There is so much critisism over this term that I had to put my two cents in. Yes marketers are using this frequently and yes it makes sense. I looked up the wikipedia definition, which was something like this “Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.” It’s still a little unclear why people give you weird eyes when you tell them that you use growth hacking techniques to get traffic.
That is a great definition, but if I was to break down what I thought it was it would go something like this “growth hacking is figuring out any possible way you can get visitors or actions to your website.” Is SEO part of growth hacking, well yes. I generally think of SEO as its own channel though and don’t think that there is something uniquely done. I want to share what I think would be an example of a growth hack. Students are prime targets for retailers. They are of upper middle class and fall within a very lucrative buying age range. Did you know that most Universities assign independent emails to students when they join?
For the duration of their college years they are forced to check two emails. Their person one and their student one. Can you imagine how valuable this email would be if you could get a hold of it? You would be able to have their direct attention for a few seconds to market whatever you wanted. Here is the growth hack. Get into the school database with the list of names and emails. You would have something like maybe 35,000 emails. Setup a mailchimp account and create the best marketing email you have ever written. Then blast to all 35,000. Boom, you just flooded your website with traffic and potential users or sales. Also students are extremely viral with their sharing.
They are more plugged into the social networks then anyone else. If you can get them to share your content, you could have some serious gains. There would be a few really important parts to pay close attention to in this equation. Pay very close attention to the email that you write. I would not recommend sending anything more then two sentences. It will be seen as spam if it is not super short. Also I would not recommend putting a link in there. Spam filters will grab it and many people will be annoyed.
There are so many of these techniques you can pull to drive large amounts of traffic to your websites, you just need to be creative. Get out of your normal routine of marketing and think really hard. I like to ask myself a lot “What would I click on?” or “Why would I leave?” Hopefully this can help with the process. There are a ton of great articles out there and videos as well. If you want immediate tips and tricks here is my class
Stay creative and keep “Growth Hacking” you growth hackers.
