Growth Hacking: What it is and how it is applied in business

[jrineakter]

Growth Hacking is a term coined by Sean Ellis, a business angel with investments in Dropbox, to define a strategy according to which the growth of a company is pursued through analytical techniques, creativity and curiosity; that is, by working on organic sales and reducing expenses to the minimum possible.

Growth Hacking is born from the need to identify new growth strategies that are far removed from conventional advertising and excessive spending of money. It is particularly suited to the startup ecosystem, since this is where the lack of initial resources is most efficiently compensated for by more experimental and mixed techniques – marketing and product development.

In this post we will talk about the Growth Hacking Funnel and how some companies have used it successfully. But first one more thing, what is the so-called Growth Hacking Funnel?

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This growth funnel is based on the AARRR metrics model, an acronym that is broken down into the following terms:

Acquisition : This part talks about business awareness, about how to have maximum awareness about it to generate maximum profitability in the shortest period of time.
Activation – After people know about your business, why should they sign up? This part talks about how to onboard users seamlessly.
Retention : Once users have started using your product/service, what will keep them coming back again and again? Retention is about keeping customers for life.
Referral – One of the best marketing greece number data channels is word of mouth. People trust their friends more than anything else. This part is aimed at maximizing referrals.
Revenue : When all the above points work together and give rise to a scalability process, controlling cash flow and revenue is the next step to take into account.
And now let's look at the success stories with Growth Hacking strategy :

Airbnb
It doesn't need much of an introduction at this point, but just in case anyone hasn't heard of it: Airbnb makes it easy for people to rent out rooms in their homes (or their entire homes) to other users. It's basically a collaborative hosting platform with more than 12 rental spaces and more than 100 million users.

How did it get so big? After raising an initial round of funding, following a few business failures, the company kicked off its Growth Hack strategy by looking for customers on Craigslist. This classifieds website already had a large user base and was where many people were looking for accommodation, an opportunity they did not miss. Airbnb used email marketing to contact users who already had a property listed on Craigslist and recommended them to advertise on Airbnb.

At the same time, Airbnb developed an integration on its website that allowed users to publish their properties on Craigslist from the startup's platform. This integration had many benefits, since Craigslist had many potential users from Airbnb but its ads were not as attractive or profitable for the business.

With this Growth Hack strategy, they were able to effectively increase the number of users, but the founders of Airbnb realized that there was still not much activity in New York. After analyzing the situation, they realized that this lack was due to the low quality of the photos of the homes, so they armed themselves with a good camera and went to photograph the properties, which ended up triggering the registrations in the nascent app.