Hi Gabi, I don’t think you’re a ‘party wrecker’ – just calling it out as it is. Growth Hacking is just one example of a new term we love in marketing that are an update on previous techniques – Big Data, Marketing Automation and Digital Transformation are similar.

Yet, I think these ‘movements’ we see in marketing are useful to communicate the value of new techniques and technologies. Growth Hacking helps highlight to businesses there are new ways to boosting sales like conversion optimisation and predictive analytics that weren’t previously available.

Gabi Levin, Ph.D.
Sapir College Sderot Israel
gavriell@mail.sapir.ac.il

Hi Logan, thanks so much for re-vitalising this post – it’s strange how fashion and hype happens in marketing. I wrote this probably 2 years after the startups and SaaS businesses were exploring growth hacking and just after I was seeing it entering the mainstream.

I’m still not sure that it has entered the main stream. I think there is a move to ‘Digital Marketing Optimisation’ – i delivered a workshop to a telco on this last week for instance. DMO is a very similar mindset – just a different label.

Your app example shows the other aspect of growth hacking which is different to DMO which is viral amplification and I’m not sure that’s relevant so often outside of certain types of apps and SasS businesses. Growth hackers talk about Hockey Stick growth as nirvana, but it’s the exception and most growth in most companies isn’t viral IMO – into the business of generation here.

Your Growth Marketing concepts sounds interesting – a more strategic, data driven approach – perhaps similar to what i mean by DMO – I’d be interested for you to expand on this in a guest post if you get in touch.

Cheers, Dave

I think that the growth hacking mindset has well and truly grown roots, which is awesome. It has forced marketing teams to drill into the data and focus on real problems, in an effort to solve pain points for customers (aka bottlenecks). It has created the mantra Acquisition, Activation, Referral, Retention and Revenue and made businesses build and model growth frameworks helping them ensure they are on track with growth initiatives.

However, I believe that so many businesses owners, specifically founders, are now looking to growth hacking agencies as the magic bullet. They have an idea, an app about to launch and want 1M downloads in 3 months…! (that is no joke btw!!). This unreasonable view of what this methodology can achieve mixed with people/businesses taking advantage of short term growth to show results means that growth hacking has been tainted slightly in the eyes of those looking at growth. I believe that growth hacking is an invaluable tactic for any business, but we are finding that learning where to direct growth work is another issue.

I believe there is another more strategic level to growth for businesses, which I will call Growth Marketing. This takes a more holistic approach to business data, and helps a businesses identify where to scale its growth efforts, what channels to push, and what parts of the funnel to optimise. Having worked in executive level marketing strategy it always came back to return on investment and resource allocation.

I think that Growth Marketing is a blend of attribution modelling, growth hacking and digital marketing and might be the next stage in the ever moving ‘marketing industry’.

I would love to know your thoughts here, and whether you think I am off point or have missed something.

Also, i think you have a spelling mistake in point 6, as you say ‘Anazon’

As a disclaimer I run a Growth Marketing Agency called Rebel Hack (https://rebelhack.com) if your interested, so I am of course slightly biased here.

Thanks for the details of the service Liam – a good example of social media in action hopefully – let me know if you have any leads and whether there are any case studies or best practices on process you can share via Smart Insights.
Dave

Hi David,

Thanks for the interest. True Up offer this to both types of businesses. I know the hype and heritage surrounding Growth Hacking is with startups but there is no reason why this can’t be equally applicable to more established companies too.

We have a little checklist we use and find it works best with companies meeting the following criteria:

– A decent product & happy customers
– Focus on growth & desire to scale
– Openness to testing, experimenting and not being afraid of getting it wrong (as this will happen a lot)
– Believe there’s life outside Google Adwords.
– Technical / development / creative resource to make relevant & speedy changes.
– Have budget (doesn’t have to be huge)

This naturally lends itself towards startsup as by their nature they are leaner, more agile and experimental. However we’re also having success taking Growth Hacker approach and applying it to more established businesses. The most important element is access to data and ability to create a space where rapid, fast fire tests and experiments can occur. As a result, it lends itself best to companies where there is a strong digital focus, regardless of size.

We genuinely do believe there’s a market for this. Part of the reason for starting True Up was the recognition that there are very few people with a genuine blend of data, tech and behavioural economics skill sets out there. And that many companies simply can’t afford to take such a person on full time. So True Up has to some extent ‘packaged’ Growth Hacking making it readily accessible to a wider array of businesses. The world is only becoming more digitalised so its a good space to be in but as its still relatively new, obviously some hurdles to get over on route!

Thanks

Liam

http://www.trueup.co.uk

Can’t disagree with that Will – I’m running a webinar series for a client at the moment called Digital Sales Optimisation – there’s a new TLA right there which is really what we’re talking about here.

Hi Liam,

That’s interesting you think there is a market here – will you be offering this to startups or existing companies too?
If you fancy sharing your views – particularly on process and more examples of companies using this – maybe expanding on this comment in a guest post, please get in touch via the Contact Us.
Thanks, Dave

Hi David, great post and collection of Growth Hacking links all in one place. Sorry I’m bit late in replying but thought I’d also chip in as I’ve just launched True Up, London’s first Growth Hacking consultancy (hope you don’t mind the plug).

I also noticed The Guardian were recruiting for a growth hacking position and thought that was quite a sign of the times. Am sure we’ll see similar positions being created in larger organisations over time.

As for the term, I quite like it. The growth part is great because it simply says what it is on the tin. Having worked in around London marketing / advertising agencies over the last 15 years, its amazing how convoluted the solutions agencies dream up can be. Most of the time they’re to solve non existing issues or are complete ego driven, to make someone famous, win awards etc rather than create real change. However saying ‘we help you grow your business’ is a bit of a no brainer.

The ‘hacker’ bit is what I’ve found creates most interest. Thankfully most people don’t associate this with Anonymous but do realise that a hack is just a clever way of doing something, usually using technologies, SaaS, APIs etc. Its also about cutting to the chase, doing something quickly and dirty enough to get the job done and learn (doesn’t have to be beautiful to work as a starting point). I actually prefer the term ‘bending’ which is using the available tools (tech, data, platforms etc), bringing them together and using them / bending them together in ways that they weren’t necessarily designed for.

Although there’s a lot of buzz I think the principles behind growth hacking are sound and therefore here to stay. The idea of being lean, agile, creative, analytical and experimental but then validating all decisions through rapid test and learn make good sense and been proven to work well.

At the end of the day, its customers that make a business, not the product. So getting under the skin of what makes customers tick, why they make the decisions they do, why they visit your site, bounce, don’t bounce, sign up, purchase etc is the key to successful business growth. Growth Hacking just provides a good suite of tools to help understand this and relate it back to the business as a series of solutions.

being agile, creative, utilising data and the multitude of tools available. And then relating it back to the business

I appreciate the term ‘Growth Hacking’ is generating a lot of buzz at the moment and t