There was a time when television and magazines ruled our information consumption, and marketing meant advertising campaigns. This glorious past was the Mad Men era when Madison Avenue housed great advertising agencies.

Now marketing means an entire suite of activities based on product/market fit and customer engagement. It’s no longer about manufacturing desire for a fait accompli product. Customer needs and feedback are baked into the product, and the customer experience is integrated into the company.

Growth Hacking is about customer participation in the marketing process and turbocharging awareness campaigns by creating viral products and content.

Growth Hacking resides at the intersection of Marketing, Engineering, and Programming. It takes advantage of all the new tools of websites, mobile, analytics, email, and social media available to us that help us reach and communicate with customers and measure their behavior to provide the best user experience possible. It has gone from one-way advertising to two-way engagement.

Growth Hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels, like email and social media, and product development focused on enhancing the user experience. The goal is to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business by understanding what is most compelling to customers in messaging and product feature sets.

Growth Hacking refers to a set of marketing experiments that leads to the rapid growth of a business. The tests use A/B testing features and messaging and measure which aspects customers respond to best. Measurement tools like Google Analytics provide the measurement metrics and feedback that help refine awareness campaigns and product features.

Calls-to-Action activates lead generation and sales.

It’s about how you get, keep, and grow customers. The first stage is Customer Acquisition, where we activate customers to do something through Calls-to-Action.

Calls-to-Action activates lead generation and sales. Initially, it could be a sign-up or download of valuable content that ultimately led to becoming a paying customer.

Marketing funnels are developed to measure how many people respond and then convert to being customers.

Next, we want to keep them and not lose them to competitors. Then we want to grow them by giving them compelling reasons to spend more or use more of what we offer.

Marketing funnels are developed to measure how many people respond and then convert to being customers. This process is obsessively measured and continually refined and optimized.

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are calculated and compared to the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer. We are looking to optimize CAC<LTV. Conversion Rates are tracked and optimized along the customer journey.

Growth Hacking includes engaging with customers by delivering content like blogs, digital downloads, and social media posts. Viral Marketing is a method where customers are encouraged to share information about products or services via various Internet channels, especially social media.

Growth hacking was born from the challenges of startups.

Traditional marketing has a comprehensive focus, and while that skill set is critical in an established enterprise, it is not relevant early in a startup.

In a new startup, you don’t need someone to build and manage a marketing team or establish a strategic marketing plan or any other thing that marketers do. A startup needs growth.

A growth hacker has different objectives from a marketer.

Every move a growth hacker makes is informed and driven by growth. The focus of every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative are growing the user base and customers.

A growth hacker’s sole focus is growth.

Traditional marketers care about growth, but not to the same single-minded extent. A growth hacker’s effectiveness is their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring everything else, they achieve the one task that matters most early on in a startup.

This focus on growth has given rise to several methods, tools, and best practices, that didn’t exist in the traditional marketing repertoire.

Traditional marketers understand traditional products and advertising channels. The Internet has transformed products, services, and advertising channels.

Products used to be physical. Now they are also invisible bits and bytes in the form of software products and digital downloads and streaming services. Products used to be only things like cars, clothes, books, and candy. Now Facebook is a product. Online accounting software is a product. Something you can’t hold is now products and services.

This transition is responsible for the new age of growth hackers. The Internet has given the world new kinds of products and services, which demand a new type of thinking about marketing.

Now, a product can be instrumental in its adoption through the exponential power of networking effects. A product like Snapchat allows you to share their product with other friends to make your own experience on their platform better. Toothpaste can’t do that. A product like Dropbox can give you free cloud storage if you get a friend to sign up. Washing machines don’t do that.

To fully grasp growth hacking, you need to come to grips with this new classification of products, services, and advertising that the Internet has produced.

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