Short answer:
  • What on earth is ‘growth hacking’? It’s a simple framework that will help you grow any business.
  • The secret: It’s common sense and hard work.But within a logical simple framework.
  • What do I know? Well, I’ve worked in advertising and branding for 25+ years. And whilst leading growth at a Fintech startup I qualified from the Growth University growth hacking course.
Growth University Course

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Demystifying Growth Hacking: From Playful Tinkering to Clever Scaling

The term growth hacking has become very widespread and trendy in recent years. Like many things in this blog, its growth as a term seems to stem from the Idea that it’s somehow about cheating your way to success. Shortcutting things that otherwise would be harder or more expensive. 

So this post is about growth hacking; what it is, and what are the sensible bits of it.  What you can learn and what you can do to grow your business using some of the growth hacker skills. 

I thought it’d be useful to start with the origins of the word hacker. Particularly modern terms and relation to computer programming

1955: The first recorded use of “hack” in a computer context appears in MIT documents, referring to working on the electrical system of a model train set. This early usage suggests a positive connotation: finding solutions and tinkering.

1960s-1970s: Computer enthusiasts at MIT used “hack” to describe clever programming shortcuts and creative exploration of systems. Hacking was seen as a playful and resourceful activity.

1980s: As computers became more widespread, the term “hacker” entered mainstream media. Unfortunately, the media often focused on malicious uses of computers, leading to a negative association with the word.

Essentially growth hacking is finding elegant solutions to quickly scale your business, so is much closer to the original positive meaning. 

Unfortunately, many people have taken its meaning to be about cheating your way to success somehow, which is perhaps why it’s become so well known because of the innate human desire people have to get ahead without much effort. This is a common theme in many of my blogs. 

In essence, the idea behind growth hacking is very simple

It’s about trying stuff testing it, then doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. But, like anything, it’s a bit more complicated than that

Understanding the “Why” Behind Your Business: The Key to Captivating Customers

Like any form of marketing or communications to potential customers, it’s absolutely vital to understand your market. Particularly to understand the really important question of ‘why’ they would be interested in your product. I heavily recommend you read ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek at this point 

‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek

It’s a brilliant summary of everything you should think about in marketing and business more generally Far too many people focus on the ‘how’ of what they do or the ‘what’ of what they do. And not on the ‘why’.

What makes this important? Well, people generally buy the ‘why’. A great example of this is the success of Velux Windows. What they’ve sold is the possibility of amazing use of space and opening up light and air into places that were dark and dingy. That’s why people buy Velux windows. The what and how of a roof window is rather more turgid. It’s a hole in a roof with a window in it with certain features like clever catches and clever blinds that make the Velux probably the best in the market. But that’s only partially what makes them successful. It’s the dream of opening up space that gets people excited. 

Here is a link to a great video where Simon Sinek talks through all this and a copy of his book which I’ll get a very tiny commission on if you buy it through Amazon from this link. It’s well worth it though so I recommend it

Once you’ve established the why then you can start coming up with ideas about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ and the way you can communicate these to your target audience.

 

Crafting Your Target Audience: Finding the Perfect Fit for Your Message

Target audiences are another really important thing here. Not everyone will buy your product or be interested in what you’re saying. So you need to work out who they are so you can know how to talk to them. 

A great way to do this is to write a persona. Which is essentially a description of a kind of idealized person. Write it like you want to get to know them. It’s not just the name, their age/ gender etc.  Also, add what they are like. Give them a name, what they like to do on a Sunday afternoon, what they like to eat or drink, and what films they watch. It’s easier to get under the skin when you think of them like a real person.

Once you know who you’re talking to and why they’d be interested in what you have to say the next step is to come up with a plan of how you can talk to them.

Idea Explosion: Brainstorming Brilliant Ways to Connect with Your People

Now I’ll write a series of other blogs about that because there’s a whole host of things you can do here. This blog is more about what growth hacking is as a concept so I won’t go into all those details yet.

So what you gonna do is go and read a bunch of those other blogs when they’ve been written. But in the meantime, you are going to come up with as many ideas as you can of ways to talk to your audience. Whether that’s Facebook ads, Twitter posts, going around their house knocking on the door or writing to them leafleting …whatever it is. And as many as you can.

Then you need to work out which ones are you going to spend some money on.

Now the really important part here is this is all about testing what works and not about blowing all your budget on a couple of things you think might work well because they may not.

 

So what are you going to do here is score all your ideas in a way that means you can focus on the ones that can be much more confident are going to have an effect.

The best way I found to do this is a thing called ICE scoring 

ICE Scoring: Prioritizing Initiatives for Maximum Impact

This is simply three scores out of 10, added together and averaged. These are the metrics:

Impact. What impact do you think this particular piece of activity is going to have on whatever it is you’re trying to do? Whether that’s to get people to read your blog, sell bird feeders …whatever. 

Confidence: this is where you give some degree to the confidence you have that the impact score is true. If you’ve never done any Facebook advertising and you know nothing about it you’re confidence is going to be pretty low. If you’ve done a load of research on the types of Facebook ads that your audience click on then your confidence will be a little higher. If you’ve done loads of Facebook ads for your product and you know the type they’re clicking on and have some data then your confidence is higher still. Obviously, in the early days, this is a hunch only. But as you get to do more of this, you’ll get better and better at knowing what works.  But if you know your business and your audience, often your hunches can be pretty accurate.

Ease. This is as simple as it sounds. It’s the ease with which you can do this particular thing. Leafleting your local area is relatively easy. Only leafletting people in your local area who sit in your target market suddenly becomes more tricky. 

Note here. Be harsh in your scoring. The idea is to separate things. If you score everything 10. You won’t get much of a spread. 

Now it’s simply a case of adding your scores together and dividing by three.  Then order your list by the score. There, you now have a prioritised list of initiatives you think will have an impact on your business. 

I’ll add a template sheet to get you started. 

Measurement Makes It Matter: Tracking Success and Refining Your Approach

Now the next step before you start spending lots of money on these is to think about measurement.

Unless you can measure the effectiveness of different types of activity you’re going to have no idea whether you’re spending money in the right place or not. 

The easiest way to do this is through digital means. Anything that tracks to a website can be measured very easily using Google Analytics. Everything you do online can be tracked using things called UTM codes. Again that’s a whole blog on its own which I’ll write at some point and link in here. 

But even if you’re doing a leaflet make sure each leaflet design has its own unique code on. So when people phone you up you can ask them which leaflet they’ve got. They can tell you the code and you can get some data on which ones are working, and which ones are having an impact. 

Rinse and Repeat: The Cyclical Journey of Growth Hacking Mastery

Now you’ve done all this, congratulations, you’ve got all the ingredients to be a growth hacker

You’ll try out things.

You’ll measure everything you do.

Hopefully, some stuff will work other stuff might not.

You’ve now got some data and a better idea of what makes your audience tick and engage with you.

So you can come up with a bunch of new ideas which you can score and test.

Then basically you rinse and repeat.

Define what success means for you.

So what does success look like? What is pretty simple really. Have you got an ROI (a return on investment) of more than one? This is as simple as it sounds. Take the income you generate, minus the investment, divided by the investment. 

ROI = ((Income – Investment) / Investment )* 100%

Anything that’s more than zero % is going to grow your business. And the greater the percentage return, the greater the growth. 

Ready to Take Action?

I’ve made all this sound quite easy. The principles are. But doing it can be hard work. You may want to invest in a course if you don’t have a background in marketing advertising. That will help you accelerate the way you do this. I’ve done a couple of courses through work which have been very good.

The best was with The Growth University. It was an excellent online course and gave a really good grounding in Growth Hacking.

Growth University Course

Usual disclaimer I might earn a penny or two from these links. Nothing just gonna leave me holidaying in the Bahamas but hopefully, it’ll pay for the sharing of some of my experience. 

Good luck. Let me know how you get on. 

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