It is often this step that explains the failure of many products, which choose the wrong market or are created without taking into account the needs of the public.
Therefore, to achieve this step, it is necessary to understand people, their needs and desires, their motivations, their purchasing journey, and then develop the products they want or need to use.
And we’re not necessarily talking about creating a totally disruptive product . Often, a small change to what your company already sells or the process it already uses can serve to meet market needs and deliver incredible results.
One technique used to check if your product is in line with the market is the 40% Rule, created by Sean Ellis.
This technique verifies, through a questionnaire, how your customers would feel if your product ceased to exist.
If more than 40% respond that they would be “very taiwan phone number data disappointed” (rather than “indifferent” or “a little disappointed”), then you have Product-Market Fit.
2. Growth Hacks
The second step is the application of growth hacks. This is where the team formulates hypotheses, experiments start coming to life, and the first users start arriving. The intention is to identify which changes can generate faster and cheaper results.
To do this, growth hackers must look at the product and, based on their knowledge and intuition, find vulnerabilities and growth opportunities.
This is how hypotheses are formulated: “What if we did the opposite? What if we added an element to the product? What if we used a particular tool in the process?”
A good example was the strategy adopted by Quora , a website specializing in questions and answers. They needed to improve user acquisition in order to establish their platform that offers reliable answers among their audience.
The company asked itself: “What if we invited well-known, influential and authoritative professionals to the platform?”
The company therefore directed its marketing efforts towards this type of user. In this way, Quora increased user acquisition for its platform, becoming a recognized source of information.
3. Scale and viralization
Growth hacking is a growth strategy that seeks to use as few resources as possible. Therefore, the ideal way to do this is to get your own consumers to become propagators of your product by receiving some benefit.
This stage is perhaps the most difficult. Not all solutions can go viral, but success will always depend on the power of word of mouth . What you can do is give it a little push to make it happen.
puzzle game that went viral on Facebook. The game took advantage of user acquisition when it defined that they would gain more lives as they invited more people to play.
This way there would be no need to invest in advertising or traditional marketing: the users themselves would do the advertising work.
Another example is Hotmail. In its early years, an email message made all the difference.
The phrase “PS I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” was placed at the bottom of emails and significantly increased the user base. Within six months, there were over a million registered users. Within a year, 10 million.
It is at this stage, therefore, that its scalability potential becomes evident. After running an experiment, winning over the first users and obtaining results, you need to expand it. With an expanded user base, you also begin to better understand your audience.
And when we talk about gaining scale, we are talking about automating actions. A scalable process cannot be manual.
4. Optimization and retention
Finally, you need to optimize the solution to improve usability and satisfy users . The goal now is to retain the consumers you have won over in order to consolidate your customer base.
If this happens, the experiment is finished and approved and can now become a process in the company.
Testing, feedback and data analysis play an essential role at this point.
You need to check the metrics , keeping an eye on the KPIs we explained above, to find out how consumers are using your product, whether they are returning to it, and if not, why this is happening.
Then, with this information, continuously optimize your solution to meet your users’ needs.
Growth hacking doesn’t mean throwing out an idea, approving it, and finishing the job. The process is one of continuous improvement and requires you to optimize the idea from time to time to always improve the user experience .
Furthermore, a completed experiment opens doors for others. The team cannot stand still, as there is always a problem waiting for new ideas to solve it.
Main growth hacking strategies
The implementation of growth hacking strategies depends on the definition of KPIs, which can vary from one company to another. Therefore, they must be specifically designed for each company.
But there are strategies that generally work for all types of companies and obtain significant results.
Below we will tell you which are the main strategies that we recommend and evaluate whether you think they meet the needs of your company.
Referral Marketing
It was with this strategy that companies like Paypa we compile and purchase additional assortment Dropbox and Uber became established. And this is one of the main strategies for viralization in the growth hacking process.
Referral marketing is about turning your customers into promoters of your brand. In general, the system works like this: a user refers another customer and receives a reward for that (often, the person referred receives a reward as well).
The case of Paypal was a pioneer in this: in 1999 mobile lead the online payment system gained 100,000 users in the first month of operation, simply by paying US$20 for each converted customer referral.
In this way, marketing promotes word of mouth , which is essential to reduce the cost of acquisition per customer , increase the user base and improve business growth.
Referral marketing is also related to loyalty marketing . After all, loyal customers tend to recommend your product or service even more to their acquaintances. Therefore, you can combine this strategy with loyalty programs as well.
