Well, let’s start at the beginning: what exactly is Growth Hacking?
It’s simply a strategy to find the “innovative element” that will accelerate the growth of your business rapidly and strongly.
However, this sensational idea doesn’t necessarily come from just one person, as it’s about involving all roles and professions within the company to maximize growth. This differs from the traditional vision where employees work separately towards different goals without harmony or homogeneity.
The Growth Hacker within the company aims to discover how to move users from one stage to the next, while minimizing potential losses and unnecessary expenses.
For example, how to transform a registered user into an active user.
There’s a well-known method that perfectly demonstrates this process and what happens at each level. Dave McClure, founder of a startup accelerator with 500 startups and former marketing director at Paypal, invented the AARRR matrix, which describes the business growth model and represents the customer lifecycle:
- Acquisition: How to attract visitors? Acquisition is the first contact with your future client: the moment when you must do everything to grab their attention. In this phase, the focus should be on acquiring and “seducing” new users. Users represent your business potential.
- Activation: How to engage the visitor? This is where visitors actually use your service. Users should perceive the full value of your product from the first use, as they will only spend a few seconds trying to understand how it works.
- Retention: How to retain the customer? After the acquisition and activation phase, the goal is now to retain them without pushing too hard to avoid driving them away. It’s about converting them into active users based on various indicators such as activity frequency, time spent, user behavior towards your product, etc.
- Referral: How to turn the customer into an ambassador? Users become advocates by spreading the word. Contests, promotions, privileges, or referrals… All means are good to encourage users to invite more people and bring in more clients without excessive spending. Sharing on social media is arguably the simplest lever to implement.
- Revenue: How to convert them? Now that the machine is well-oiled, it’s time to focus on ROI and growing your revenue. This is the final phase where users finally start spending money on the business.
Many major companies have adopted a growth-oriented approach using unconventional techniques and Growth Hacking as a acquisition lever.
Here are some well-known examples of Growth Hacking that can give you ideas and inspire you enough to get started:
Hotmail
In 1996, Hotmail decided to add to the end of their users’ emails “PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail.” The result was incredible: over 1 million members in 6 months. Hotmail had 10 million users when it was acquired by Microsoft.
Spotify
The Growth Hacking technique that brought Spotify into the spotlight was their integration with Facebook. So whenever someone listened to a song, it automatically displayed on their Facebook profile “I’m listening to […..] on Spotify” with a link redirecting to the website or app.
Apple
“Sent from my iPhone,” a famous phrase found at the end of every email sent from an iPhone.
The result? Every email sent from an iPhone subtly turns into large-scale advertising.
Dropbox
To increase its users, Dropbox implemented a referral program. The company offered 500 MB of storage space to the user each time they invited a new friend to sign up.
Before it was called Instagram, the app was named Burbn, which had roughly the same utility as the famous Foursquare: the founders quickly realized that an auxiliary function of the app that allowed changing photo filters was more popular. Users weren’t using Burbn for its main function! So they decided to rework and redesign the app to focus solely on photo features.
This funnel explains very well the philosophy of Growth Hacking, which is a mindset before being a set of techniques, tools, and know-how. The “GH” primarily seeks to increase the number of users to ensure sustainable growth by focusing entirely on the quality of users. Monetization and the pursuit of money come much later.
For those new to Growth Hacking, this article is probably the best way to get a concrete idea of the concept. Otherwise, the consultants at Webeuz will be happy to assist you and advise you on the necessary optimizations, not hesitating to recommend drastic improvements to achieve your goals.
Start growth hacking today!
