Rise of the Growth Hacker

In the world of digital marketing we continue to see a preponderance of advertising techniques used to blitzkrieg consumers with imagery, messaging and witty technologies designed to earn that highly sought out “click.” Contrast this to the endless wave of commercials and adverts that so rudely interject themselves into a consumer’s consciousness at every turn, it's a wonder that new customers can be caught anymore, much less retained and value cultivated. While some call these advertising techniques ‘targeted’, more often than not, they end up being rapidly fired to the point of customer callousness.

While advertising in hybrid warfare across both online and offline platforms will continue to be a game won through survival of the fittest, the elitist’s at the business will naturally rise through innovation, and surprisingly, a term that is often forgotten in the supply chain of consumer acquisition… that term is “cultivation.”

Now, consumer cultivation is not about retention specifically, where so many companies build and design programs to try and keep their customers from going astray. No, in the sense of cultivation I mean generating more value from your current customer base; retention being only one facet of the relationship.
If we divide the playing field up between the typical operating paradigms; “Hunters vs. Farmers”, we can firmly plant that value of cultivation into the farming bucket.

We call this activity “Growth Hacking.

I first heard the term a few weeks ago when attending a marketing technology conference in Miami FL, when talking with an emerging entrepreneur interested in launching his first sovereign commerce business. We sat over coffee and his listened to my story about where I had been, the projects I had worked on, and specifically what our company was focused on, when I saw a glint in his eye and a proverbial light bulb went on.

He stops me in mid-sentence and says …you know what your company is? You are consumer acquisition specialists… in the Silicon Valley community that is a rising concept called Growth hacking…”

As our discussion continued, I was forced to agree. It is a fitting term for the direction I believe forward-thinking marketers are pivoting to.

With the Internets networked, data rich eco-system, combined with rapid experimentation and consumer-centric marketing, we begin to see strategies evolve to support the key growth levers of a business. This is an asynchronous event that isn’t just delegated to a developer or an analyst. This is rather an integral approach to running a business that calls on teams of creative people, marketers, operators and technologists to band together into ‘think tank’ alliances to come up with something amazing.

How Growth Hacking Works
Growth hacking generally starts with a thorough understanding of how a company is growing itself. Trajectory, customers, growth levers, technological gas and brake pedals and the like. When you understand the importance of a business conversion funnel, targeting, integrated marketing channels, authority and competitive strategy, you can begin to correlate actions that lead to performance improvement in those metrics. With that data in hand, you can encourage managers and operators to take beneficial actions. This calculus is far from a quick hack, it’s about finding unique insights about your business and leveraging them for growth.

For example, in our core business we discovered that the linear way of considering lead quality from the top to bottom of our marketing platform, and common perception that most industry wigs have is fundamentally flawed. From the sense of a buyer, the assumption is that the higher the price, the better quality the lead. This theory assumes that all lead deliveries are injected into the market from the top-down. But what happens if leads are injected by the bottom-up? Or what happens if both delivery systems are involved? In our studies of how consumers interact in the market we discovered that high quality users can be captured at all levels, and that degradation of lead quality is reflected less by the injection process, and more by initial advertising and subsequent re-marketing methods use.

The best balance of this involves optimization from the originator of the consumer engagement to the destination of the consumer offer. To do this, consider the words and phrases on the page, the steps to signing up, the design elements of the data capture, the offer and technology used to harness that experience, everything. One combination is always the winner. Growth hackers don’t guess. They test.

Difference Between Marketing and Growth Hacking
Growth hackers also tend to have a deeper and more critical thinking approach to their business where they can drive engagement, authority and retention. Most marketers spend the majority of the time focused on the front-end of the external conversion funnels, generating awareness and general branding, away from the core product, whether because of lack of experience or a fundamental disinterest in what happens after the click. Growth hackers are constantly trying to understand the end-to-end business elements necessary for accelerating business growth.

Fast growing Silicon Valley companies generally have both marketing teams and growth teams. The growth teams tend to report into the product organization. In the best organizations, these two teams work closely together to improve the same broad metrics.

Rather than obsessing about what the business objective should be called, it’s much more important to focus on the concepts behind the new growth playbook. Companies that come to grips that they can’t be in the horizontal supply chain anymore, and realize that vertical integration is necessary to understand the end-game of the marketing, will be among the first to take market share from their competitors. By working closely together, marketers, growth hackers and advertisers can change the marketplace.