I attended a talk organized by Institution of Engineers Singapore (IES) and the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) that featured the founders of Pirate3D talking about their successfully KickStarter campaign where they raised $1.4m. The talk covered many areas about entrepreneurship and growing a startup (they are now 25 people strong). One interesting area they touched upon was what they decided to invest in and who was their first hire. Except for their professor, the other founders were all engineering fresh grads and their first employee was a “growth hacker”. It is the first time I heard the phrase used locally and in the form of a job role – “we went out and got a growth hacker”.
Growth hacking is a term used especially in startups to refer to marketing techniques that use analytics, data and metrics to deliver growth (in users, visitors, subscribers, revenue etc) in a startup environment where marketing budget is severely limited, make that non-existent. It is also often associated with tweaking the user experience, software or product in response to user data or even designing products to deliberately turn product usage into user growth. Andrew Chen has a well known blog post that describes growth hacking and the well cited example of Airbnb cross posting into Craiglist
While growth hacking is often referred to as something new and innovative, it is really about going back to the basics.
Criticism of the state of online marketing
Growth hacking is often distinguished against “traditional” online marketing for its lean execution, focused on data and analytics and its creative use of available online tools. It does say something about the coming of age of online marketing that we can now add a word like “traditional” to it and scores of millenials all nod their head in agreement. When I first switched into a “marketing” role, traditional marketing was anything that was not online.
The growing popularity of the term is in many ways a critique of the state of online marketing. Rightly or wrongly, “traditional” online marketing has become associated with big budgets (I know, its all relative) and inward looking metrics that are understood by digital marketing professionals but have the rest of the organization scratching their heads and wondering “so what”? In the chase for parity to get our fair shake as customers spend an increasing amount of time online, one of the common measurement is what the % share of the marketing budget is digital. One online marketer I spoke to recently when asked what will help her make a bigger impact to her business responded without a single second of hesitation: more money. At a recent media conference, I had an interesting conversations at the sidelines with a search marketer. When I followed his train of conversation and asked him why he kept broadening his campaign as it seems to be moving further from his original target segment, his completely earnest response was there wasn’t enough search volume – if he didn’t broaden, he couldnt finish spending his budget.
A share of the marketing budget that reflects the migration of customer attention to online channels is seen as a measurement of digital getting the respect it deserves. In an earlier day of digital marketing, digital differentiated itself from traditional marketing with its accountability and measurability and scoffed at measurements such as GRPs . Successful examples of growth hacking are in many ways going back to being accountable and measurable in a meaningful way. Bigger budgets don’t necessarily get you better marketing. The “innovation” in growth hacking is really about going back to the basics – understanding your channels, analyzing available data, strategizing, being agile, responsive and smart.
In all fairness, the pace of change in digital and by extension in digital marketing is not for the fainthearted. The explosion of data, ecosystem and technical capabilities in marketing is a particular affliction in digital. What is the right way to do things and the right things to measure are constantly changing.
Get back in touch with our inner techie
Growth hackers are also often referred to as people who are both marketers and coders, having the engineering knowledge to be able to design or influence product development to build support for growth into the product itself.
As the digital marketing industry grew with the expansion of digital, convergence with mobile and rise of social networks, the number of people who are online marketers grew. It is now very common to find digital marketing professionals with many years in digital often with deep experience in a particular silo and very little understanding of the underlying technologies that power their digital marketing. In recent years, I have interviewed digital marketers who do not understand domain names translate into a string of numbers, don’t understand the separation of presentation layer and content or dont know what is an API. And they don’t think they need to care.
I recently spoke to a VP of Marketing for an FMCG company who shared this observation. He expressed his frustration in trying to find a digital marketing person who also understands the internet technology and so can lead the digital transformation efforts in his company and be a substantive counterpart to IT that will deliver the infrastructure to power his digital ambitions. He wanted a marketing outcome but he needed a digital marketer who understood technology to deliver that.
To me, growth hacking references another time in digital marketing where digital marketers were seen as fairly techie, straddling an area between marketing and technology. We spoke a different language and didn’t sound like marketers at all. There is a lot of technology in digital. Without some appreciation of what goes under the hood, it is harder for a digital marketer today to imagine/reimagine what is possible and to say I know this can be done and discuss how we can do it. Too many digital marketers have not bothered to look under the hood as tools made it almost unnecessary to ever have to see anything that looks remotely like a string of code. I don’t actually think everyone needs to literally know how to code but they need to care if only so they can understand what is possible.
Though the term really originate from the recent startup scene, the characteristics that define growth hacking – creativity, innovation, risk taking, deep understanding of, ability and willingness to harness technology were what defined smart digital marketing or simply, smart marketing (isnt everything digital these days?)
Whether you work at a startup or an established company, you should get back in touch with your inner techie self. You will make better use of all the available online tools at your disposal, you will become an even better marketer and you will generate better ideas – hacks, then you did before.
My favourite “growth hack” is WeChat and its New Year Red Envelope campaign to drive adoption of its mobile payment app. This innovative and wildly successful campaign was widely reported but I didn’t see any reference to it as a growth hack. It was simply recognized for what a growth hack is: brilliant marketing.
Digital Optimist 