Growth Hacking: 4 Simple Tactics To Get In The Game

Growth Hacking: 4 Simple Tactics To Get In The Game

The term growth hacking was initially used by entrepreneur and angel investor Sean Ellis back in 2010, when he was hiring for his replacement. While he received many qualified marketing resumes, he felt one key area was missing from potential candidates: growth.

He then added the phrase “growth hacker” in his advertisement instead of “marketing” to explain the profile he’s looking for. The phrase has since been broadly used in the technology startup world and it’s perceived as a new phenomenon to promote and sell products.

Deploying Deep Discipline
The basic ingredients of growth hacking are based on a set of strong disciplines that uses testing and analysis to scale not just marketing promotion, but also product development. Companies like Twitter TWTR +2.49%, Facebook,  Airbnb, YouTube, and LinkedIn LNKD -0.23% owe much of their success to hacking strategies. LinkedIn, for instance, grew from two million to more than 200 million users by simply implementing a growth hacking technique that allowed user profiles to show up in search engine results.  What a phenomenal success!
Growth hacking is not limited to just small companies or start-ups as there are certain characteristics businesses can adopt to create growth.  At SAP, the success of our cloud customers often comes from the simple desire to test, optimize and improve. Here are four, simple traits we recognized from them:

1. • Adopt growth hacker mindset of continuous testing and improvement
2. • Make your ideas shareable, accessible and addicting for users.
3. • Push the boundaries and find ingenious technology based avenues for growth (think of the possibilities between people, machine and channels).
4. • Drive creativity and sustainability. Growth hackers do not see the disciplines as temporary. The techniques are addictive and continuous.

If growth hacking can work without resources, imagine what it can accomplish with resources.  I believe the key to sustainable growth and innovation is to cultivate creativity by allowing people to experiment and learn via the aforementioned growth hacking disciplines. People need to believe in transformative power of their imagination and the imagination of others.  Isn’t that how creativity is born?