Growth hacking is not the same as marketing or digital marketing. However, many online marketers have confused these concepts, and few fully understand how they differ from each other.

If you want to finally get this matter clear, you are in the right place.

At the top, you can click directly on the section you want.

1. Growth hacking simply explained

2. How does growth hacking differ from traditional marketing?

3. How to Identify a Good Growth Hacker?

4. Concrete Ideas for Growth Hacking

5. Is growth hacking suitable for your company?

Growth hacking simply explained

"Growth hacking is not anti-marketing, it is the evolution of marketing, it is pro-growth."

Sean Ellis

Growth hacking refers to creative and inventive tactics and strategies aimed at growing a company.

In conventional marketing, the aim is usually to increase sales with a focus on the product, whereas in growth hacking, growth is at the center of everything.

How does growth hacking differ from traditional marketing?

A growth hacker typically knows and understands certain platforms or search engines very well, and they see opportunities that a traditional marketer might not notice at all.

These opportunities include, for example, certain growth strategies on Twitter, strategically targeted ads on TikTok, or unconventional and disruptive ads on Google Adwords.

Example of a growth hacking strategy for a personal brand on Twitter

1. Follow 50 new people per day using, for example, hashtags or keywords.

2. We tweet a few times a day.

3. Comment on followed tweets a few times a day.

4. The Twitter profile aims to direct followers to its own website with a short and concise message targeted specifically at its own followers.

In growth hacking, familiar and safe marketing guidelines no longer apply. Instead, a growth hacker focuses on things that can be tested, tracked, and scaled.

For this reason, growth hacking generally refers to strategies implemented online or through the internet.

How to Identify a Good Growth Hacker?

Since most marketing strategies nowadays revolve around the internet, the best growth hackers do not reveal their secrets so easily.

Most growth hackers are skilled internet users who understand their tools almost as well as the developers themselves.

Since testing is one of the most important aspects of growth hacking, people working in this field must dare to make mistakes and learn from them quickly.

Creativity is also very important. Here are a few examples of cases where a less creative marketer would not have come up with the whole idea.

Paypal

When the payment service founded by Elon Musk wanted to quickly expand in North America, PayPal's marketers decided to advertise on the world-famous eBay online marketplace. PayPal's growth hackers created bots that won auctions, after which the automated bots inquired sellers about the possibility of paying through PayPal.

AirBnB

An American service that offers short-term housing rentals to its clients quickly gained traction when they decided to use bots to list all the listings on the AirBnB platform on the highly popular Craigslist service. The Craigslist listing included a link that directed interested visitors to the AirBnB site.

Music Industry and TikTok

This year, the song Dreams by the band Fleetwood Mac, which turns 44 years old, unexpectedly reached Spotify's Top 10 most listened songs, as the track started to be frequently added as background music in TikTok videos.

Concrete Ideas for Growth Hacking

The above-mentioned examples may be a bit too specific and cannot be directly applied to one's own marketing strategy.

Below we have compiled some clearer and easier ideas to ensure that you don't leave this page empty-handed.

Google advertising

Put yourself in the customer's shoes and search for a specific keyword on Google. Take note of what the paid advertisements in particular say, claim, and sell. Could you think of a way to stand out from these? What are they doing wrong? What is the customer really looking for and wanting?

on LinkedIn

Most companies do not add much value with their posts on LinkedIn. It usually consists of a few sentences, an emoji, and a link to the actual article. You can take advantage of this when you write something next time on the platform. Some growth hackers take this even further by not having any actual link in the post at all. The post can be read in its entirety on LinkedIn, and best of all, it can of course be published in the same way on other platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).

Is growth hacking suitable for your company?

If you feel that conventional marketing tactics no longer resonate with your customer base, growth hacking might be exactly what your company needs. The best way to determine this is to contact professionals who know the best and most secret tricks. At Growly, our growth hacking team focuses on finding cost-effective and breakthrough strategies that align with your specific marketing strategy and company culture.