Growth Hacking Guide : Step by Step Process

Growth Hacking is a popular word among start-up companies. For those who are not familiar with the growth hacking, by definition is activities to achieve massive growth, in a short time, with a low budget.

It sounds impossible, isn't it?

Actually it doesn't. There are some companies that have tremendous growth by using growth hacking technique.

One of the examples is Facebook

Even though growth hacking has only been around a few past years, but it's already in the spotlight. There are many companies range from start up to corporate are trying to replicate this technique.

The reason is very clear. They would like to acquire users and dollars in very ridiculous fast.

In this article, I would like to share my knowledge and experience in conducting Growth Hacking and give some practical tips. But please bear in mind that nothing is a golden bullet. You've to make an experiment with your business, to know where your growth leverage coming from.

I'll divide the article into several sections to make it easier to follow through

OVERVIEW

Some miss conception about growth hacking is a marketing process. It's not totally wrong, but growth hacking itself is not only marketing process. It requires combination of Marketing, Data Analysis, Product Development (Programming) and Business Partnership.

Why? To optimize user acquisition to retention process it requires multi-discipline. If usually, the pure marketing process relies more on creativity, while growth hacking is combining creativity and logic as part of its process.

If the pure marketer focuses on budget, expense, and conversion while the growth hacker focuses on the growth as His/Her primary goals. Growth hacker often have to use analytical, inexpensive, creative, and innovative methods to exponentially grow their company’s customer base

Growth hacking really needs data as its optimization process and the data should be real-time. That's why many growth hackers are someone who are data-savvy, and have extreme analytical skills. Analytics is the blood that flows through the veins of a growth hacker. Almost everything they do has an element of analytics either in the foreground or the background. Without analytics, a growth hacker feels embarrassed.

Growth hacking also process needs some programming, but it doesn't have to be to growth hacker itself. Some of growth hacking processes also require business partners as part of its distribution model development.

Now I'll share step by step of growth hacking process below

Step 1 : Find a scalable product fits

The product can be said fits if it can help solve people's problems. Of course, we can't solve every problem that people have, but we need to identify some of the biggest challenges that most people/companies had. The product itself must be a scalable product that is having a wide potential customer base.

If you targeted a very niche market e.g Super Sports Car or Super luxury car, of course, you don't need a growth hacking process.

You also have to ensure that the products it self is having a good quality. If you have a bad product, you will never know how the bad messages is fastly spread in this era.

There are many examples in the past, how bad products or services experience is spreading very quickly and unstoppable especially in social media. It will create a massive PR impact on the companies.

But please keep in mind that the product doesn't have to be perfect at the first time. The most important things is keep listening to the feedback and keep improving based on user experience.

One of the best examples of products that are listening to the feedback is Instagram.

Instagram has insane growth during last past years. If you may have read the story of Instagram, at the beginning doesn't aim as photo-sharing platform. But along with the time and listening to the user, they know that most of them are using the photo-sharing function whereas it's not their main features at that moment.

Having research and dig more information with their user, they finally can produce an app that meets their user needs an easy to use photo-sharing platform.

Step 2 : Target The Right Person

You may realize that you have an excellent product, and there's some confidence to introduce your product to as much as people possible since in the beginning. Well, nothing wrong with that confidence. But I'll suggest, have a deeper insight to identify who are the person can benefits more with your product. It may not be everyone.

Growth hacking process is really focused on the small group of audiences who can be your brand advocates and really engage to your product as you have provide perfect solution to their problem.

The graph below represents precisely why it's important

To reach the majority of people, your product must first successfully pass through innovators and early adopters. If your target customer is “everyone,” there’s no way to growth hack through that first 15% because you don’t even know who to convince to buy.

Then how to reach those 15% of people who may benefits the most of your product? You need to have a customer profile or some other say it as a buyer persona. A good buyer persona should be able to tell you any detail information required to support your growth hacking process. Some of a good example of buyer persona may consist of their demography, interest, pain points, as well as their buying behavior

By understanding the persona of your main 15% target audiences, you can start to focus the effort to reach and satisfy them with your product. If you can satisfy the 15% of your target audiences, there's a high chance they will share their experience with their colleagues and the positive word start to spread out very fast. To encourage the 15% of your target audiences to share their experience, you may offer a valuable incentive to them. One of the good example is Dropbox. They offer more storage to their active user each time they invite their colleagues to use Dropbox services.

One of the other examples in the importance of making a buyer persona is based on my experience as Growth Lead in Kalibrr. My first week in Kalibrr is focused on understanding my customer profile aside getting to know my team. I realize that without knowing their profile and behavior, it's really difficult to win their heart. By conducting research with target respondent of 400 people, i can figure out what challenges they face, how they would like to be reached, how is their online presence and also what factors will contribute to their decision in making a purchase. Using this valuable information, I can develop growth hacking process that really fits their needs and interest.

Step 3 : Understanding Growth Funnel Process

Growth hacking process requires a funnel. Without understanding the funnel, it's very difficult to determine the priorities of your growth hacking process.

The common funnel stages outlined included:

• Acquisition: How you get people to know you by name.
• Activation: How to give users a happy first experience.
• Retention: How you keep them coming back for more.
• Revenue: How you monetize them.
• Referral: How you get them to tell other people.

The first stage at the top of the funnel is acquisition.

This measures exactly what it sounds like. You can use some tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, Ahrefs or some others to get an estimate of your reach.

How many people are you exposing to your messaging? Here, you’re looking at the performance of paid advertising, PR, SEO, and more. Usually, it consumes the most budget if not manage properly and if you don't have any innovative idea.

For example, if you spend money on Facebook Ads but all of those visitors bounce immediately, it was unqualified traffic. There's an indication of you might be targeting the wrong people.

The second step is Activation.

It is measuring the number of people who have really interest in your products, apps, or content. Sometimes it can be measured by the number of people are opt-in but it also can be measured by the quality visits. Using several tools, you can figure out how is their behavior after visiting your website. Are they bounce immediately, or go to specific pages. It might give you an idea of how to optimize your website to increase the sign-up.

Once you can get them to sign up and activate your product, the next challenge is to retain them.

Based on the data published by Quettra, we can see that the average app loses 77% of its DAUs within the first 3 days after the install. Within 30 days, it’s lost 90% of DAUs. Within 90 days, it’s over 95%. Stunning. The other way to say this is that the average app mostly loses its entire userbase within a few months. You lost 90% of your user based in the 30 days without any opportunity to monetize them.

Getting a customer base just to lost them is really hurting the business. That’s why retention is so important. You spend money on ads or creating an awesome first experience, you lose them before you can make any money from them.

Once you can retain your customer, the next step is to think about how to monetize them into real Revenue. It's nonsense having many active users without having any idea of monetization. Some of the popular concepts in monetizing user is using the freemium concept. Where the user can use the product with limited functionality for free, but if they would like to have full experience to have to pay some money.

Turn your paying and non-paying as your brand advocates and referral can reduce your investment on the acquisition process dramatically. You may use tools like NPS to measure how likely they would like to recommend your product to their colleagues.

Now let's get deeper on optimizing each funnel process and share my real experience as Growth Lead in Kalibrr.

Step 4 : Optimize the acquisition process

The acquisition process is the main challenge of growth hacker usually face. Given a small amount of budget, they have to think creatively and innovatively to get as much as traffic and brand exposure possible. There are 3 main source of growth in the acquisition process

Viral

This step is aiming for bigger and larger audiences. In my experience leading Kalibrr's growth hacking process, i utilize Linkedin a lot to reach out potential audiences (this information I got from buyer persona mentioned earlier). To make a viral content, we engage to HR influencers. Using their insight and our solution, several times we able to produce valuable content that has more than 100,000 views in just less than one week.

Some other examples are Apple with their Ipod campaign. By making their headphones white, Apple made sure that everyone would recognize them. Headphones were usually black, so by only changing the small features, they turned all of their customers into walking advertisements.

The other example are Wordpress. Wordpress was used by more than 29% of all websites, and it's free. But the free version has a mark. Your domain will always show up as yourdomain.wordpress.com. Everyone who visits your free WordPress blog will instantly know that it’s a WordPress website.

Youtube also provide a great viral strategy with their products. Have you ever tried to share a youtube videos in your blogs, Ads, and Whats app? Youtube make embedding videos very easy. Using the specific code they had created, user just need to hold Ctrl Key + C and that's all.

Spotify also had a great job when making their apps going viral. Their integration with Instagram was an excellent idea. People can directly post what they listen to in their Instagram stories and if their friends are interested to listen, they make it super easy just by a single click.

Have you got some ideas to make your apps going viral?

Sticky

To make people remember about your brand, you need to offer something that are sticky and memorable. In Kalibrr, as the recruiter is our target customer I realize that there's only very few good literature or article in Bahasa that discussing the recruitment process. How to help the recruiter to perform their job better. It's more on the recruiter's point of view.

Based on those facts, then We invest heavily in content marketing to develop high quality and valuable content in many formats include E-Book, Blog, Social Media post. We share all the content for free. Basically we would like to be in the top of mind when people talk about recruitment, they will refer to Kalibrr. Because to have consumed our content, and get benefit from it.

Using that approach and with help of digital ads especially in Linkedin, we can reach out to many targeted potential clients. Our content has become famous among recruiters and they don't hesitate to share our content to their colleagues.

Paid

We can't deny that a paid scheme is also crucial to the Kalibrr Growth in the past years. But the most important about paid channels especially digital ads is the optimization process. As we don't have much budget to spend on the ads, then what I trying to do is to make the review span shorter.

The idea basically is to notice when the ads start performing worse than our expectation and we need to do some intervention. At least one per day I check the performance of the ad to see if it is still performing well or not.

If you can see one of our campaign results was much better than the other Linkedin sponsored content best benchmark as mentioned in here https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-analyze-linkedin-ad-performance/

Aside from the digital ads, some other paid channels we utilize are vouchers give away. We buy some of MAP vouchers as an incentive for our targeted potential clients to do some given actions such as filling out the survey form or re-share their most favorite content from Kalibrr. Utilizing this paid channels and keep them optimized are some of the growth fuel you have to try.

Step 5 : Optimize the activation process

In this step the job of growth hacker is to ensure to convert the web visitor into subscriber or apps downloader or start using your online apps. One of the most important things to do with it is to optimize your landing page and sign up form.

It's useless if you can drive tons of traffics into your website, but only a few of them are convert into subscribers or join as members.

You can simply increase the conversion rate of your activation is by integrating it with other popular apps such as Google, Linkedin, FB, IG, or some other platform. By providing integration, people are less likely to bounce as they have very convenient way to sign up or subscribe just by single click.

But in case integration is not a feasible option at this moment, your best way to engage your visitor to your products is using the landing page. Landing page is simply a one page (dedicated) that have main objectives to convert a visitor into a subscriber. There are some guide lines to follow on making great landing pages

• Use high quality and attractive picture to engage your audience
• Use simple but effective sign-up form
• As simple as possible, remove unnecessary navigation
• Clear CTA Button
• Optimize the layout both for mobile and desktop
• Landing page from Netflix below is one of my favorites

In Kalibrr, to optimize the acquisition process We use a dedicated landing page using a platform named Lead Pages. The lead pages can be integrated into our CRM system to make easier lead onboarding to our system. Monitoring the landing page conversion is really important to ensure our acquisition funnel run in optimum performance. Usually, we monitor the landing page performance at least on weekly basis.

Step 6 : Maintain your user Retention process

As i have mentioned earlier, user churn are the most nightmare that business face. Not only in start up but almost in many companies. The user usually churn if they don't feel engaged with the brand or the apps.

To keep the user engaged is particularly important especially to convert them into paying customers. According to the research by Zoominfo, consumers are would rather to connect with brands and business if they can see them across different channels. That's very important to keep them engaged in various channel they're presence.

Some of multichannel marketing to keep them engaged are using combination of re-marketing Ads and email campaign. Think about what Facebook does.

• If you don’t log in for a few days, what happens next?
• They email you with information about what you’re missing out on.
• This friend is doing that. Your sibling went to this new place.
• and some other information that may put your interest to bring you back to their app.

Combining this email campaign with remarketing is very powerful way to bring back your passive user into an active one.

In Kalibrr we also use a similar approach. But instead of doing multi-channel, we would like to call our retention strategy as Lead Nurturing Campaign. Our lead nurturing campaign was set based on the average sales cycle. Then we try to figure out what campaign we need to deliver each week/2 weeks considering the interest and the buying stage of each customer. We also use the email list we had as remarketing purposes.

Our lead nurturing campaign was a great success, and they contribute around 20% of Kalibrr's Growth. Social media was the biggest source of growth that contributes more than 50% of Kalibrr's Growth.

Step 7 : Monetize your user

There are many ways to monetize your user. Offering freemium model, or do cross-sale or up-sale, in apps purchase or maybe you charge certain number of commission fees each time they make transaction using your apps. The monetization model depends on your business.

In Kalibrr, we monetize the user using a subscription model. They will be charged certain amount of money for some period of subscription. During their subscription period, we also encourage the user to use another add on feature that can bring greater experience to our products only with the addition of small amount of money.

Whatever the business model you're making, it's very important that you can maintain a good ratio of CAC : LTV. What does the CAC and LTV stand for? The CAC is Customer Acquistion Cost. These numbers will provide a figure of how many $ in average you have spent for each acquisition. While the LTV is the number of average revenue you can generate from each user before they finally churn.

If your CAC : LTV ratio is too small it means that your business is not profitable. You need to figure out the root cause either you not making enough money or you cost too much in acquiring one customer. But in the other hand if your CAC : LTV ratio is too high, it means that you don't invest enough money to support the growth hacking process.

According to some expert opinion, the ideal CAC : LTV ratio should be around 1:2 to 1:4. The Growth Hacker, should have a deep understanding on how to optimize and monitor this ratio properly.

Step 8 : Turn your happy customer into advocate

A referral is an integral part of the growth hacking process. Based on the research published by hubspot in 2016, they ask a question to their respondent "Who do you consider to be trustworthy".

The result was surprising. Only 3% of the respondent says that they believe in the marketer and salesperson. These facts will make the growth hacking process harder since it uses a combination of some marketing techniques.

But fortunately there is still a big opportunity to growth hack this. According to the research made by Nielsen, 92% of people will believe in the recommendation they get from the people the know.

There are some other stats you may consider to understand why referral is really the key for future business

That's why it's very important to turn your happy customer into your brand advocates. The easiest way to measure it is by using Net Promoter Score. All you have to do is ask people one simple question to gauge your product:

How likely are you to refer this [product/company] to a friend or colleague?

You give them a simple scale of ten to fill up.

Then you need to design specific referral program especially for those who are your promotors. Ensure that the referral program also can increase their loyalty to your brand.

In Kalibrr, we design a program called Share Your Experience. We design the flow process as well as the incentive scheme.

We also develop the communication materials, as well as a specific landing page and apps to make it easier for them to refer Kalibrr services to their colleagues. They also can monitor the status of their referral using the apps that we have developed.

There are many other ideas for the referral program. What you have to do is just be creative and start work on it. There's no need to wait for the perfect program.

Step 9 : Continuously Improved

You must keep iterate on your growth hacking process. Growth hacking is not sprints but instead, it's a marathon process. Once you stop iterate and improving your growth hacking process, you'll see that the decline is much faster than the growth you have made.

A true growth hacker is never satisfied with the result they have achieved. They always would like to achieve much bigger achievements. So, don’t just take a “one and done” approach to growth hacking. What comes after the growth is just as important if you want to create a sustainable business.

Conclusion

To start a growth hacking process, the first thing to do is put off your impossible mindset. Growth hacking isn't a strategy. It's a mindset. If you don't have a growth mindset, and always see the impossibilities over the possibilities, never dreaming of the great result I've shared earlier.

I hope this growth hacking guide helped you to acquire it. I want you to start thinking like I do and like other growth hackers do. Let this guide be your starting point.

Here are the step again you can have a look

• Find scalable products fits
• Target the right customer
• Understanding Growth Funnel Process
• Maximize your acquisition process
• Optimize activation
• Maintain your user and keep them engaged
• Monetize it
• Turn your happy customers into advocates

Where are you at the growth hacking step? Let me know by dropping comments and we can discuss how to make it easier to you.

Happy Growth Hacking!

Author : Handito Aji Saroso