Growth Marketing vs Growth Hacking: Difference and Benefits

To survive, you must simultaneously increase sales and reduce costs. How to do it? Apply growth marketing - quick, easy, free, and low-budget techniques for explosive business growth that are universal and work worldwide in all industries. Growth marketing will enable you to survive and maintain sales by rebuilding your business to meet your customer's needs in a crisis.

This article will discuss the difference between growth marketing and growth hacking. We will dive deep into growth hacking.

What is Growth Marketing and what are its benefits?

The popularity and effectiveness of growth marketing are incredibly high. It is especially actively implemented in the U.S. and European countries. In the last few years, growth marketing has completely changed how marketers work, what they are responsible for, and what KPIs they use. With the growth approach, marketing is no longer focused on the top of the marketing funnel. After all, growth is about bringing in a user who stays with the product/service for a long time and later becomes a driver of attracting new users.

The picture below illustrates the difference between classic marketing and growth marketing.

Unlike classical marketing, which primarily concentrates on things like building brand awareness and customer acquisition, growth marketing is about cross-team and cross-channel interaction, where attention is paid to every step of the user journey without exception.

I recommend reading Guide to Growth Marketing: Who Needs Growth Marketing Team?

How does the growth marketer differ from the classical marketer?

For the most part, the key difference between the two professionals lies in the breadth of their focus. Therefore the level of responsibility and KPIs by which to measure the success of their work also differ.

A growth marketer can analyze user behavior even after a purchase. This usually leads to excellent ideas, like running a referral program. Growth marketers often use services like mParticle to analyze customer data.

IMPORTANT: What distinguishes a good growth marketer is an ability not to make cool ideas but to operate on hypotheses.

Suppose you haven't experienced how to create and validate hypotheses properly. In that case, I recommend watching David Ly Khim (Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot), where he very clearly talked about how to build hypotheses and why it's crucial for growth teams.

What is Growth Hacking and what are its benefits?

Many American tech startups used growth hacking: Airbnb, Evernote, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Amazon. The most advanced online startups, such as those involved in fintech and mobile apps, often look for growth hackers, not marketers.

Often, startup founders don't have the money to hire good marketers. And they are programmers who think in algorithms and code. They understand very little about marketing and sales. And they face the scary questions that investors ask:

How do you recruit users?
How do you start selling?
How do you survive?

Without investment, a startup can survive for only a few months, and in these brutal conditions, Growth Hacking was born.

Founding programmers, without an understanding of marketing strategies, find those quick, easy, low-budget, or free techniques that someone has already successfully implemented. They quickly copy them and measure the results. If it worked, they would optimize the technique by constantly measuring the results of each improvement. If the technique didn't work initially, they immediately abandon it and forget about it.

There are more and more successful tricks, and the startup's human resources are limited. And the founding programmers start automating their work. This is how automation comes to digital: website builders, auto-posting services, and email marketing automation platforms. And these services, with the development of technology, are becoming more and more convenient, simple, and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses.

The most ingenious startups come up with unconventional, creative ideas that make them stand out and bring outstanding results.

Rules of a growth hacker

Here are 5 crucial rules of a growth hacker:

Quickly put your ideas into action. For example, it is better to make a simple one-page website without unnecessary details instead of a cumbersome website.
Use free or almost free promotion methods.
Emphasis on experimentation and analytics. There is no point in waiting long for the result: run, check how it works, refuse or adapt, and begin to optimize.
Use automation. For example, to save time and resources, you should create a landing page in an online designer and set up automatic email sending.
Take a creative approach to promotion. The idea should be unique. It will only stand out from the hundreds of other proposals and catch the user. By the way, the uniqueness of ideas brings the most powerful results.

And now, I will tell you about the brightest ideas and techniques that helped young startups to grow into industry giants.

Growth Hacking #1: Give the money away to people

You can invest huge sums in advertising and see little or no return. Instead, it's better to give it away to people. PayPal gave away $10 to every user just for making an account. If the user recommended the service to a friend, he got another $10.

The result was impressive: after the campaign started, the number of users grew from 7% to 10% daily, and then eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion!

Growth Hacking #2: Recommend to a friend (word of mouth)

Referral marketing is the most effective. 80% of people tend to follow their friends' and acquaintances' advice and recommendations. Dropbox asked users to invite their friends to sign up. For the invitation, a Dropbox client got 16 GB of cloud storage for free, and if his friend used the offer and created an account, they both got 500 MB more. As a result, Dropbox grew from 100,000 users to 4 million in 15 months, with 2.8 million users coming by referral.

Growth Hacking #3: "I love you"

We love to be loved. And we love gifts. The email service Hotmail played on this by adding a signature to its email newsletters. It was just one line right after the logo: "P.S. I love you! Get your free Hotmail inbox." Who can resist such a thing? The 12 million people who joined Hotmail in 18 months couldn't resist. And then Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million, a prime example of the emotional marketing that's becoming popular in digital.

Growth Hacking #4: Try it for free

At first, the website of Getresponse had a call to action "Buy Now." Their main goal was the rapid growth of users, and they changed the rules of using their platform. They added a free 30-day trial period, which allows users to get acquainted with the platform and decide whether to buy it or not. So their call to action on the website became "Try it for free." In the first month, the growth of registered users exceeded 200%.

The opportunity to try for free reduces the user risks that come with prepayment and helps them understand how to use your product and what results can be achieved. Offline manufacturers widely use this principle, offering free samples of their products, such as perfumes or cosmetics. At the same time, educational businesses invite potential customers to their free workshops, where they not only teach but also present their introductory courses and training programs.

Growth Hacking #5: Experiment

Growth hacking is based on hypothesis testing and experimentation. And Facebook has never been afraid to experiment. For example, it invented widgets for user profiles and allowed them to be posted on third-party sites. People who were not familiar with the social network clicked on the links and also registered on Facebook. As a result, the social network gained 12 million new users in 12 months without investing a dime in advertising. YouTube followed the same path, starting to offer the code of the video to be inserted into the website, and it didn't go wrong either.

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