Growth Hacking: What Does It Really Mean?

Growth hacking is not the same as marketing or digital marketing. However, many online marketers have the concepts confused, and few fully understand how the concepts differ from each other.

If you want to finally get this straight, you're in the right place.

Below you can immediately click on the section you want.

Growth hacking simply explained

"Growth Hacking is not anti-marketing, it is the Evolution of marketing, it is pro-growth."

Sean Ellis

Growth hacking refers to creative and inventive tactics and strategies aimed at growing a company.

While conventional marketing usually aims to increase sales and the focus is on the product, in growth hacking growth is at the center of everything.

How is growth hacking different from regular marketing?

In general, a growth hacker knows and understands very well certain platforms or search engines, and he sees opportunities that a traditional marketer might not pay attention to.

These opportunities are, for example, certain growth strategies on Twitter, strategically targeted ads on TikTok or unusual and disruptive ads on Google Adwords.

An example of a growth hacking strategy for a personal brand on Twitter

We follow 50 new people per day, e.g. using hashtags or keywords.
We tweet a few times a day.
We comment on the tweets of the followers a few times a day.
In the Twitter profile, the aim is to take followers to your own website with a short and concise message, which is targeted precisely at your own followers.

In growth hacking, the familiar and safe marketing instructions no longer apply. Instead of these, the growth hacker focuses on those things that can be tested, monitored and scaled.

For this reason, growth hacking generally refers to strategies implemented online or via the internet.

How do you recognize a good growth hacker?

Since most marketing strategies today run online, the best growth hackers don't give away their secrets so easily.

Most growth hackers are savvy web geeks who understand their tools almost as well as their developers.

Since testing is one of the most important things in growth hacking, people working in this field need to dare to make mistakes and learn from them quickly.

Creativity is also very important. Here are a few examples of cases where a less creative marketer would not have come up with the whole idea.

Paypal

When the payment brokerage service founded by Elon Musk wanted to quickly grow in North America, Paypal's marketers decided to advertise on the world-famous eBay online store. Paypal's growth hackers created bots that won auctions, after which the automated bots asked sellers about the possibility of paying via Paypal.

AirBnB

The American service, which offers short-term apartment rentals to its customers, quickly caught wind when they decided to use bots to list all the listings on the AirBnB platform on the highly popular Craigslist service. A link was found in the Craigslist listing that took an interested visitor to AirBnB's website.

The music industry and TikTok

Fleetwood Mac 's song Dreams, which turns 44 this year, unexpectedly reached Spotify's Top 10 most listened songs, when the song was diligently added as background music in videos of the TikTok service.

Concrete ideas for growth hacking

The examples mentioned above are perhaps a bit too special and cannot be directly used in your own marketing strategy.

Below, we've put together some clearer and easier ideas to make sure you don't leave this page empty-handed.

Google in advertising

Step into the customer's shoes and search for a specific search term on Google. Pay attention to what paid ads in particular say, claim and sell. Could you figure out a way to stand out from these? What are they doing wrong? What is the customer really looking for and wants?

on LinkedIn

Most companies do not add much value with their posts in Linkkari. It's usually a few sentences, an emoji and a link to the article itself. You can use this thing to your advantage the next time you write something to the service. Some growth hackers even take this so far that they don't have any actual link at all in the post. The publication can be read in its entirety on Linked, and the best thing is, of course, it can be published in the same way on other services (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).

Is growth hacking right for your company?

If you feel that the usual marketing tactics are no longer biting your customer base, growth hacking might be just what your company needs. The best way to figure this out is to contact professionals who know the best and most secret tricks. At Growly, our growth hacking team focuses on finding cost-effective and breakthrough strategies that match exactly your marketing strategy and company culture.