Growth Hackers are blurring the lines between marketing, product management, and engineering. They are combining quantitative direct marketing techniques, relentless testing, data analysis, modeling, and creativity.
Who Is A Growth Hacker?
A Growth Hacker is a professional who is only interested in the online growth of your business. He is not interested in having more visits to your website if they do not convert – his interest is purely in a scaled growth of your product. And for that, he has to reformulate, analyze, and experiment until he achieves the perfect fit for your product in the market.
Growth hackers are, in many ways, designers that help startups in their growth journey. They strive to fit the service or product into the market, viralizing it in the simplest way, doing multivariate tests, and analyzing each phase of the online marketing campaigns.
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The Growth Hacker Profile
The Hacker
This is the Ying in the Growth Hacker. He needs to amaster the various technical aspects necessary to run any successful digital campaign. Sometimes, this requires some bit of coding knowledge:
- HTML (in its variants with its effects, animations etc.)
- CSS – Master and interpret the codes, change them on the fly in preview of a live website.
- XML – Format to redistribute content through RSS or to index content in Google on a regular basis.
- JSON – Used to exchange data. JSON is often preferred over XML since it’s faster.
- APIs – They are used to connect third-party services to your project.
Though it’s not necessary to have all these technical skills at your fingertips, having them gives you a way bigger advantage over other Growth Hackers.
The Pirate Marketer
This is the Yang in the Growth Hacker – the one who implements the code, analyzes and makes changes based on A/B test experiments on landing pages, configures social media pages, takes care of SEO, and tests different CTAs (call to actions) in different colors for the client to “fish”, handles Email Marketing, and if that isn’t enough, pursues Remarketing efforts.
Good Growth Hackers use disruptive marketing techniques with little economic capacity and in a short period of time to validate each process. As you can see, growth hacking is not a simple process. It requires different ways of execution, programming, and analysis.
As a growth hacker, you must know when and how to change your strategy and follow your intuitions until you find the rule that DOES work for the Startup you are helping.
The Growth Machine: Mission Of The Growth Hacker
When it comes to obtaining data, although it’s important, the growth machine for a growth hacker is a much deeper mentality – it is an attitude and the process is much more than a collection of tools.
Here are a few key missions for any Growth Hacker:
- Identify the objective to achieve (ex: lead, visits, conversions)
- Brainstorming of experiments (hypotheses)
- Prioritize which experiments are in order (and which channels we will use)
- Design experiment (CTA buttons, landing page design etc.)
- Configure analytical tools (Google Analytics)
- Run experiments (with dates and deadlines)
- Record learning (compare data and start over).
Growth Hacking Tools for Kenyan Digital Marketers
If you’ve just installed an analytics tool, without a growth hacking philosophy, then you’re just playing numbers, randomly changing metrics and things about your product with a false sense of grounding. Digital Marketing Metrics help you understand your project. They allow you to keep track of your marketing efforts and change your strategies when they don’t work.
The tools that we currently know are always changing in the world of online marketing, but the growth process of a Growth Hacker is always the same. Whichever tool you use, you will always be guiding leads or people through the conversion funnel. A growth hacker is always going to create hypotheses, run experiments, and optimize the results. That’s the job
