Once after it has been established, a startup company should only worry about initial growth. Some make the error of hiring marketers immediately the business is established and hence growing or scaling becomes dead on arrival.
A startup needs to identify it’s strong points in its chosen target market and use these data to create a lead and conversion plan. Once that has been achieved, the next recommendable step is to find a way of establishing a repeatable and scalable method for continual business growth.
This exposes the fact that while a business needs the expertise of a top-class marketer to achieve corporate goals, what it requires at the initial stages is growth – and this skill is possessed by a professional called a growth hacker.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking would be a combination of business engineering and market skills to help a company pick up the pace in its initial growth stage.
Since we are in an era where marketing decisions are made from the copious volumes of data available, hiring an expert that can both market your company and analyze the resulting data is priceless for the growth of the company.
Who Is A Growth Hacker?
A growth hacker is a professional whose only aim or job in business is to exercise the potency of scalable growth to make the company grow beyond the glass ceilings. His strength is in two fields – Marketing and Engineering.
Everything they do, every action made is geared at pushing for sustainable company growth.
If you were to pay attention only to the elements that make your company grow, it would be obvious that the only thing you need is a growth hacker and not a VP Marketer.
How Does Growth Hacking Work?
Theoretically, growth hacking is straightforward, however, things might begin to look a lot difficult when you begin to look at it from the practical angle.
For laymen or a company wishing to hire a growth hacker, growth hacking works by creatively combining and entrepreneurial drive and an obsession for company growth.
It has a way of making your creative solutions known to your target market and creating a desire or hunger for it.
There are improved and creative ways of achieving organizational growth and you need to find a growth hacker that can discover and implement these techniques to drive your business up north.
Growth hacking also means a growth hacker must find ways of acquiring, testing, and removal of ideas that focus only on the growth of the company. This means the idea might be from him or others in the company, and he has to properly analyze (test) these ideas to know which one is worth keeping or doing away with.
Once a growth hacker can reproduce or repeat this process quickly, the company is well on track for upward and sustainable growth.
How Does Growth Hacking Help Businesses?
A business only thrives if the customers are being satisfied or it meets a certain need. To constantly satisfy your customers, you need to keep in touch with their responses to your brand or product, their likes, dislikes, complaints, and turn the whole data into improved services. However, not everyone knows how to analyze these data and make any sense of it that is why there is a need to hire a growth hacker.
Growth hackers are especially important when the business is still in the budding state and you do not have all the money to splash on a VP Marketer.
What Are The Upsides Of Hiring A Growth Hacker?
When it comes to the growth of your business, there are no one-size-fits-all tactics. However, growth hacking techniques have been tested and trusted to be a powerful tool for driving company growth.
Therefore, every business needs to hire a growth hacker. For skeptics, they may need to understand the benefits of hiring a growth hacker for their business before buying into the idea. So we have outlined here some of the benefits of hiring one for your business:
- LOW COST – One of the biggest advantages of growth hackers over VP Marketers is the cost of hiring the former. Despite possessing a mix of engineering and marketing skills, growth hackers come for a relatively small fee and employ some serious creativity in their marketing techniques to cause business growth. It is important to hire a growth hacker from an agency rather than do it yourself because a professional will have the expertise turning your business needs and goals into an effective project via a series of planning. They can also help you understand newer ways of attracting buyers, and create metrics for measuring your business success. Any process that doesn’t help your business is easily struck out because growth hackers are constantly experimenting with the metrics.
- EXCELLENT PRODUCT MARKETING – Product marketing is one of the strategies for making your brand stand out. Growth hackers achieve this by expanding the user base and because product marketing is more effective in the short term, it can be repeated for the continual growth of your business.
Product marketing can be done with various strategies – allowing incentives on referrals to your site or using a sign-up system that is designed for invite-only guests. By this, anyone who gets to your product or site wouldn’t have gotten there by chance but on purpose. You can also design a system to make the user’s time on your site quite engaging and interesting, or you could go the way of email listing and affiliate marketing.
- CONTENT MARKETING – Another benefit of hiring a growth hacker for your startup is content marketing. Despite being cheap to acquire, content marketing is effective for creating awareness to the public about your product. However, one of the most effective ways of achieving content marketing is through blogging.
There are blogs covering a wide view of topics and written by several people, which makes your business (whatever it may be) blog-able.
You can either manufacture blog content on your own about your product or you may rely on other bloggers who acknowledge your services in their blog articles.
Email marketing is another form of blogging where growth hackers utilize social media or podcasts to reach out to your potential market.
EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING – As known to almost anyone, advertising is important to put a business out there for potential customers. Growth hackers use advertising as a means of growing business via running tv and social media ads. The good thing about advertising is that if it is done properly, the returns are always bound to be worth the cost.
Finding A Reliable Growth Hacker
It is one thing to know about the benefits of a growth hacker to your business, it is another thing to know where to get the best professionals in the business.
If you want to hire the best growth hacker, you may have to clear up your table or do some homework and discover what you really want as it will go a long way in helping the expert do his/her job.
Here is a list of some of the things you must put in place before hiring a growth hacker:
HAVE SPECIFIC GOALS – If you have a clear understanding of what you want in a growth hacker, it would help you in making a suitable choice and finding one who can get the job done.
You may also need to understand what keeps growth hackers and marketers apart. Even with your excellent marketing plan in place, your company cannot forfeit the need for a growth hacker because most of the marketing data would need to be interpreted to make sense of them. A marketer may not possess the skill to effectively analyze the volumes of data from their marketing activities and this is what a growth hacker specializes in.
GET THE BUDGET PREPARED – Hiring a growth hacker without the right budget is suicidal for your business. According to research, having a limited budget always hindered marketers’ ability to utilize available data. This isn’t just going t be the employee’s salary but the budget for purchasing the tools necessary for carrying out the growth hacker’s job.
When a growth hacker recommends a particular strategy, you need money to implement it and make it work. Although you might spend lots of money experimenting with the ideas of the growth hacker, in the long run, you are going to save more money before those ideas start paying off big time. so building a large company or office doesn’t necessarily have to begin with you burning thousands of dollars!
DECIDE WHAT YOUR COMPANY GOALS ARE – Before spending money to hire a growth hacker, you need to determine your company goals.
Insights can be developed using customer data and a mix of creativity – and this is one of the growth hacker’s strong points. Also, engaging the right message via the right channel is what a mining growth hacker is good at. Once you understand your position in this particular process, you would get a full grasp of your company’s needs and goals as well as the kind of growth hacker that will suit you.
CONSULT THE RIGHT AGENCIES – It is quite difficult to locate a growth hacker online because the job is a relatively new one plus anybody nowadays can claim to be a growth hacker. However, you can find a reliable growth hacker via LinkedIn or you can ask your employees for referrals. Another weird but worthy way of getting a growth hacker is by consulting your user or customer base.
If you opt to post your job link on specific websites, ensure that you scrutinize the applicants’ qualifications to see that they possess the required skill set that aligns with your company goals.
Also ensure that the professionals you are hiring would stick around for long because according to Software Advice, the past decade has seen more professionals “just up and leave their jobs.”
How Much Does Hiring A Growth Hacker Cost?
Startups are advised to hire a growth hacker ahead of a marketer because the former helps the company save more money in the long run.
However, how much you pay to hire a growth hacker may depend on how you hired them.
It is advisable to get one that you can retain because they would be cheaper – and carry out loads of growth experiments which will lead to your business’ success.
Generally, most growth hackers are paid on an hourly basis and you must avoid professionals that give you ridiculously cheap prices. The picture below gives an insight into the charges of a growth hacker (from my experience).
Hiring a growth hacker per project or just retaining one (in-house) could see you spend far less than just picking a freelancer.
Is Hiring A Growth Hacker The Same As Hiring A Traditional Marketer?
No. A marketer specializes in selling your services or products to your potential market. While growth hacking is something much more holistic.
Marketers are for companies that have enough money to throw around to create awareness on social media platforms or other media.
Most times a marketer only brings in prospects and can hardly make sense of the data attached.
However, a growth hacker does product development, acquires leads, and interprets consumer data which are all reused into conversions and hence, growth.
In A Nutshell…
Growing your business requires a reliable growth hacker – one who actually understands what is needed of them and has the tools and capacity to deliver. Although hiring a marketer has its perks, it is ill-advised for a startup.
You also need to, first of all, understand what your startup requires to take off so that you can identify a growth hacker that fits the narrative and hire one.
You may also have to familiarize yourself with the rudiments of hiring a growth hacker and despite the initial stages causing you some discomfort, once your business succeeds, you would be happy you made that decision.
