What exactly does Growth Hacking mean? It is a complex marketing technique, which requires creativity, a touch of analytical thinking and web and social media metrics to sell a product. In reality, and simplifying it as much as possible, it is a set of marketing techniques based on advertising and hype about a product with a low budget. In many cases, growth hackers are known as positioning strategists, but they must also bring a great deal of creativity to the table. It is a figure practically consolidated in start-ups, since they are companies that must launch a new product with a low or null advertising budget. The father of this magic potion lives in California and his name is Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of Growthhackers and early marketer of Dropbox. He first used the term in 2010.
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A growth hacker must have a very specific profile, having to fulfill the following skills:
Must be flexible and open to new ideas/trends.
It must be creative.
Addicted to metrics.
Your objective should always be focused on growth.
Actually, there are many start-ups that, convinced of this fantastic mix or magic potion, use this type of profiles to increase their sales and improve their online positioning. Experts and experts in Social Media, UX, Product Management, Deliberaty, A/B Testing…
To understand exactly what Growth Hacking is, we are going to give you the example of two exemplary companies in the use of this strategy: Twitter and Dropbox.
Twitter chose not to advertise and to focus on its own platform. In each of the existing profiles he set up a space with recommended users so that people could follow other users and thus increase the activity on his website. It’s like traditional word of mouth but online. Much easier and faster. Twitter managed to grow exponentially with almost no external marketing. Brilliant idea!
For its part, Dropbox, possibly under the leadership of the father of Growth Hacking, began offering an additional 125 MB of storage to users who followed its profile on Twitter or Facebook.
These are ideas that, today, may seem obvious to us… But being the first to have them is not easy. As always, we advise you to consult experts in the field because, what seems simple, has its intricacies. Things don’t just happen.
