Growth hacking is a new field in digital marketing. This field developed out of a need for startups to get rapid growth with small budgets. Growth hacking’s main strategy is to get as many customers as possible in the shortest time period and in the process build brand awareness.

Imagine a team comprising of:

• Digital Marketing strategist,
• Social Marketing specialists,
• Content writer,
• Product specialist,
• Web developer.

Working together day in and day out looking for ways to launch your product or service, I bet they would find innovative alternatives to costly traditional marketing like TV, Newspapers and mainstream media.

• The Strategist will keep the team on track,
• The Social Media specialist will find groups, influencers and ways to blast your message to millions,
• The Content writer will develop mouth-watering content in line with the buyer’s taste,
• The Product specialist will ensure that the team understand the product and its uses,
• The Web developer will ensure that the web presence is optimal, driving SEO, building internal links, linking Social Media with the website, etc.

Case Study – Growth Hacking

I was leading a team of “growth hackers” that was tasked to launch a very well respected company selling South Africa products in the US. Well, in the first place there is a huge difference in market size. In South Africa, their potential clientele was around half a million – in the US it was estimated at 50 million!

The next challenge was that their products could not be marketed with any Google or Social Media adverts, because they were considered to be dangerous. Yet another challenge we faced was the fact that if we were successful, they might not have enough stock to supply the demand, but they were working on that problem

The brief to my team every morning was to find a gap in the market to get the company top Google Search listings and brand awareness. We, a team of 6 people, searched for the answer for almost 2 months. Then we found the gap and we used all our efforts to gain an entry point into the US market. It took another 4 months, but we were successful and penetrated the market with top Google Search listings and growing brand awareness.

Who can benefit from growth hacking?

Growth hacking is not for all companies and very few companies can dedicate such a comprehensive team just to focus on a product or service offering’s growth. Anyhow, if they did their job well, with the necessary brand awareness and market share growth, the product or service should be successful.

In my opinion, growth hacking is a very good strategy to launch a start-up or to rocket launch a product or service into the market. A longer-term sustainable Digital Marketing strategy is necessary after the initial growth hacking phase to ensure long term success.