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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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The term ‘Growth Hacking‘ was first known to the world of marketing in an article entitled“Find a Growth Hacker for your startups.” Sean Ellis first introduced Growth Hacker as a term in 2010. It is defined as a person whose primary marketing focus is growth. Growth Hackers have a dedicated role where they work closely with the various departments within the organization. All their techniques are dependent on their potential impact on scalable growth.
Necessity of Growth Hacker in Your Digital Marketing Team – An Overview
Growth Hackingis emerging as a combination of traditional and innovative marketing experiments leading to business growth, especially for startups where the goal is rapid growth at an early stage launch phase. As a startup marketing strategy, growth hacking allows small businesses or startups to find the most effective marketing channels to take advantage of different tactics to improve traffic and online visibility. Thus, this connects with the audience and scales the business. If you’re just starting out or you need to overhaul your existing marketing strategy, make sure to familiarize yourself with these 7 important marketing metrics:
Why Focus on Growth Hacking Techniques?
Because, Growth hackers use the tactics to improve your traffic and online visibility, besides implementing tools to measure the success of your business. The advantages of growth hacking techniques include the following: · Locating where your target audience is spending their time online ·Growth hacking tools make your visibility grow in the market while reducing the costs incurred for digital marketing techniques. Read: 91 Growth Hacking Tools every Growth Hacker must have
Growth Hacking Techniques – An Outlook
Growth hacking cannot be looked at as a combination of tools and techniques like other forms of marketing. It is different because it allows startups with few resources to work on their marketing strategies in an accelerated manner. Marketing automation is an important part of growth hacking, and it is continually receiving immense popularity among digital marketing specialists, professionals that permit sales and marketing departments of any company. This is so because automation helps to create, initiate and automate internet-marketing campaigns and sales activities to expand profit and boost productivity. Thus, the role of growth hacking has become more important than ever in the field of digital marketing.
Ten Reasons for Hiring a Growth Hacker in your Digital Marketing Team
Many startups and business enterprises do understand the meaning of growth hacking, but they do not necessarily understand how to use the growth hacking techniques by hiring the services of growth hackers in their digital marketing team.
Growth hackers, as professionals, use their knowledge of the product and distribution networks to find better, technology-based avenues for growth. By hiring a growth hacker in your digital marketing team, you can utilize the benefits growth hacking techniques.
For instance, the best way to get instant recognition is through Social Network profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. These social networks value interest and originality that your brand can generate. With a well-designed social strategy, a powerful, direct and attractive message can be a fertile ground for your company. A professional growth hacker will take the advantage of social media to send a powerful message using a specific language to turn the message into an event.
The Top Ten Reasons for hiring a Growth Hacker in your Digital Marketing Team instead of a Traditional Marketer:
1. Growth Hackers Have a Different Vision and Set of Tools –
Traditional marketers stick to a set of strict standards that have already been proven and applied. Whereas a growth hacker, through his innovative thinking will set into practice a new manner of accomplishing the goals. He will not hesitate to use a different set of tools or vision that is not in sync with the usual norm. This type of innovative thinking definitely sets them apart from a traditional digital marketer.
2.Growth Hackers Have a Greater Vision –
A growth hacker with expertise in soft skills is capable of communicating with other teams. He is also capable of implementing traditional SEO techniques and assisting the email team to tweak lifecycle campaigns in addition to pushing for conversion rate optimization tests. They have a larger vision with huge opportunity to effect change in digital marketing campaigns of the organization.
3. Growth Hackers Take Bold Actions –
They take actions that at times seem to be controversial due to bending of set standards. However, their actions turn into commendable decisions on a long-term basis as growth hackers have a tendency to think out of the box by developing innovative ways of effective digital marketing techniques.
4. Growth Hackers Are the Best Users of Tools –
Growth hackers are most suitable for startups as they are more focused on using marketing tools that are tailor-made for them. They are always focused on making the company exist in the minds of the public consumers.
5. Analytical Bent of Mind –
Growth hackers have an analytical bent of mind when compared to traditional digital marketers as they place more emphasis on the specific journey of your business. Unlike a traditional marketer, the role of growth hackers requires a detailed study of the paths taken by the customers to find any discrepancies within their own system that may hinder the growth of their business.
6. Work Best with Unknown –
Growth hackers are capable of working with unknown marketing systems for increased traffic and customer leads. They never fear of facing anyone within the organizational hierarchy and even engage with engineering departments as well as product departments with ideas to improve gradual engagement.
7. Short-term Growth –
Growth hackers have expertise in accomplishing short-term goals. Whereas, traditional marketers plan to derive their goals over a longer period. The main objective of growth hackers in startups is to enhance the efficiency, speed and quality of the website as per the wishes of the consumers within a short time.
8. Growth Hackers are Masters of Current Trends in Digital Marketing –
They are the masters of implementing digital marketing strategies while also taking into account the future requirements of the startup. They are capable of deploying successful techniques that, over a period of time, will become the new SEO trends which would be put into practice by the traditional marketers on a daily basis.
9. Budget-Friendly –
Growth hackers adhere to their respective budgets and are most suitable for startups that work on a shoestring budget. This limitation of the budget set into practice new methods of accomplishing the goals of businesses through technologies used by growth hackers. Efficient online marketing experts can help you generate high quality leads for your startup business through Social Media Marketing, E-mail Marketing, etc. When the time comes to see the impact of marketing efforts, you can’t evaluate everything with them for everything they’ve measured. If you’re just starting out or you need to overhaul your existing marketing strategy, make sure to familiarize yourself with these 7 important marketing metrics
10. Careful Targeting–
Growth hackers aid startups by targeting hundreds of websites at once with a carefully designed infrastructure within a short period. Instead of only focusing on a few keywords. Startups do need a larger client base. This is not possible with common SEO practices that hone on particular niches for a higher relevance of potential customer’s query search. Growth hackers as such take advantage of free channels to compensate for the lack of means by using their skills to get the best traffic results for websites.
Want to kick start your business with some amazing growth hacks?
Finally, it can be said that hiring the services of growth hackers for startups is a way of building your startup growth. With market automation in place. Employing growth hackers in your digital marketing team is the best marketing bet without spending a huge amount of money.
Watch Why Every Startup Needs a Growth Hacker — 10 Powerful Reasons
For Curious Minds
A growth hacker reorients the entire marketing objective from brand awareness to a singular focus on scalable growth. This professional works across departments, using a deep knowledge of the product to find technology-based avenues for expansion, a stark contrast to the siloed, campaign-based approach of traditional marketing.
This shift is driven by an experimental and data-centric mindset. Instead of relying on proven but potentially slow methods, a growth hacker prioritizes a cycle of rapid, low-cost tests to identify the most effective channels. For instance, they might analyze engagement metrics on Facebook to quickly validate a new messaging strategy. Key differentiators of this approach include:
A primary focus on metrics directly impacting growth, not just vanity metrics.
Close collaboration with product and engineering teams to build growth mechanisms directly into the user experience.
Constant testing of unconventional tactics and distribution networks to find opportunities competitors have missed.
This method ensures every marketing action is a measurable experiment aimed at finding repeatable and scalable ways to grow the business, which is detailed further in the full analysis.
Growth hacking offers a more agile and cost-effective path to rapid user acquisition compared to traditional marketing. It prioritizes low-cost, high-impact experiments over allocating a large budget to established, and often expensive, marketing channels from the start.
The core difference lies in the methodology and risk tolerance. A traditional marketer often sticks to a set of strict, proven standards, while a growth hacker uses innovative thinking and a different set of tools to uncover new growth levers. For example, instead of a large ad spend, a growth hacker might create a viral referral loop or optimize content for a niche social platform like LinkedIn. Key comparative points include:
Resource Allocation: Growth hacking is designed for startups with few resources, focusing on creativity and automation over budget.
Speed: It accelerates marketing strategies through rapid testing cycles, enabling faster identification of effective tactics.
Focus: It is laser-focused on growth metrics, whereas traditional marketing may have broader goals like brand sentiment.
This approach allows you to find what works for your specific audience without a significant initial investment, a critical advantage explored within the complete guide.
Effective growth hackers treat social networks as dynamic laboratories for growth experiments rather than simple broadcast channels. They move beyond posting content for visibility and instead design social strategies that generate direct, measurable outcomes like leads or sign-ups.
This is achieved by turning a message into a strategic event. A professional growth hacker uses specific language and powerful, direct messaging tailored to the platform's audience, such as on Twitter, to provoke a specific action. They continuously analyze engagement metrics to refine their approach and double down on what works. This involves using social platforms to:
Rapidly test different value propositions and calls to action.
Identify and engage with highly targeted audience segments.
Automate content distribution and interaction to scale outreach efficiently.
Create shareable content or tools that have built-in viral potential.
This transforms social media from a cost center into a powerful, data-rich ground for your company's expansion, a topic we cover with more examples inside.
Integrating a growth hacking mindset begins with shifting the team's primary focus from broad activities to a single, critical growth metric. This creates clarity and ensures all efforts are aligned toward a measurable goal, like increasing user activation rate by 15% in one quarter.
Once the core metric is defined, you can implement a structured process for experimentation. This operational shift empowers your team to test and learn rapidly. The key steps are:
Identify and Analyze: Pinpoint the biggest opportunity or bottleneck in your customer journey and gather baseline data.
Ideate Solutions: Brainstorm a list of low-cost, high-potential marketing experiments designed to impact your core metric.
Prioritize and Test: Score ideas based on potential impact, confidence, and ease of implementation, then execute the top-ranked tests.
Measure and Iterate: Analyze the results rigorously, document learnings, and scale successful experiments while discarding failed ones.
This systematic approach helps you discover the most effective tactics for your business, a framework that the full article explains in greater detail.
The role of a growth hacker will evolve from a marketing specialist into a strategic, cross-functional leader who architects the entire growth engine of the business. As marketing automation handles more routine tasks, growth hackers will focus on higher-level challenges that technology alone cannot solve.
Their future value lies in connecting product, data, and distribution in novel ways. Instead of just running campaigns, they will be instrumental in designing products with inherent virality and identifying new, technology-based avenues for market entry. This evolution means their responsibilities will increasingly include:
Interpreting complex data sets to predict market shifts and user behavior.
Working with engineering teams to embed growth loops directly into the product.
Discovering and integrating emerging technologies and platforms like Google+ was in its day.
This strategic shift makes the growth hacker indispensable for navigating a competitive landscape where sustainable growth is the primary differentiator, an idea explored further in our analysis.
The most common strategic error is adopting tools and tactics without a foundational, data-informed growth hypothesis. This tool-first approach leads to disjointed efforts that lack impact, as teams chase shiny objects instead of focusing on the underlying drivers of their business growth.
Effective growth hackers avoid this by starting with a deep understanding of the product and its distribution channels. They formulate a clear hypothesis first, for example, “Improving onboarding completion rate by 10% will increase long-term retention.” Then, they select tools and run experiments specifically to validate or disprove that hypothesis. This strategy-first vision ensures they:
Focus on solving a specific business problem, not just implementing a new tool.
Maintain a disciplined process of testing, measuring, and learning.
Align their efforts with the company's most critical growth objectives.
By prioritizing strategy over tactics, you ensure your marketing efforts are purposeful and directly contribute to scalable growth, a core principle we unpack in the article.
The growth hacking framework redefines success by treating growth as the product of a holistic system, not just a marketing outcome. It moves beyond acquisition metrics to focus on the entire customer lifecycle, including activation, retention, revenue, and referral, embedding growth into the product itself.
This integration is what ensures sustainability and scalability. A growth hacker works closely with product and engineering teams to run experiments that improve the core user experience, making the product stickier and more shareable. For example, they might test changes to the user onboarding flow to improve the activation rate. This approach differs from traditional marketing by:
Focusing on the full AARRR funnel, not just the top.
Using product usage data to inform marketing messages.
Building features, like a referral program, that are inherently marketing channels.
This method creates a self-reinforcing growth loop where a better product drives more user growth, a concept the full article elaborates upon.
A B2B startup can transform its LinkedIn presence into a growth engine by moving from passive content sharing to active, targeted engagement and lead nurturing. The key is to use the platform's unique professional context to deliver highly relevant value and build direct relationships with potential customers.
This requires a systematic, metric-driven approach rather than sporadic posting. A growth hacker would focus on experiments to optimize for a key metric like 'demo requests from LinkedIn'. Proven tactics include:
Publishing original, insightful articles that address specific pain points of the target audience, establishing thought leadership.
Using marketing automation tools to identify and engage with professionals who interact with your content or fit your ideal customer profile.
Creating and promoting a powerful, direct message through targeted updates that funnel interested parties to a dedicated landing page.
By treating LinkedIn as a channel for direct engagement and value exchange, you can create a reliable source of high-quality leads, a strategy we explore further.
Established enterprises often struggle because their rigid structures, risk-averse cultures, and siloed departments clash with the agile, experimental nature of growth hacking. Traditional marketing teams are typically built for predictable execution and brand consistency, not for the rapid, cross-functional testing that growth hackers require.
The essential organizational shift is from a campaign-centric to an experiment-centric operating model. This requires granting a growth hacker or team the autonomy to work across marketing, product, and data departments to quickly test new ideas. Key changes to facilitate this include:
Establishing a clear, high-level growth goal that everyone is aligned on.
Creating a dedicated budget and process for small-scale experiments that are allowed to fail.
Empowering the growth hacker with direct access to data and analytical tools.
This cultural and structural adjustment allows the enterprise to benefit from a growth hacker's innovative thinking and find new avenues for growth, a challenge the main article addresses.
The primary distinction between a growth hacker and a traditional marketer lies in their core competencies and problem-solving approach. A traditional marketer excels at executing proven strategies within established channels, while a growth hacker is a T-shaped professional with deep analytical skills and a broad knowledge of different disciplines.
A growth hacker's value is their ability to discover new growth opportunities, not just optimize existing ones. Their skillset is a blend of marketing, data analysis, and product intuition. Key differences include:
Analytical Rigor: Growth hackers are data-obsessed and use metrics to drive every decision, whereas traditional marketers may focus more on creative and brand aspects.
Technical Proficiency: They are comfortable with marketing automation, APIs, and basic coding to run experiments.
Full-Funnel Focus: They work across the entire customer lifecycle, from awareness to retention, unlike traditional marketers who often specialize in top-of-funnel activities.
This unique combination of skills allows them to find scalable growth in unconventional places, a topic covered extensively in the full piece.
Increasingly sophisticated marketing automation will free growth hackers from manual, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on high-level strategy and creative problem-solving. Automation acts as a force multiplier, enabling a small team or a single individual to execute complex, multi-channel campaigns at scale.
The growth hacker's role will shift from campaign execution to system design. Their daily work will involve architecting automated workflows that nurture leads, onboard new users, and re-engage dormant customers, all triggered by user behavior data. This amplification of their efforts means they can:
Run more concurrent experiments across different channels like Facebook and email.
Create highly personalized user journeys that improve conversion and retention rates.
Gain deeper insights from the vast amount of data generated by automated systems.
This allows them to focus on identifying the next big growth opportunity while the automated systems handle the execution, a dynamic the full article explores.
Identifying effective marketing channels requires a systematic process of research and controlled testing, not guesswork. A new growth hacker should start by creating a detailed profile of their ideal customer to guide their search, focusing on demographics, behaviors, and motivations.
The core of the process is data-driven channel exploration and validation. Instead of committing to a channel like Twitter or LinkedIn based on assumptions, you run small, low-cost experiments to gather real-world performance data. A practical plan involves these steps:
Brainstorm Potential Channels: List all possible channels where your target audience might be found, from social media to niche forums.
Conduct Qualitative Research: Survey your early customers and interview industry experts to understand their media consumption habits.
Run Small-Scale Tests: Launch minimal, inexpensive campaigns on the 3-5 most promising channels to measure initial traction and cost per acquisition.
Analyze and Prioritize: Double down on the one or two channels that show the best performance against your key growth metric.
This methodical approach ensures you invest your limited resources where they will have the greatest impact, a process the full article details further.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
