you’re wondering how growth hacking can help your business, the following are a few points that shed a little more light in helping you understand growth hacking.
Understanding Growth Hacking
While the first growth hacker and the term ‘growth hacking’ were coined in 2010, this is something that has been around for longer. However, it was woefully underutilized and usually indulged in by extremely large companies who had exhausted all other obvious channels of growth. Growth hacking shares similarities with online marketing but it is not the same.
With a bigger focus on growth than improving sales, growth hacking means that someone is constantly exploring and searching for other venues and aspects in which the business can experience significant growth. This is one reason why businesses started making use of social media to interact with their target market. It was a previously unexplored area that yielded amazing growth for businesses, even the well-established ones.
Why Does it Work for Small Businesses?
One of the main limitations that small businesses face in their growth is the fact that their budgets are very limited and there is little room for flexibility. Luckily, growth hacking involves being creative, resourceful and thinking out of the box. A good growth hacker has the ability to utilize the given budget and still produce results which reflect well on the overall growth of the company.
A great idea to understand how growth hacking can help your business is by looking at examples of businesses that have made use of it:
DropBox– The first company to utilize growth hacking on a major level, Dropbox’s very own Sean Ellis is the one who coined the term. He fueled Dropbox’s growth by offering an innovative recommendation plan that gave users more MB’s as a reward for recommending the product to their friends. This made sure that Dropbox not only reached out to its target market, but it was also able to capture a global target market despite the fact that cloud storage at the time was not as popular as it is today.
Growth Hacking Today
Given the many algorithms, tracking data and other tools that are now available, growth hacking tends to be more effective when used by online businesses and new ones. New businesses actually stand to gain the most benefit as growth hacking focuses on the wants and needs of a business on a micro level in contrast to online marketing, which has a broader outlook.
This means that growth hacking not only produces better results; it also shows you tangible data that can allow you to enhance your business, as well as its effectiveness. Over time, it has become an invaluable tool for businesses and it has been utilized by many different companies.
