Growth hack in your business

Contrary to popular belief, growth hacking isn’t exclusive to big companies like Google.

In fact, it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business today.

In this blog I’m going to guide you through what growth hacking entails and how you can leverage data to gain insights into customer behaviour, enabling you to reinforce that behaviour and foster customer love for your product or service, ultimately encouraging word-of-mouth referrals. This blog is practical, actionable, and something you can implement immediately.

Let’s get to it.

We’ve run through this with all of our clients in the Business Growth Club clients over the last 4 years and now we want to share it with you.

Before we dive into the practical aspects of growth hacking, let’s first define it.

Growth hacking is a strategic approach within an organisation that aims to drive scalable growth. It typically involves a team composed of product development, design, analytics, and marketing professionals.

Growth hacking employs a pull strategy to attract customers. Instead of relying solely on traditional marketing methods, growth hacking incorporates engaging experiences within the product. By understanding users’ motivations and behaviours, you can provide immediate value to entice customers in. This contrasts with the traditional modular approach where the marketing team reaches out to customers after the product team has developed a version of the product.

Growth hacking involves four key components: building a must-have experience, understanding the must-have experiences using data science, analytics, and testing, incorporating those experiences into the product, and removing friction from the must-have experience.

For those interested in incorporating this skill into their business, you can learn it yourself. There are many resources available online. This skill is not rocket science; it’s a citizen analyst skill that anyone can learn.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “I have a successful business with a small team, and I don’t think I need a multidisciplinary approach like growth hacking.” But let me assure you, growth hacking doesn’t require a large team.

In fact, growth hacking can be done by a single individual. I’ll now outline the key components of growth hacking and provide examples from Facebook to illustrate how they’ve successfully implemented growth hacking strategies.

So, the first component of growth hacking is to build a must-have product. First, you need a product or service that currently engages the majority of your existing customers who visit your business either online or in person. This is your base product.

Now, it’s important to understand that growth hacking can’t take you from 0 to 10. It can only take you from 1 to 10. If you already have a product or service that your customers are enjoying and coming back to you repeatedly, growth hacking can help you take it from 1 to 10.

This is what we call exponential growth, if you do it systematically.

For example, let’s say you have a product or service that your end users are quite enjoying and coming back to your business over and over again. That’s your must-have product. The second component of growth hacking is to understand your must-have experiences.

So, what does that mean?

You need to understand your most engaged customers and through research, figure out their needs and what they love about your business. This will include identifying growth drivers, which are things that users do that engages them.

And by asking this question, you’re defining the key metrics you’ll use to measure your business’s success.

The second question you should ask is, “What are my business drivers and dynamics?” What factors influence my performance?

To answer this, you can use portfolio analysis. This will help you identify the key drivers of your business. In the context of business growth, your businesses success is measured by growth and profitability so the drivers are an acquisition and a retention strategy.

The third component of this approach is, “Who are my customers? How do I engage them?”

By using this approach, you can uncover the essential experience that drives growth. For example, Facebook discovered that when they had 45 million customers, they established a SWOT team for growth hacking. One of the team’s findings was that users who added seven friends within 10 days of opening an account kept coming back to use Facebook.

Facebook found that the must-have experience was seven friends in 10 days to drive product stickiness and engagement. You may find something similar in your own business.

Now, I understand some of you may be wondering, “Where can I find the data I need to do this?”

You all have access to data. It’s likely stored in your Google Analytics or in some of your servers, along with the systems you use to enable e-commerce, such as Shopify. There’s a wealth of data available.

And if you have a systematic approach to asking questions about your data, you can uncover the essential experience. This was the second component of growth hacking: understanding the must-have experience.

The third component is to incorporate these must-have experiences into your product.

For instance, when Facebook discovered that adding seven friends actually leads users to return, they tested this and implemented a recommendation system, allowing users to connect their contact lists and recommend friends. These changes encouraged more people to add friends, and within a few days, Facebook users became habituated to the platform.

You could follow a similar approach. Once you identify what drives growth or stickiness for your product or service, such as retention or growth, you should incorporate these must-have experiences through input or nudges to your customers.

The final step is to remove friction from the must-have experience. In addition to incorporating growth drivers into the custom experience, anything that creates distractions or impedes the must-have experience should be eliminated to further drive growth.

Analytics and testing are iterative processes used to identify and eliminate distractions, leading to product or service changes. For example, Facebook may have discovered that a tutorial on using Facebook distracted users from adding friends, so they removed that element from the experience.

Leveraging data can drive growth, sustain and retain customers, and enable scalable growth.

Growth hacking is essentially identifying your best customers, understanding their characteristics, and their behaviours.

What makes them your best clients?

When people experience success with your product or service, they naturally want to share it with others. They’ve found something that works and compels them to talk about it.

Before we finish, I want to leave you with this:

Data tells facts and information that can help you grow and succeed. Any information you can gather with your customers’ consent is invaluable. One of the best ways to do this is by conducting customer interviews and polls. You can simply schedule a call and ask them a series of questions to understand who they are, why they’re your customers, what they like about your product or service, and what they don’t like. This will give you data points on what makes a great customer and how you can find more customers like them.

Many people mistakenly believe that data science is just about tracking and analysing data in algorithms. However, it can also be as simple as asking your best customers some questions. We’ve done this at Webinar and Joe a few times, and it’s helped us tremendously improve our product and serve our best customers better.

“Data is the new oil” - is a quote from British mathematician and entrepreneur, Clive Humby

And I couldn’t agree more.

Data is power meaning data is priceless in your business whether that’s for growth or improving your business in other ways. So collect what you can and use this to inform your future business decisions.

Data is flowing in and out of your business daily, be that customers, visitors, money, people, and so on. If you don’t have any means of capturing this data then you won’t be able to use it to make better business decisions, with more accuracy and improve your business and its position in the best and fastest way. Don’t just capture all your data, it must have a purpose or you’re wasting your time and effort. Decide what you want to achieve (be that growth, improved efficiency, increased profit, bigger social following, and so on) and then what information you need to collect to measure this.

Got a burning question? Reach out on our social channels or email michael@purpleyak.co.uk

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you on the next one.

Take care.