Growth Hacking
Growth hacking refers to marketing tactics that generally use social metrics, analytics, and other metric based approaches for making marketing decisions. Growth hacking often involves low cost, innovative approaches to marketing. Growth hacking is a mindset in the sense that there isn’t a specific set of well accepted growth hacking tactics. In general, it describes a willingness to explore measurable, low-cost alternative approaches to marketing. Sustainable growth hacking requires that the hacker be willing to adapt based on quantitative feedback. Generally, growth hackers approach marketing in terms of specific goals as opposed to a general marketing mix. The approach is less concerted than traditional marketing with a focus on achieving specific objectives. There is a disregard for traditional marketing tactics that do not provide any kind of measurable outcome.
The major consideration in growth hacking is being able to make quick assessments in determining the most efficient ways to achieve rapid growth, including a willingness to work along the edge of black hat and white hat marketing tactics.
Growth hacking relies on tricks, social engineering, or hacks to increase mindshare in social media. They typically use some kind of quantitative metric to evaluate the effectiveness of the hack. Growth hacking usually seeks to create rapid growth through taking advantage of opportunistic conditions rather than focusing on repeatable and scalable marketing tactics.
By Jack Johnston, MA TESOL, MBA, MSML