What actually is growth hacking? What’s behind this buzzword? How do you use it and how do you become a sought-after growth hacker yourself?
Andreas Anding answered these and many more questions at a workshop on “Growth Hacking” last month. Andreas is the CEO of Remote Native GmbH, a digital expert and consultant with extensive know-how in marketing, sales and technology.
The special thing about this workshop was – and maybe you can even call it Growth Hack – that this time it was not only about pure theory, equipped with general use cases, but was a real team event. In advance, each participant could submit case studies of their companies. These case studies were then discussed in small groups of 4-5 people and they looked at which growth hacking methods could be applied to these concrete company examples in order to create more growth, more awareness.
The case studies came, for example, from P&C Nord with its online shop VanGraaf.com, adSoul, Endereco GmbH, Traveldude and of course picalike itself.
The composition of the teams with people from very different companies and from different areas has given us a rather ingenious departure from the standard program that you normally drive in marketing. I really enjoyed that. – Thomas Ziegler from Adsoul
Which methods can be used to generate growth?
There are numerous methods to generate “growth hacking”-like dynamic processes. Here are a few examples:
- Referral Programs: Clients refer the brand. Customers and new customers are rewarded. For example, the cloud service dropbox became very popular.
- Influencer Marketing: Which people already have a high reach in the relevant industry? How can they be used to grow the brand? YouTuber and Instagramer are particularly suitable for this.
- Email Marketing: Can we create content that customers want in their inbox every day? And then share it? Like the briefings that some editors-in-chief send out every day?
- Social Sharing: How can we turn our customers into brand ambassadors? Like letting their friends know that they are using our product? Like the music service Spotify, for example?
- Application Programming Interfaces? (API’s): Can we set up interfaces to our content so that web developers can integrate it into their projects? For example, a bestseller list that then appears on other websites, blogs or social networks to promote your product.
- Viral content: Which content can be used virally – and which not. This concerns the topics, the lines, the texts, the images. If you want to be successful in growth hacking, you need such content.
Creating your own Growth Hack is the true supreme discipline.