Having a great idea for a startup is no guarantee you’ll succeed. Neither is being a talented, hard-working entrepreneur. Without a solid understanding of marketing, you won’t be able to get the word out about your business. It’s not easy to serve customers if they don’t know you exist.
That’s why all startup founders should familiarize themselves with growth hacking marketing.
What is growth hacking marketing? The following information will help you better understand the topic, and how you can use it to your benefit.
What is Growth Hacking Marketing?
Don’t make the mistake of dismissing growth hacking marketing as just another in a long line of buzzwords. When put to use, this approach to marketing can provide startups with substantial value.
The basic idea is to adopt a growth-centric mindset. Too often, marketers spend so much time focusing on various metrics that they make the process of promoting a startup too complicated. Growth hacking marketing simplifies the process by giving you one major goal to strive towards. If the company is growing, you’re on the right track. Of course, understanding this topic is easier if you consider major examples.
What You Can Learn from Dropbox
It’s no secret that Dropbox offers a very useful product. Despite this, the company wasn’t always growing as quickly as expected.
That’s because Dropbox’s marketing strategy relied on traditional methods. While some marketers may believe they need to improve the quality of their ads if they learned traditional ads weren’t delivering results, a growth hacker would consider other ways of attracting users.
That’s exactly what happened at Dropbox. When the company unveiled a “Refer a Friend” feature, the result was a 60% increase in sign-ups. Instead of trying to improve their approach using methods that simply weren’t working, Dropbox’s marketers identified a new way to reach potential users.
What to Focus On
It’s important to remember that growth hacking marketing is unique when compared to other approaches to marketing because it doesn’t ask startups to rely on specific tools or metrics in order to implement it successfully. Again, it’s all about shifting your mindset.
That said, you do need to make sure you’re focusing on the right factors in order to truly be a strong growth hacker. Those factors are the growth of your customer base, the growth of your profits, and the growth of your market share.
Let’s return to the Dropbox example. When the referral program was introduced, Dropbox attracted significantly more customers than it otherwise would have. This in turn yielded higher profits. Additionally, because few customers need more than one cloud-based storage service, it almost certainly had a positive impact on Dropbox’s market share.
These are factors you need to consider when growing a startup. You don’t want to waste your money and time on marketing techniques that aren’t yielding a strong return-on-investment. That’s a key reason to shift your focus to a growth hacking marketing mindset. When your main goal is to find ways to boost growth, you’ll be more likely to use your budget effectively.
