Growth hacking

Any successful company regularly seeks to stand out from the competition, create added value, and improve over the long term while reducing costs.

You will gradually discover through this article the basic notions of Growth Hacking and how to successfully integrate it.

1. The appearance of growth hacking.
2. What is Growth Hacking?
3. The objectives of growth hacking.
4. How Growth Hacking Works: The AARRR Matrix.
5. The tools to use for a successful growth hacking strategy. 

The appearance of growth hacking:

Growth Hacking, as a concept, was born in the early 2010s in the United States. More precisely: in Silicon Valley. The coiner of the term “Growth Hacking” is Sean Ellis. At the time, Sean Ellis was working at Dropbox, but already had other professional projects in mind. In short, he wanted to leave Dropbox. So Sean Ellis had to look for someone to take over his job. Problem: he didn’t know how to title and define his position. His job was to grow the user base of Dropbox. The term “marketing” was not suitable, because it was completely insufficient to describe what he was doing. Eventually, he settled on “Growth Hacker”. 

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is a set of techniques, or rather a state of mind, a methodology, whose objective is the rapid growth, by all means, of a service or a product.

In other words, growth hacking consists of promoting the growth of a product or service in a rapid manner and at lower cost using unconventional methods, hence the term “hacking”. It is a process paced by one and same objective: growth.

The objectives of growth hacking:

The objective of growth hacking is to boost a business. generate rapid (or even exponential) growth in a company’s turnover, if possible at a lower cost and sometimes at all costs. Beyond the turnover, this method also seeks to increase the notoriety of a brand or a company.

Basically The ultimate goal is to acquire traffic, generate conversions and therefore revenue, by optimizing the famous “conversion tunnel”. For this, growth hackers use “hacks”, create experiments and present the results constantly in order to adjust their strategy. The challenge is to succeed in rapidly automating the most effective growth levers by using “test and learn”.

How Growth Hacking Works: The AARRR Matrix

The AARRR technique is an essential growth hacking tool that aims to improve your purchase funnel.

The AARRR matrix is ​​the abbreviation of five major elements of the user lifecycle: Acquisition → Conversion (Activation) → Engagement (Retention) → Revenue → Referral

Each step must be treated and measured independently to improve your conversion rate as much as possible.

• Acquisition:

This first step aims to introduce your site or your brand to new leads. In this case, you are called upon to take care of your natural and paid referencing techniques as well as your inbound marketing strategy.

The next objective is to focus your acquisition efforts on the most appropriate channels and/or improve those that are not achieving the expected results.

There are two types of locations where to source potential leads.

Paid Channels: Includes advertising, sponsorship, and affiliate marketing.

Unpaid Channels: Unpaid channels contain content marketing, search engine optimization…

The two channels are complementary. 

• Conversion or activation:

Convincing your visitors to make a purchase, in order to transform them into customers, for this you must invest in a modern landing page design rich in high value-added content, thus encouraging them to leave their contact details, to subscribe to your newsletters.

The goal at this point is to prevent them from stopping using your product or service after the conversion.

• Commitment or Loyalty:

retain them, ensure that visitors regularly use your service or buy your products again.

• Recommendation:

Consists of transforming your customers into ambassadors. Knowing that a significant % of satisfied consumers are willing to recommend X product or company. On the other hand, a prospect arriving following a recommendation has a greater chance of converting.

Perfunit suggests that you opt for the following strategies:

• Set up a referral program: earn gifts or discounts for the customers you refer
• Use influencer marketing: If influencers or public figures recommend you, consumers will be enticed to do the same.
• Send reminders in the form of emails after the act of purchase that encourages them to talk about you on their social networks (and to subscribe to you on the networks).
• Share your customers’ content daily on your social networks: they will be encouraged to create more.

• Income:

A question that occupies all business leaders: how can you increase your income?

Don’t worry Perfunit has the answer:

If the first 4 indicators of the AARR matrix are well optimized, your income will absolutely increase. However, there is a technique to improving your earnings: increasing the amount of profit you earn from a consumer over their lifetime as your customer. While reducing the budget spent to acquire a new customer. This includes the cost of anything necessary to get your client to convert.

The tools to use for a successful growth hacking strategy:

The growth hacking strategy can start with the implementation of a few simple actions: 

• Collect the email addresses of visitors to offer them content and optimize acquisition;
• Dissect statistics via Google analytics to better understand your audience and adapt your strategy;
• Produce quality content adapted to the interest of its target audience;
• Analyze its performance continuously and via the different variants of its content (in particular via the A/B testing method);
• Encourage media buying to expand its audience…

To succeed in the previous actions, the company is called upon to use and develop several tools like : 

First keep abreast of what is being said about the company, competitors, the industry and what may impact it.

Analytics:  allow you to quantify the effects of making a change to your strategy, and that’s invaluable to the process of improving and optimizing online marketing campaigns. The biggest benefit of utilizing proper analytics is being able to identify strengths and weaknesses

Scraping :the practice of gathering data online automatically

Search engine optimization:a set of techniques that allow robots to index a web page in search engines so that it appears in the best possible position when a user makes a request.

Search Engine Advertising:literally means search engine advertising in French. It designates a paid referencing method for websites.

Social Media Marketing and Management: the activity of taking into account and using the influence potential of social media to promote marketing activity, the commercial development of a company and the employer brand. It is the operational implementation of a social media strategy.

Social Media Ads:includes all activities related to the distribution of advertising content on social media sites

Cold Mailing:This technique consists of sending a prospecting email to a prospect with whom you have never had physical or virtual contact before.

Automatisation:means total or partial execution of technical tasks by machines operating without human intervention.

Sales Funnel:the different stages that your potential customer goes through between the moment he discovers your brand and the moment he buys.

Design Thinking:Design Thinking is an innovative methodology that allows ideas and projects to be transformed into real actions and tangible prototypes.

Do you then want to go further and launch your first actions in growth hacking? The Pefunit team has made its knowledge available to you in order to develop an efficient strategy that is above all adapted to your objectives. Do not hesitate to contact us.