What is 'growth hacking' and why it is not just a buzzword...

Growth hacking involves rapid experimentation and repeated testing within any discipline (such as UI, sales, marketing, product development) to make improvements to your product or service. It is most commonly associated with start-ups that need to grow very quickly, efficiently and cheaply in order to survive, but any organisation can (and should) apply the strategy.

Facebook is a good example. Looking at their data, they realised that if a new user doesn't add at least seven friends within the first 10 days of using the platform, they will disengage and defect to a different network. This led Facebook to re-engineer their onboarding and activation process, which ultimately led to the roll-out of their Suggested Friends feature, ensuring that users hit the magic number 'seven' within 10 days of signing up.

Analytics, product development and marketing all worked together to develop and execute a solution that led to great retention at the social media network. That's the beauty of growth hacking. It forces companies to move out of their comfort zone and for teams that usually operate in silos to collaborate and come up with an execution, based on a bigger picture.

Developers that usually spend time fixing bugs and building a product according to a spec from marketing are actively engaged and motivated by the end goal. Marketers that are usually restricted by their own technical knowledge (or lack thereof) can draw from the experience of developers that build products for a living. And everyone benefits from the insights of a test-as-you-go methodology, rather than trying to convince a market to adopt a finished offer.

Company culture

This leaves you with the obvious question: Why aren't all companies following the model? Some of the reasons are cultural. Research among staff in the East, for example, has shown that developers consider testing to be a loss of face – an acknowledgement that you don't know the best way forward. But the primary reason is company culture. It's one thing to implement growth hacking at a start-up, where there is no set modus operandi and staff are constantly adapting as they face obstacles and opportunities. A well-established, large corporate with a reliable client base is much less robust and much more set in their ways.

Unfortunately, as we've seen time and time again, complacency can easily lead to a loss of market share and even redundancy. Think of the founders of Burbn, a social networking app for whiskey drinkers. Evaluating their app data, they realised their photo sharing mechanism was their most popular feature. They then looked at other photography apps, studied the features they liked best (like filters) and rebuilt the app for a new audience – Instagram. They reached 25,000 installs on their first day and 1 million installs by month two.

They weren't the biggest company on the block and they weren't the first to launch a photography app. But they were able to deliver and build a product combining popular features in a single app, and the rest is history.

We've got to create a culture of growth hacking in our organisations, baking the need to test, question and re-test into our DNA. We need to sit down regularly, with multiple departments, to determine our North Star objective and draw up blueprints to reach it. We need to appoint Growth Masters that can pull teams together and coordinate departments, technologies and strategies, boxing smartly to achieve a common goal.

You might not create the next AirBNB or Instagram, but you might not need to – as long as you're discovering new ways of keeping your customers coming for more.