Growth Hackers

Growth hacking provides an excellent way for companies to grow (and retain) their customer base and increase revenue without breaking the bank to do so. Much of the work of growth hackers is organized by a concept called the growth cycle. This three-part process begins with a growth problem (e.g., not enough visitors to a Web site, customers do not renew their subscription to a digital product), then moves into experimentation (i.e., the growth hacker tries various strategies to gauge customer opinion/preferences, improve the product or service itself), and then into solution/scaling (i.e., the growth hacking team solves the problem and then scales up its solution so that the product or service can be improved).

Growth hackers use a variety of tools and techniques to find solutions to problems and/or create new marketing approaches. One popular technique is A/B testing, which is also known as split testing. In A/B testing, growth hackers create a randomized experiment in which two or more versions of an email headline, web page, or other content element are simultaneously shown to different groups of potential or current customers in order to determine which version creates the maximum impact, best influences customer behavior, and drives business metrics. Once the best-performing version is identified, the growth hacker continues to develop it—and combines it with other elements—to create an effective marketing campaign or meet other goals (such as retaining customers).

Data analytics plays a major role in this profession. Growth hackers constantly collect and analyze data to determine how customers view and use their company’s products or services; to determine which marketing approach, tagline, design, color, or font works best to attract customers; and to meet other goals.

Some growth hackers use their programming skills to improve products and services, build web landing pages and entire Web sites, improve the user interface of Web sites and apps, and perform other technical duties. At larger companies, the growth hacker may just need a basic understanding of these processes, and a programmer, digital designer, or user experience professional handles the tech tasks. Smaller employers may seek employees with strong marketing and information technology skills.

Other duties include monitoring ad and user dashboards to better understand customer activity and preferences, ensuring that landing pages are leveraging search engine optimization best practices to rank highly in search engines for important keywords, writing and sharing content to attract customers and generate buzz about a product or service, creating referral loops in emails and on Web pages that aim to grow the customer base, repurposing existing content as a way to attract new customers, identifying potential new channels for customer acquisition, and writing reports that share growth marketing insights with managers and coworkers.