The startup ecosystem is clear that growth is no longer an option, but the only way to face the dizzying speed of the new interconnected context. Faced with this need, a new approach to marketing and communication emerges, which, in fact, transcends its borders and becomes a business approach. It is called growth hacking.
This concept, which everyone talks about, first appeared in 2010, on Sean Ellis's Startup Marketing blog, to define a multidiscipline characterized by having growth as its objective, with a strategy based on two essential pillars: creativity and analysis.
In Silicon Valley, there are already key figures in this multidiscipline, such as Andrew Chen, Uber's growth driver, for whom a growth hacker is a professional who constantly asks how they can grow their business and answers that question analytically and creatively, through A/B tests, landing pages, viral techniques, and content marketing strategies that work on SEO, among many other possibilities. The frontiers of growth hacking have already crossed the borders of Silicon Valley. In fact, the figure of the growth expert is among the most sought-after professional profiles worldwide and among the best paid, as Nilton Navarro, Social Media Manager at Infojobs, points out: "Companies need technological profiles that help them grow and boost their digital transformation. Growth Hacker is one of the most demanded emerging profiles because it is a key piece in companies. This profession barely existed in the labor market at the beginning of the decade and they suffer from a lack of prepared professionals. In addition, salaries usually exceed 30,000 gross euros per year, so they become excellent opportunities for young people who want to orient their training towards a future profession or for those who want to reorient their current profession."
But what is the recipe for success of a growth hacker strategy? At its core, its approach fits perfectly with the Lean Startup method, key to the functioning of startups. This methodology, popularized by Eric Ries, is based on the so-called "minimum viable product," which allows for launching successive versions of the product to measure their impact before fully developing them, following the virtuous cycle of create-measure-learn. From these three pillars, we can define the different basic growth hacking strategies:
CREATE Innovation is key to driving growth. Among the multiple decisions that can be adopted to boost growth, those that involve empowering the user, with a focus on virality, stand out. Hotmail was a pioneer in this practice, with a simple but extremely effective action: placing a link at the end of each email promoting free accounts. More recent techniques, such as influencer marketing or content marketing, seek to establish these links with the user, which has also been achieved through other means, such as integration into large social networks, as was the case with Spotify and Facebook.
MEASURE As Avinash Kaushik, one of the most renowned experts in digital marketing, highlights, there is currently an immense field of possibilities for making intelligent decisions based on the analytical study of data. The multiple digital monitoring tools, and the Big data generated by the platforms themselves, allow for checking, almost in real-time, the results of any action. Active listening to the user is key, not only for growth but also for the development of the products themselves.
LEARN In these changing times, learning is the only way to evolve. Without experimentation, without constant dialogue with audiences, and without a flexible attitude, it is not possible to maintain the constant beta attitude imposed by the new economy.