If you are well familiar with the latest trends and buzzwords in marketing, you have surely met growth hacking. So let's understand "what is exactly meant for growth hacking”?

Growth hacking is the mechanism of rapidly experimenting with different marketing trends with the aim of quickly figuring out the best way to serve the targeted audiences and customer base. It has no rules instead it's a process of making rules for your business with the help of experimentation.

How is Growth Hacking different from Traditional Hacking?

Traditional hacking refers to any kind of promotional activities, paid advertisement or running campaigns online that has a proven success rate in engaging customers. Whereas growth hacking aims at encouraging more people at no cost for marketing any product or service because it relies on tactics rather than anything. It has eliminated the need for money to spend on paid search and tools. The only thing required is -- a creative mindset and innovative methods as the key tools to scale business growth.

Why is it important to hack your growth?

Not every entrepreneur has enough amount of budget to invest in marketing tools and paid advertising or search. Growth hacking has taken place of money by providing strategies and tactics, designed to be results-oriented using any means to achieve it.

What are the other important benefits of Growth Hacking?

Data

Data is the foundation for any business organisation to draw the decisions. Today, all businesses need data either to examine customer engagement or monitoring web traffic. You have to observe the data metrics every single day before you drive any conclusion.

For instance: your target audience doesn’t spend much time on Linkedin rather than you find the good engagement on Facebook. In this way, you can shift your social media preference to Facebook or some other platform.

Also, data gives you hard facts for decision-making but at the same time, it needs time for accumulation. Hence observe the insights for some time-- which type of content or infographics are getting engagement and what type of data you need to share more.

Agility and Speed

Agility and speed are two important concerns for the entrepreneurs who want to cover the market in their particular niches because agility creates velocity and prevents stagnant growth. So growth hacking allows you to quickly move to other profitable campaigns also because it doesn’t restrict your ability to opt for any other way if the planned one doesn’t work out.

Suppose, your advertising medium doesn’t resonate with the targeted audiences, you may suffer from a loss of thousands of dollars. Hence, you can switch to some different channel to hack your growth rather than spending money unnecessarily.

Market Disruption

Market disruption occurs when consumers experience a change in their choice preferences or in resolving problems through some better options available in the market. Basically, this market disruption is a company’s strategy of introducing a better way of doing usual things for its consumers.

A better example to show market disruption is the use of cabs for easy transportation unlike earlier when people use taxi or car services for going anywhere. Now Uber/Ola cab service facilities are available in everyone’s smartphones to book a ride within no time.

Now, millions of users have shifted their preferences towards the online booking of cabs through mobile apps instead of hiring cabs and spends a lot on it.

Fewer resources

Growth hackers are growth-focused, unafraid and agile in taking any sort of risk while operating in small teams with limited resources. They try to understand everything from start to finish of the growth cycle rather than considering just a few touch points. That's why growth hacks don't always need a whole team to perform the tasks rather it can also be a single person’s effort to execute the strategy correctly in the right direction.

We have observed few of the successful growth hacks which develops massive results for top tech organisations:

• DropBox – By promoting incentivised ‘refer-a-friend’ scheme.

• LinkedIn – By preferring one-click endorsements for existing connections on Linkedin.

• Twitter – With the pushing of automated notification emails on Twitter.

• YouTube – By making it easy for people to share YouTube videos on their own sites by providing embedded codes.

• Hotmail – By giving a link --‘Get your free email at Hotmail’ to the sign-up page so that it can add to user's signatures.

Thus, testing is to figure out -- what works well and what doesn’t. It is one of the main things in successful growth hacking process. Through a consistent hypothesising, testing and refining processes, a successful business growth can be easily hacked.