The digital landscape is constantly evolving rapidly, no doubt faster than ever in 2024. Companies vie to grow their brand and thereby seek beyond traditional marketing methods to excel against their competition. While originally developed by startups and small companies to grow customers, awareness, and exposure without the help of an extensive budget, growth hacker marketing has become an all-popular way to rapidly succeed in today’s market cost-effectively regardless of the organization's size.
Growth hacker marketing is a fairly new idea, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it or don’t yet know how it works. But as marketers and entrepreneurs, we must stay on top of the trends. So what is growth hacker marketing, and why is it essential in 2024? Beyond Blue Media has you covered.
What is Growth Hacker Marketing?
Situated somewhere between digital marketing and engineering, growth hacker marketing—first coined by author and public speaker Ryan Holiday—retains the broad goal of marketing to acquire more customers and grow the market share of a particular business while simultaneously leveraging the power of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative unconventionalism to drive the sought-after results at a fraction of the cost.
In essence, growth hacking is finding unique and clever ways to market your business, product, or service in a way backed by trackable data. Unlike traditional marketing efforts - like putting up signs on a highway, buying billboards, or running TV/radio ads - growth hacker marketing is more cunning and scientific and leads to less waste of money, time, and resources.
Finding one unified definition of this new concept is difficult, but perhaps it's easier to understand using examples. The goal is, of course, to grow, and it means utilizing the most advanced and optimized techniques at a company’s disposal to meet that end, including the use of email, community management, SEO optimization, content creation, data and analytics, trends, and so much more.
The term itself is derived from many large tech companies like Meta or Twitter, for example, because they were built by programmers and "hackers," so to speak, and they had to devise creative ways to hack themselves (ethically) into bigger audiences strategically. Companies like Meta and even Tesla have spent close to zero money in their lifetimes on traditional marketing efforts, yet here they are leading the world in ideas, customer base, impact, and reach.
Who is a Growth Hacker?
The fact that growth hacker marketing is such a new term begets an unfortunate sense of exclusivity. Many people wonder who can actually be a growth hacker - is it just these successful entrepreneurs and engineers who have seemed to crack the code, or can your company house your own growth hackers as well?
As a quick answer, anyone can be a growth hacker. The more nuanced answer is that it takes certain activities and mindsets to dive into the world of growth hacker marketing effectively. Here are a few of the conditions:
- Everything that you do has one single goal: to grow reach, impact, and awareness
- You must iterate, test, measure, and adjust your value proposition until you find the best way to reach your goal.
- You should continually seek creative and innovative ways to grow without relying solely on conventional tools (conventional advertising (TV/ radio), social media ads, PR, etc.).
- You must think outside the box: what is effective that few others (or no one else) are doing?
- Decision-making is a priority, and you must know when to stop doing something if you can’t prove it makes your activity grow or hit the accelerator when you know you’re on to something.
Benefits of Growth Hacker Marketing
There are several benefits of implementing growth hacker marketing as soon as possible into your company’s workflow, even if it is just a subset of your marketing team:
- Low cost
- Potential for high growth
- Potential to find untapped avenues for success
- Efficient user and customer acquisition
- Measurable through data-driven decision-making
- Rapid results
- Highly dynamic
- Leverages current trends, themes, and sentiments
- Works for startups, small companies, and large organizations
- Stimulates innovation
Who Can Use Growth Hacker Marketing?
As you may have gathered from the previous sections, one of the greatest aspects of growth hacker marketing is that anyone can utilize it to their advantage. Any company of any size, in any stage of its life, and any industry can use this tactic effectively. Any individual can also be a growth hacker, but to achieve the most impressive results, it usually takes individuals with a certain mindset and set of skills.
This is not to say that companies should halt all efforts into traditional marketing paths, but if an organization decides to investigate the growth hacker marketing route, it’s important to have the right people doing it so that time isn’t wasted.
Optimize Your Marketing Stream in 2024
Because growth hacker marketing is so widely and so easily attainable, there is no excuse for companies not to experiment in this uncharted territory. Low-cost marketing with the potential for rapid growth is a potent mixture - it’s how startups leap barriers of entry and market leaders remain dominant.
If your company is ready to take the next step into optimized marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to consult a team of efforts to boost your business in 2024. The market landscape will only continue to accelerate, and no one wants to be left behind - contact the experienced professionals at Beyond Blue Media to see how great it will work for your company.
