WTF is Growth Hacking - Webinar Q&A

We’ve hosted our first webinar together with Meltwater! Noud van Alem and Huub Schuijn talked about “How to get started with Growth Hacking in 5 Simple Steps” and we got a lot of questions. So we’ve captured them all in this blog, but you can also watch the webinar of course (it’s in Dutch).

There are three main components in growth hacking: 1 is data and rapid experimentation, 2 is marketing automation and development, 3 is creativity and behavioral psychology. When you are trying to make sense of your general analytics, remember that all these metrics represent a real person that goes through your customer funnel. The creative part of growth hacking is to constantly find new ways of understanding your customers feelings and think of comprehensive ways to make your customer’s journey more relevant and pleasing.

Growth Hacking is suitable for any size of organization. You just have to find the right people to join the team, which is about 8-10 people. So in a bigger organization you might have more Growth teams and in a smaller organization maybe only one.

At the moment you can get started with Machine Learning Tools Like Orange (biolab) and Microsoft Azure. But Google is also building a Machine Learning suite which should make it accessible for even more people with less technical knowledge.

Growth Hacking and Scrum definitely have similarities. You work in a circle iteration and test hypotheses. But within a Growth Hacking team you bring people together from different departments. You break silo-thinking. And Growth Hacking is not only meant for Marketing and Sales. Also the HR department for example can run experiments to test how they can improve their work.

Yes there is a Sprint Lead in the Team. This person is there to guide the team through the whole process and has the overview over all experiments. He or she will be critical on how hypotheses are formulated and sees if similar experiments can be consolidated.

Yes of course. You can bring the Growth Hack Mindset to your clients and show them how this way of working brings fast results. You can form a Growth Team together with your client.

You are probably already have set up your page analytics, but see if your event analytics are setup too. This will track behavior like scroll-depth, clicks, time on page, etc. which you could use to trigger follow up actions. You can also think about your website structure as an experiment. For example create pages for specific target audiences (product x for marketing, product x for sales) this will give you insights about your audience without asking it. This way you can direct your audience to more targeted content and this also makes retargeting more efficient.

Growth Hacking doesn’t always have to be digital, although it makes tracking and analyzing easier, you can also do offline experiments. For example, maybe your sales reps bring a folder to potential customers with leaflets and information. Experiment if the one leaflet creates more traction than the other. Or see if you can optimize the lead-time of the proposal phase. There are numerous ways to experiment offline.

Sean Ellis’ book Hacking Growth is an awesome book to get the basics of Growth Hacking. Join the Facebook group BAMF (Bad Ass Marketeers & Founders) hosted by Josh Fechter or sign up for the weekly newsletter www.thegrowthweekly.com 

If you too have questions after watching the webinar, feel free to reach out to us and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.