What is a growth hacker?

Wait, if growth hacking is a legitimate term, what is a growth hacker? Well, a growth hacker is better known as “a person whose true north is growth”, a term first coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, a famous marketing specialist. He wrote about growth hacking in various blog posts, but focused his attention on a growth hacker. A growth hacker is basically someone with discipline, experience, and willpower when it comes to prioritizing and testing any marketing idea that comes along. After the testing part, the growth hacker takes his time on data analysis to successfully interpret the final results and make the best marketing tactic to scale further.

Growth hacking is the process where digital marketers do the exact same thing as mentioned above: research, test, interpret, and scale every possible marketing channel to skyrocket a product, business, or individual into the engines. thus creating a strong link between growth hacking and search engine marketing. People who live by these marketing tactics often work together in teams and, along with social media managers, PPC managers, and copywriters, make results happen!

But truth be told, almost everyone needs to be a growth hacker in their own area of ​​expertise. It has become vital to be able and willing to test your work to see if it will attract a lot of attention. It’s pretty conventional that if you’re not a growth hacker in today’s world, you can’t consider yourself a good salesperson at all. Period.

Startups are the ones who trust growth hackers the most, because they believe in their ability to scale them so much that they will outperform almost all their competitors in a couple of weeks. But that’s not always the case, unfortunately. It takes an incredible amount of time to fully verify every marketing channel, create every possible email template to reach out to public media outlets, design that landing page just right so that the bounce rate drops to a percentage more decent and optimize each unique page for indexing, which is what search engines specialize in.

Growth hacking is considered as the intersection between marketing and technology, because all the tests mentioned above can be repeated with A/B testing, which is something marketers do together with developers. A/B testing helps a lot when it comes to continuous improvement. Marketers run these tests for as long as those tests lead them to that “Aha!” moment. Those moments always lead to rapid customer growth, increases in visits and decreases in bounce rate, and much more of those benefits that all marketers seek throughout their careers.

But there’s a lot more to it than just coming up with crazy good marketing tactics – we mention data analysis as one of the final steps in this (almost) never-ending cycle. Data analytics is crucial to knowing when and how to apply and track acquisition, engagement, retention, and referral, which are some of the most important points to track in a visitor’s lifecycle. For some, the most important points may be the CTR of all those Google AdWords campaigns, or the average percentage of people who responded to your Facebook posts during the previous week.

The people responsible for tracking and measuring data should help you figure out what the key statistics are for each of your A/B tests, so you can see improvements along the way.

As mentioned above, growth hacking is a process that is almost endless, mainly because it keeps iterating over and over again.