Many businesses aren’t seeing the results they want because they view traditional marketing and growth interchangeably. Traditional marketing and growth are both methods to achieve a certain goal, but they have significantly different executions and ultimate functions. While most people have a relatively strong understanding of marketing, growth marketing is usually a source of misinterpretation and confusion. In my past five years going from selling a startup to running growth for a business to co-founding a company, this is something I’ve found myself constantly educating clients and colleagues on over and over again.
A “growth hacker” is essentially a hybrid between a data-driven scientist and special ops personnel. The job requires being able to scope out ephemeral opportunities that can be exploited for massive spikes in traffic, sales and retention, while simultaneously conducting multiple, ongoing experiments.
The biggest source of misunderstanding is the idea that growth can be reliably cloned. There is no single growth blueprint. Just because something worked for one of your competitors doesn’t mean you’ll see the same results. What does exist, however, is a mindset that is fine-tuned for growth.
This mindset is the junction between the constant inquiry of “what if” questions, some solid touchpoints of experience for reference and a drive to experiment and test to find what works. Additionally, there are certain gaps in general marketing that leave many companies feeling underwhelmed with their marketing efforts. That’s where growth marketing comes into play. In order to understand how to successfully implement both types of marketing into your business, it’s important you make yourself familiar with how they are different from one another.
General Marketing: The Workhorse
Your marketing efforts are best viewed as the steady day-to-day work to develop your brand, communicate your value and advertise to your audience.
Marketing plays a substantial role in how effectively you can meet your business goals. It's fairly reliable and almost procedural. If you put $X into Facebook ads, you can generally expect a return around Y% if the campaign was executed effectively. Effective marketing campaigns have a positive ROI and are able to scale as a company increases its marketing investment.
There are multiple, different strategies that fall under the umbrella of marketing. You can utilize PPC campaigns for short-term to drive massive amounts of quick exposure to a certain page or product. However, this flood of traffic usually slows to a trickle or a halt as soon as you stop spending money. You can also invest in marketing efforts such as SEO that will pay dividends in the long-term. But those require major investments over time to yield any worthy results.
Marketing is an amplifier. It’s up to you what actually gets amplified and if customers will stick with it after it is.
Many startups are in a state of marketing denial, where the prevailing assumption that “if you build it, they will come” ends up deflating whatever possible long-term growth they could have achieved.
Growth Hacking: Baby Steps Turn Into Big Steps
The term “growth hacking” has earned itself quite the mixed reputation. On one hand, you have an entire community of growth hackers raving about their ability reliably to achieve astronomical growth. On the other hand, you have people who view growth hacking as an empty and fruitless discipline that distracts attention and resources from reliable marketing tactics.
The controversy surrounds growth hacking because both sides inherently view it incorrectly. It’s a matter of semantics. To consider growth hacking a reliable hail mary is paradoxical. And to consider it ineffective purely comes down to the execution. The reason that growth hacking has become so popular, especially in the startup community, is because it could earn brands the traffic, sales and exposure that would only be possible with a much larger marketing budget.
Growth hacking is essentially the scrupulous process of identifying which channels can help bring in massive amounts of attention/purchases/sign-ups/etc. In order to beat ordinary results and earn relatively non-scaleable growth, growth hacks often involve using non-traditional methods.
For example, for my real estate startup, we built a Facebook community to use as a sandbox to test different growth hacks and strategies. Not only was it our sole free acquisition channel, it helped us develop a rapid feedback loop to either prove or reject any potential marketing tactics or growth hacks. Today, the group is still active with over 45,000 members and is ranking on the front page of Google for valuable keywords such as “NYC sublets.”
There are two sides to growth hacking:
• Building things into the product to improve and gamify the fundamental consumer experience. Growth-marketers often work with product teams to design the product in a way that helps turn the end-user into a word-of-mouth growth machine. One of the main focuses here is finding and improving the viral coefficient or the number of new users an existing user brings with them. This means designing scaleable affiliate programs that offer users something valuable in exchange for referring their friends.
• Conversion-rate optimization. Marketing involves working with an arsenal of different tools in a variety of different channels. A savvy growth-marketer is always looking for potential opportunities to exploit for massive growth while also looking to improve the conversion rate of every channel.
Marketing and growth hacking complement each other, and different types of businesses should rely on different proportions of each. It’s important to keep in mind that growth-hacking isn’t as replicable as marketing. Many people who try growth hacking don’t understand the fundamental ingredients required to make a certain model successful. Just because something worked for Dropbox or Uber doesn’t mean it will work for you. However, it doesn’t hurt to understand what other companies pulled off to help you brainstorm your own creative strategies.
