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What is a Growth Hacker?

Posted by SMstudy® on January 11, 2016 | Marketing Strategy (MS)

Keywords: Growth Hacking

What is a Growth Hacker?

Here at SMstudy, we've always been amazed with how Sales and Marketing has evolved over time and never has this growth been more prominent than in the past couple of decades. Technological innovation has been the main driver for these changes and the job of the typical Marketing individual has also changed a lot as they continue to follow the technological adoption cycle. Earlier the marketing individuals used to focus on TV, Radio and Newspapers to reach out to their audience. This was till the internet arrived and changed Marketing forever. 

The internet brought with it new ways of marketing with Search Engine Marketing, Paid Adwords, Search Engine Optimization becoming the buzzwords to reach out to audiences. The modern day Marketing professional had to track customers interactions online and understand how to best optimize them. They started analyzing huge chunks of data to understand where customers were spending time on their site, where they were dropping off, what they were buying etc. to provide more focused advertising to them.

The amalgamation of technology and marketing has let to a new phrase “growth hacker” coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. A growth hacker is a personn who understands technology, marketing, data and product to find a strategy and create scalable growth models for an organization. Growth hacking’s goals are based on marketing but driven by helping improve product experience and hence a Growth hacker understands technology as well as marketing enabling him to implement any change he/she wants.  

A Growth Hacker can create online Google adwords, Facebook, Twitter campaigns, can make high quality landing pages that are going to have awesome CPC, and can also manage targeted email campaigns like a normal Marketing professional. However, at the same time, the Growth Hacker is equally adept at having conversations with the technology team, develop web pages, design mobile and web user experiences etc. 

We will follow this blog up with another entry on how Growth Hacking has helped companies achieve viral growth. A typical Growth Hacker will base each and every decision of his on a simple question ”What will be the impact on growth?”

Example of Growth Hacking:

Paypal’s friend referral: As a new payment mechanism primarily fighting with large banks, PayPal’s big challenge initially was to get new customers to adopt their product and get them started on using it. Traditional advertising was too expensive and also there was no assurance that people who they reach out to, would use them. Initially, the PayPal team thought of doing business development deals with big banks but that didn’t work out and they understood that they needed a direct to customer approach that would provide a organic, viral growth.

So they started a referral campaign wherein any customer of theirs would get $10 for each friend they refer that joins up and these new customers, upon joining get a $10 amount too. Although this cost PayPal a $20 customer acquisition cost, they were able to witness a 7 to 10% daily growth and acquired 100 million users in a very short span of time. Not only did they acquire these new users, but because the new users already had $10 in their PayPal account, they would end up using PayPal to use the amount.

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